Jen Psaki Assures Reporters that Fauci’s Job is Safe Despite Revelations About Wuhan Funding

White House press secretary Jen Psaki assured Thursday that Dr. Anthony Fauci is secure in his position at the National Institutes of Health despite revelations about NIH funding that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“You’ve said … that under no circumstance would President Biden ever fire Dr. Fauci. Is that still the case since Fauci told Congress the NIH never funded gain-of-function research for coronaviruses in Wuhan?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked, noting documents published this week that indicated the Wuhan lab received $599,000 in U.S. funding to study ways to increase the transmissibility of coronaviruses like Covid-19.

Psaki responded with assertions from the NIH that she said “refuted” the report, saying it had “never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans. We’re reminded that there are previous and different coronaviruses than the existing one we are battling.”

She added: “The body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work NIH supported were not covid — the strain, the Covid-2 strain — so what [Fauci] said was correct.”

“So his job is safe?” Doocy replied, prompting Psaki to reiterate, “Correct.”

This week’s documents revealed the cash in question traveled by way of a $3.1 million NIH grant allocated between 2014-19 to EcoHealth Alliance, an American nonprofit group that subcontracted its research out to the lab in Wuhan. A research proposal produced by the group’s president, Peter Daszak, said researchers would be seeking to “virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice” and look for “spillover” from bats to humans. He added, “We will do this by sequencing the spike protein genes from all our bat-[coronaviruses], creating mutants … [and] we will also induce site mutations in S proteins.”

Watch above via the White House.