Fauci and Rand Paul clash over NIH funding for Wuhan Institute of Virology

Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) got into a heated debate at a Senate health committee hearing on Tuesday, clashing over whether funding from the National Institutes of Health was used for risky "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Why it matters: Questions remain about the origins of the coronavirus and the so-called "lab leak hypothesis" — the theory that the virus resulted from experiments in the Wuhan lab that accidentally spilled over, which the head of the World Health Organization has said should be investigated further.

Context: China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located just miles from the market where the first COVID-19 outbreak was detected, previously received funding from Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

The EcoHealth grant partially funded research at WIV that involved analyzing bat specimens collected from caves in China to study their potential for infecting humans. EcoHealth's work in China started in the aftermath of the 2002–2004 SARS epidemic, which also likely originated from bats.