White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that Dr. Anthony Fauci's job is safe - despite Republican Sen. Rand Paul pointing to a new report from The Intercept that he says proves Fauci is a liar.
Psaki said the National Institutes of Health had 'refuted that reporting' adding that the 'NIH has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans.'
'A reminder that there are previous and different coronaviruses than the existing one we're battling,' she continued. 'And the body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work that NIH supported were not COVID - the strain, the COVID-2 strain - so what he said was correct.'
When asked, again, if Fauci's job was safe, the press secretary answered, 'Correct.'
On Monday night, The Intercept revealed it had received 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S.-based company that received NIH grants to conduct bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, China - where COVID-19 likely originated.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Dr. Anthony Fauci's job is safe during Thursday's press briefing, while top Fauci critic, Sen. Rand Paul, said that a Monday night report from The Intercept proved Fauci had lied to Congress about gain of function research in Wuhan
The documents were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
In its first report on the documents, The Intercept highlighted two previously unreported EcoHealth Alliance grant requests that were funded by the NIH.
One of the grants included $599,000 to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to 'identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,' The Intercept said.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, told The Intercept that the documents suggest researchers were creating novel coronaviruses in Wuhan.
'The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,' Ebright told The Intercept after reviewing the documents.
He said the documents showed that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice.
'While
