Officials says agency ‘offered to have a chance to simply get into a secure space and have a conversation.’
The director of the National Institutes of Health wants to answer congressional inquiries about the agency’s links to a Wuhan lab in private, he told the Hugh Hewitt Show on Wednesday.
Referring to a congressional letter on his agency’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said, “in our response, we offered to have a chance to simply get into a secure space and have a conversation … Much of the information they’re asking for, we don’t have the answers to. Some of it is pretty sensitive, not quite classified, but getting close to that.”
“No good. The public needs answers,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin tweeted in response.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is at the center of speculation that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from a lab.
The NIH’s granting of funds that went to a Wuhan lab complied with regulations because it was for research on a bat virus, not a human one, and was to study how the virus transferred to humans, Collins said in separate comments published Wednesday in The Atlantic.
