The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, clashed with Fox News' Martha McCallum Wednesday over her insistence on focusing on Fox News' Wuhan lab conspiracy instead of getting information out to her viewers about staying safe from COVID.

McCallum kept promoting the conspiracy that the US-funded research into Covid accelerated the virus which was then leaked from the Wuhan lab.

"We're the National Institutes of Health," Collins said. "We're the largest supporter of medical health in the world. We knew that bat-driven coronaviruses had caused already two major scares as far as pandemics, SARS and MRSA. It would have been irresponsible for us to not to try to understand what else might be lurking out there."

Collins then categorically denied that in their funding capacity Wuhan was permitted to do anything of that nature with the virus.

I'm a bit unhappy that people keep repeating those claims when they're simply not true," he chided. "I'm a little disturbed, we're spending this time on this issue and here we are today."

"We should be talking about how to put covid-19 behind us, not going back to January 2020. Right now we don't have any new data," he said.

And then he lowered the boom on Martha.

"Gosh, you and I just spent a whole bunch of minutes here, talking about some issues that we need to be able to get an answer to, and meanwhile people are still dying from COVID-19 and we didn't even talk about the ways to get to an end to this with vaccines," Collins reminded her. "So please could we have a bit more of the focus on how we're going to save lives while we're talking about how this all started? We need both of those, don't we?"

Fox News doesn't care about saving lives. They are trolls meant to keep the Republican base angry and restless. So McCallum's answer would be a clear no. But good for Dr. Collins for pointing out what they ought to be focused on if they were real "news."