Anthony Fauci testified it would have been “almost a dereliction of our duty” if the National Institutes of Health had not worked with China to study coronaviruses as he defended NIH money going to fund “collaboration” with “very respectable Chinese scientists.”

EcoHealth Alliance received at least $3.7 million from NIH from 2014 to 2020, and Peter Daszak, a key member of the WHO-China joint study team and the leader of EcoHealth, steered at least $600,000 in NIH funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research. Daszak criticized the United States for appearing skeptical of the WHO’s findings earlier this year and defended China to Communist Party-linked outlets.