Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday swatted back Sen. Roger Marshall's (R-KS) attempt to trap him with a gotcha question.

During Fauci's Senate appearance, Marshall tried to corner Fauci on whether the United States may have inadvertently funded the creation of the novel coronavirus in a Wuhan lab.

"If COVID-19 is indeed a product of lab manipulation, can you sit here and unequivocally say the viral studies the [National Institutes of Health] funded... could not be indirectly or directly related to this final COVID-19 virus?" Marshall asked.

Fauci replied that the specific experiments in Wuhan that received NIH funding would not have resulted in the creation of COVID-19.

"The NIH... did not fund gain-of-function research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Fauci said.

Marshall then pressed Fauci whether "some of the funding" could have "indirectly" helped create the novel coronavirus.

"I'm not sure where that question is going," Fauci replied. "You could do research on something that is benign and has nothing to do with it, and it could indirectly, someday, somehow be involved. So if you want to trap me into saying yes or no, I'm not going to play that game."

Watch the video below.