Fauci: 'I don't have enough insight' into CCP to know if coronavirus science has been compromised

White House coronavirus adviser and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Wednesday admitted that he lacks enough knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party to know if the one-party communist rulers in China might hold undue sway over the country's scientists. 

Fauci made the remarks during an exchange with Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. The health expert, who has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, has in recent weeks faced growing scrutiny over the NIAID's potential role in the funding of dangerous coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located just a few miles from the first confirmed outbreak of COVID-19. 

During his exchange with Kennedy, Fauci stated that funding from the NIAID was not used by Chinese scientists to conduct risky "gain-of-function" research at the WIV. Asked by Kennedy how he was certain the funding hadn't been surreptitiously used to fund those experiments, Fauci admitted that "there's no way of guaranteeing that," but he stated he nevertheless felt confident in the integrity of the grantees. 

"You think all the scientists [in China] have told the truth in terms of the origin of the Wuhan virus," Kennedy asked, "[and] have not been influenced by the Communist Party of China?"

"I don't have enough insight into the Communist Party in China to know the interactions between them and the scientists," Fauci admitted. 

Famously secretive, the CCP has been accused of covering up the extent of the earliest outbreaks of the virus in an attempt to head off international criticism on the origins of the pandemic.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is grouped under the country's Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is itself overseen by the Chinese central government's State Committee.