Infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday defended the flow of funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for bat coronavirus research, saying it would have been “almost a dereliction of our duty” for the NIH not to collaborate with Chinese scientists to study how the pathogen might jump from animals to humans. Fauci made the remarks in testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health & Human Services, with the discussion touching on the as-yet-undetermined origin of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the pathogen that causes the disease COVID-19. At issue is around $600,000 of the some $3.7 million in overall NIH funding provided to EcoHealth Alliance that was channeled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research coronaviruses in bats in 2014. Fauci defended collaboration with the Wuhan facility, pointing to an earlier coronavirus outbreak with a confirmed bat origin as …