Fox’s Martha MacCallum had a fascinating interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s boss at the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins.

MacCallum asks him about an April 20, 2020 email which references a Bret Baier report on the Wuhan lab leak theory. She asks why he, at that point, referred to it as a conspiracy theory. He claims there were “a lot of conspiracy theories floating around” and then he starts listing things including the lab leak theory, claiming he never ruled that out.

.@MarthaMacCallum is torching NIH Director Francis Collins over #FauciEmails. She asked about one w/the subject line "conspiracy gains momentum" re: the lab theory, but he lamented this is something he "never thought…would become a topic for Fox News" & they never dismissed it pic.twitter.com/bktbiNA1v0

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 2, 2021

An April 2020 email from NIH Director Francis Collins to Fauci under the subject line: Conspiracy gains momentum. The email included a link to an article about Bret Baier saying on FOX News that covid outbreak started in Wuhan lab. Fauci’s response is redacted. pic.twitter.com/G8F7SUB23U

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) June 1, 2021

Basically, Collins was trying to deflect, because the email was not about other conspiracy theories but about the lab leak theory, as the body of the text, not just the subject line indicated. Then he tries to dismiss the theory by saying he saw “no evidence” to support it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he says.

Now, of course, this makes no sense. Why should one theory require more “extraordinary evidence” than another theory?

But MacCallum skewers that deflection immediately, noting that there hasn’t been proof that it came from a “zoonotic source” (at which Collins made faces) and providing him with some golden evidence for the lab leak theory, grilling him as to whether or not he knew about the three researchers at the Wuhan lab who suffered COVID symptoms and had to get hospital care because they got so ill in November 2019. He indicates he was aware that some got sick, although not necessarily how many people there were that got sick.

YIKES: NIH Director Collins insists there needs to be “an evidence-based expert-driven open investigation” on the origins of the virus, but @MarthaMacCallum shot back that many claims were shot down if they were from the right. Collins confirms, saying many were too “outrageous” pic.twitter.com/CYEyNiT8Zy

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 2, 2021

But at a certain point, Collins must have realized that MacCallum just knew her facts too well, she wasn’t backing down, she wanted to know why he and Fauci put this down to conspiracy (which he didn’t adequately answer) and she started getting into areas that didn’t make him a happy camper at all. So he loses it a bit and says that we’ve devoted enough time to that and can we please start talking about how to save lives from the virus?

Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asks NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins several questions about the origins of COVID.

Eventually he says: “Please, could we have a bit more of the focus on how we’re going to save lives?” pic.twitter.com/MrpDccFvay

— The Recount (@therecount) June 2, 2021

Translation: You’re getting into questions that I don’t want to answer now. We’ve been talking about vaccines for months. What the media hasn’t been talking about sufficiently has been the lab leak theory, in large measure because it was shot down without reason by media and people like Fauci.