WHITE House virus expert Dr Anthony Fauci reportedly backed funding for a controversial lab in China that is blamed for causing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci's National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) allegedly shelled out $7.4 million to the Wuhan laboratory, which was studying bats with coronavirus.

In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NID) committed $3.7 million over six years for research in Wuhan, reports Newsweek.

The program followed another $3.7 million, five-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory has become the center of theories about the origin of Covid-19 because it was manipulating viruses seen in bats to explore their potential for infecting humans.

The lab is not far from the animal market where officially the pandemic began.

FUNDING NOW STOPPED

US intelligence, after originally insisting the coronavirus had occurred naturally, have conceded that the coronavirus may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab.

All US government funding to the lab was reportedly stopped last week.

NIH defended their funding in a statement to Newsweek.

"Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally," the statement read.

"Scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory."

Coronavirus has now killed more Americans than the number of US soldiers who died in the Vietnam War.

The awful milestone was passed yesterday, as the United States coronavirus death toll raced past 56,000.

A film emerged earlier this month showing a Wuhan based virus expert catching bats has fuelled a conspiracy theory that the disease was man-made and leaked from a lab.

The seven-minute film features the centre's researcher Tian Junhua, who has visited dozens of caves in Hubei province to capture the flying mammals and take samples.

Called "Youth in the Wild — Invisible Defender”,  the short documentary has reawakened a wild conspiracy theory about the Covid-19 originating at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (CDC).

Mr Tian works at the centre, which is not far from the animal market where officially the virus began.

Labs here were known to have studied bats and Mr Tian himself was said to have gathered samples from numerous flying mammals.

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