Fox News host Steve Hilton on Sunday claimed Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about the origins of the coronavirus and called for him to be prosecuted, part of a pattern of conservative attacks on the nation's top infectious diseases expert.
During a segment on his show The Next Revolution, Hilton showed a video purportedly from a conference in 2012, where Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), described the controversial process known as "gain-of-function" research.
Hilton claimed the words Fauci used to describe "gain-of-function" research in 2012 were exactly the words used in a progress report to describe U.S.-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Gain-of-function is when researchers make a pathogen more infectious, often to develop more effective treatments and vaccines.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $3.4 million grant to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2019. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was awarded a $600,000 subgrant under that contract, for the purpose of researching bat coronaviruses over five years.
Fauci has advocated for gain-of-function research in the past, but he and NIH director Francis Collins have denied that the NIH was funding it in China.
In numerous interviews and public appearances, Fauci has said the money to the Wuhan lab was not meant for gain-of-function research into human-made superviruses.
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