Rudy Giuliani questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci's involvement in grants from the United States to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that has been tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a report, the U.S. intelligence community has growing confidence that the current coronavirus strain may have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than having originated at a wildlife market, as the Chinese Communist Party first claimed. During a Sunday interview on The Cats Roundtable, Giuliani questioned why the U.S. gave money to the lab.

"Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving any money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses. Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory — and then even after the State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans," he claimed.

He added, "We never pulled that money. So, something here is going on, John. I don’t want to make any accusations. But there was more knowledge about what was going on in China with our scientific people than they disclosed to us when this first came out. Just think of it: If this laboratory turns out to be the place where the virus came from, we paid for it. We paid for the damn virus that’s killing us.”

While Giuliani placed the blame on Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 , it is not clear what oversight he had in the funding decisions. The NIAID did award $3.7 million in grants to EcoHealth Alliance to study the “risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China" at wet markets, but not all of that funding went to the lab in Wuhan.

President Trump has been asked about the matter and blamed the Obama administration for the donation, saying, "Who is president then, I wonder?" However, the funding was approved from 2014 to 2019, including $700,000 that was awarded under the Trump administration.

Giuliani called for an investigation into the Wuhan laboratory, saying, "Today, if I were U.S. attorney, I’d open an investigation into the Wuhan laboratory. And I’d want to know, what did we know? How much did we know about how bad the practices were there? Who knew about it? And who sent them money anyway? And that person would sure as heck be in front of a grand jury trying to explain to me — what are you asleep?”