Fauci Praised ‘Competent, Trustworthy Scientists’ in Wuhan. His Own Agency Said They Needed Ethics Training Over ‘Research Misconduct.’

Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2021 dismissed concerns that U.S.-funded Chinese scientists lied about performing risky gain-of-function research, calling those scientists “competent” and “trustworthy.” But a publicly disclosed grant shows Fauci’s own agency was simultaneously funding ethics training for Chinese scientists over widespread “research misconduct.”

The agency’s concerns contradict Fauci’s own comments to Congress in 2021. In May 2021, roughly a year after the coronavirus came to the United States, Fauci insisted that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were both “competent” and “trustworthy” and would not have used American money to conduct gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses intentionally more transmissible. That October, the National Institutes of Health admitted that Chinese scientists at the lab indeed used U.S. funds to create a coronavirus that was more infectious in mice.