EXCERPT:
FAUCI: “Yeah, well, they’re — they’re preposterous. Because if — we don’t know what the origin of this virus is. It either somehow came out of a lab where Chinese scientists went into the environment and got infected and played with it and it came out, or it was a natural spillover from an animal to a human in the Wuhan market. I keep a completely open mind. The virological evidence, the epidemiological evidence by most qualified virologists strongly favor, though not definitively, strongly favor that it’s a natural occurrence. But since it isn’t definitive, I keep an open mind. What they say that’s incorrect is that the NIH funded a grant in China, an indirect grant, funded a firm in New York that did a subaward to do some surveillance studies on what is out there, which is a perfectly appropriate thing to do. In fact, I would probably be held as being incompetent if I didn’t, if we didn’t do that.”