Republican lawmakers have intensified their calls for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired after he defended the flow of some $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the lab at the heart of controversy over the still-unexplained origins of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Fauci said in testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health & Human Services on Tuesday that it would have been “almost a dereliction of our duty” for the NIH not to collaborate with Chinese scientists to study how the virus might jump from animals to humans. He insisted that the NIH did not fund so-called “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan lab, which he defined as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic to humans,” saying that the purpose of the $600,000 grant “was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance, and to determine if …