Newsweek
AS Bias Certification
Center Certified
Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
News Item Format
Standard
Community
Experts are siding with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the dispute with Sen. Rand Paul over whether experiments done on bat coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology constituted gain of function research.
At a hearing on Tuesday, Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, and Fauci engaged in a heated exchange about a study that involved Chinese scientists substituting spike proteins in bat coronaviruses to gain new insight into the origin of SARS. Partially sponsored by the National Institute of Health, Paul saw the research as proof Fauci lied to Congress, a felony the public health expert vehemently denied he was guilty of.
Robert Garry, a virologist and professor at Tulane University, described the experiments as being a study as to whether the bat coronaviruses could infect humans. What they didn't do, he told Newsweek, was make the viruses "any better" at infecting people, which would be necessary for gain-of-function research.