The recent spats between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about how the coronavirus pandemic started made for good television. The head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wagged his finger at a United States senator and called him a liar. Dr. Fauci rejected the premise of tough, evidence-based questions about our government’s support of risky “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on his watch.

While everyone in Washington loves a good debate, we need less finger wagging and more facts.

The public deserves access to documents from both the Chinese government and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Communist China’s secrecy is to be expected, of course, but the U.S. government ought to be more transparent and stop hiding what it knows about the virus research in Wuhan.

Public health experts agree that to stop the next pandemic, we must find out how the COVID-19 virus—which has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and 600,000 Americans—began in China. Some argue the pandemic started because of a natural virus spillover from bats or other animals to humans, while others posit that it could have started through a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, where scientists have been collecting and studying similar viruses for years.