White House defends Dr Fauci over lab leak emails

The White House has defended the president's top coronavirus adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, amid scrutiny of his recently released work emails.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said Dr Fauci had been an "undeniable asset" in the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Fauci meanwhile told CNN an email exchange on the lab leak theory of the virus was being taken out of context.

There is no evidence Covid-19 came from a lab, though US President Joe Biden has ordered a review into the matter.

Also on Thursday, Mr Biden announced the US would donate 25 million doses of surplus coronavirus vaccine to Covax, the global facility designed to distribute vaccines fairly.

Ms Psaki said at her daily press briefing on Thursday: "The president and the administration feel that Dr Fauci has played an incredible role and getting the pandemic under control and being a voice to the public throughout the course of this pandemic."

A trove of Dr Fauci's emails covering the onset of the coronavirus pandemic - 3,200 pages, many of them redacted - were released this week to media under a freedom of information request.

Allies of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) infectious disease specialist say Dr Fauci's messages show nothing more than a dedicated public servant navigating the early days of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

But conservative critics are suggesting Dr Fauci may have engaged in a cover-up, and even claim he perjured himself in testimony to Congress.

On Thursday, Dr Fauci maintained there was nothing untoward in an email exchange between himself and an executive from a medical non-profit organisation that helped fund research at a diseases institute in Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid-19 was first reported.

The NIH, which is a US public health agency, gave $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from 2014-19 via a grant to the New York-based non-profit group EcoHealth Alliance, for the purpose of researching bat coronaviruses.

Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, emailed Dr Fauci in April 2020, praising him as "brave" for seeking to debunk the lab leak theory.

"Many thanks for your kind note," Dr Fauci replied.

Dr Fauci told CNN on Thursday it was "nonsense" to infer from the email any cosy relationship between himself and the figures behind the Wuhan lab research.

"You can misconstrue it however you want - that email was from a person to me saying 'thank you' for whatever it is he thought I said, and I said that I think the most likely origin is a jumping of species. I still do think it is, at the same time as I'm keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak."

He added: "The idea I think is quite farfetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people. I think that's a bit far out."

According to an investigation in Vanity Fair magazine published on Thursday, Department of State officials discussed the origins of coronavirus at a meeting on 9 December 2020.

They were told not to explore the issue of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab to avoid attracting unwelcome attention to US government funding of such research, reports Vanity Fair.

Gain-of-function studies involve altering pathogens to make them more transmissible in order to learn more about how they might mutate.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill and were admitted to hospital in November 2019, just before the first reported Covid-19 cases.

Days later, President Biden instructed US spy agencies to conduct a 90-day review into whether the virus could have emerged from a Chinese lab.

His administration had previously deferred to the World Health Organization for answers on how the pandemic began.

During congressional testimony on 12 May, Dr Fauci emphatically denied the US had ever funded controversial gain of function research at the Wuhan lab.

During a subsequent Senate hearing on 26 May, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked how Dr Fauci could be sure that Wuhan scientists did not use the money for gain-of-function research.

"You never know," Dr Fauci conceded, while adding that he believed the Chinese researchers were "trustworthy".

Former President Donald Trump - widely dismissed last year when he raised the possibility that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan lab - said on Thursday that Dr Fauci had a lot of questions to answer,

"What did Dr Fauci know about 'gain-of-function' research, and when did he know it?" Mr Trump wrote in a statement.

He added: "China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!"

Meanwhile, House of Representatives deputy Republican leader Steve Scalise demanded in a letter that Dr Fauci testify before Congress on the "US government's role in funding research that may have contributed to the development of the novel coronavirus".

Covid-19 is known to have infected some 172 million people, killing more than 3.5 million.