ANTHONY Fauci is facing a new wave of criticism after it was revealed the US sent more than $200,000 to the Wuhan lab where some believe the coronavirus is to have been developed.
The nation’s leading infectious disease expert has already come under fire after his newly publicly-released emails show the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology – but now he’s under pressure for misrepresenting the number of funds.
During a Senate hearing, Fauci asserted the United States had only given the lab $600,000 of taxpayers’ money, a number now known to be a conservative estimate of the actual amount.
Fauci’s released emails show that instead, the US sent $826,000 to the Wuhan lab, over $200,000 more than what Fauci had claimed on the Senate floor.
Now the doctor is facing new criticism given his downplaying of the funds.
“These new documents show that funding for the Wuhan Institute was greater than the public has been told,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“That it has taken a year and a federal lawsuit to get this first disclosure on COVID and Wuhan is evidence of cover-up by Fauci’s agency.”
Fitton’s group uncovered the discrepancy in Fauci’s emails through a FOIA request, pointing to his May 25 hearing where Fauci attempted to justify the US’s funding of the lab.
“We had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant,” through a non-profit, Fauci said at the hearing.
“The larger grant was about $600,000 over a period of five years. So it was a modest amount,” he continued.
“The purpose of it was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of” infecting humans.
It wasn’t until Friday this week that the Judicial Watch group received confirmed from their FOIA request that the number purported by Fauci was undervalued.
Judicial Watch published internal emails between the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and NIH, showing six years of funding that went to the Wuhan lab.
The grants were filed under “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” with the sum amount next to it totaling $826,277.
This incongruence is just the latest headache for Fauci as his newly-made public emails have become available through a FOIA request.
On June 3, 2021, he admitted that he’s “not convinced” that Covid-19 developed naturally after hundreds of his emails were published.
Fauci even wrote that he might consider Covid-19 to be synthetic given its spread.
“I keep an open mind all the time,” he wrote in one email.
“And that’s the reason why I have been public that we should continue to look for the origin.”
