everything. facts are stubborn things. here are the simple facts that dr. fauci needs to explain and the department of justice should investigate. on may 11th, dr. fauci testified before a senate committee that the nih has not ever and does not now found the gain-of-function research in the wuhan institute of virology. that is a clear categorical statement. but then on october 20th, the nih wrote that they funded an experiment at the wuhan lab testing if spiked proteins from naturally occurring bat coronavirus is circulating in china were capable of binding to the human a.c.e. to separator in a mouse model. that is gain-of-function research. that is taking an existing virus and modifying it to make it more dangerous to humans. and listen, at the end of the
no, it s important to understand the intent of the research and the effect of the research. so the intent of the research was to understand whether certain bat coronavirus spike proteins could infect human cells. and the way they did the experiment was they took a well-known bat coronavirus called wiv-1 and added to that some other bat coronavirus spike proteins. and they gave that to mice altered to have the receptor, the ace-2 receptor that the virus uses to enter human cells. they found, yes, they could. those spike proteins could enter human cells, but they also noticed that the enhanced virus then was more virulent. okay. so they proved that those spike proteins could enter human cells but in so doing they made the virus they used more deadly essentially. the mice were sicker.
senator paul, you do not know what you are talking about. reporter: now in a new letter, the national institutes of health says ecohealth alliance conducted an experiment that found mice infected with an altered bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the unchanged virus. in unexpected result, that was never reported to nih despite the terms of the grant. a spokesman for ecohealth alliance told the new york times the group reported the findings, quote, as soon as we were made aware. but republicans claim this proves dr. fauci lied about the type of experiments conducted by the lab. he s going to continue to dissemble and work around the truth and massage the truth. reporter: health officials stress this is about accountability, not about any possibility the pandemic started in the lab. yeah, they messed up. we are going to hold them accountable. but let me be clear. this was in no way, no way connected with the advent of
n.i.h. explained the naturally occurring bat coronavirus are distant from the sars covid 2 and could not possibly have caused the covid-19 pandemic. any claims to the contrary are false. now, although the research in question is completely unrelated to covid-19, scientists say they cannot rule out the theory that a lab leak led to the pandemic until they get more cooperation and transparency from the chinese government. harris. harris: jonathan, i don t know how much transparency we ll get from a communist nation but this was a whole lot in this nation and a lot of great information to work with. thank you very much. dr. marc siegel is a fox news contributor and professor of medicine at nyu langone medical center. first of all, dr. siegel, this reporting is important as i understand it because it could mean the american people were lied to over and over and over about what was really going on
research. but senator rand paul says top nih officials including dr. anthony fauci are parsing words. he has been sort of kind of going around the subject and he never fully explains why it is not gain of function. i think his explanation is this. it was inadvertent. we didn t know they would gain function. that s what a gain of function experiment is. nih explained the bat coronavirus viruses studied under the grant are far distant from sars covid 2 and couldn t possibly have caused the covid-19 pandemic. any claims to the contrary are false. although the research in question is unrelated to covid-19 it raises concerns about operations in general at the wuhan institute of virology. nih director collins says he believes the virus that causes covid-19 developed naturally in animals and eventually spread to humans but he says without