Two San Diego police officers died Friday when a wrong-way driver hit their car in a head-on collision, according to reports. 

California High Patrol (CHP) responded at about 10:20 a.m. Friday to a call about a Honda Civic driving down the I-5 the wrong way. A call about a crash shortly followed. 

The driver of the errant vehicle, as well as the two police officers in the other car, all died upon impact, FOX 5 San Diego reported. 

“Heroic efforts from San Diego Fire weren’t able to rescue any of the occupants in either of the vehicles,” CHP spokesperson Salvador Castro said at the scene.

It is not clear if the officers were on duty at the time of the incident. The officers were driving a white sedan, though, according to NBC 7 San Diego. 

Factors surrounding the crash – including vehicle speed and any possible intoxicants – remain unknown at this time. 

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The highway remains closed while authorities investigate the incident. 

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called on top government epidemiologist Anthony Fauci to resign from his post amid revelations about emails Fauci sent early in the coronavirus pandemic. He also called for a congressional inquiry into the virus’ origins. 

“Anthony Fauci’s recently released emails and investigative reporting about #COVID19 origins are shocking,” Hawley tweeted Friday, adding: “The time has come for Fauci to resign and for a full congressional investigation into the origins of #COVID19 – and into any and all efforts to prevent a full accounting.” 

“The public deserves to know if persons within the US govt tried to stop a full investigation into #COVID origins, as recently reported,” the Missouri Republican continued. “And Congress must also find out to what extent Fauci’s NIAID was involved in financing research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” 

Buzzfeed obtained and published thousands of Fauci’s emails from the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic this week, some of which sparked outrage for a variety of reasons. A group of emails appear to show Fauci’s opposition to mask-wearing early in the pandemic, which was consistent with his public statements, before he and other public health officials reversed that stance. 

FAUCI EMAILS SPARK FLOOD OF BACKLASH: ‘NEEDS TO STOP PLAYING GAMES’

Other emails, however, indicated that the possibility the COVID-19 virus leaked from a Chinese lab was raised to Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as early as January 2020, and that he and some other reputable scientists took the possibility seriously. 

Nevertheless, Fauci, other public health experts and many in the media were strongly dismissing the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, even as Fox News reported in April 2020 that at least some in the U.S. intelligence community believed a lab leak to be more likely than other theories. 

The expert who raised lab leak concerns to Fauci on Jan. 31, Kristian G. Andersen, later said that he is quite sure the virus was not artificially altered after looking at the “data.” 

Also sparking outrage against Fauci are two other sets of emails, including one in which Fauci tells his deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, to read a paper about “SARS Gain of function.”

“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss said in an email to Fauci. “Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

That’s being interpreted by some to indicate that Fauci and those close to him were concerned that his agency – which has indeed funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – may have indirectly funded experiments on coronaviruses that may have led to the creation and accidental release of the COVID-19 virus. 

FORMER STATE DEPT INVESTIGATOR ON FAUCI EMAILS: ‘I DON’T TRUST THESE SCIENTISTS’ ABOUT WUHAN LAB

“It seems like he was very troubled early on that there was gain of function. He’s like ‘What, is gain of function still going on? I thought we paused it.’ He seemed unclear about whether or not the gain-of-function research, how it got started again in Wuhan,” Paul said on the “Tom Roten Morning Show“ Wednesday. “And I think he was very concerned – although he doesn’t say it in the email – concerned that he continued to fund it through NIH even though there weren’t doing gain of function.”

Some are also upset about correspondence between Fauci and a man named Peter Daszak. Daszak’s organization EcoHealth received millions in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including a $600,000 grant from Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that it later paid to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans.

“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak said in an email. Fauci replied: “Many thanks for your kind note.” 

Daszak was also notably on the World Health Organization team that investigated the Wuhan Institute of Virology earlier this year, an inquiry that’s been panned even by the Biden White House as lacking transparency. 

“These emails show that Dr. Fauci coordinated with one of the Wuhan Lab’s funders to cover-up the plausible notion that the virus could have come from inside the lab. Dr. Fauci needs to stop playing games and answer questions about his role in funding the very lab that may have unleashed this pandemic on the world,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a statement to Fox News Wednesday. 

“It’s all so incestuous,” Paul added on the Tom Roten Morning Show. 

The NIAID did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News on Hawley’s call for Fauci to resign. NIAID did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News earlier this week about the content of Fauci’s emails and the backlash against him. 

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The White House, which has elevated Fauci’s role to a top adviser to President Biden, meanwhile, is standing by Fauci amid the fallout from his emails. 

“The President and the administration feel that Dr. Fauci has played an incredible role in getting the pandemic under control, being a voice to the public throughout the course of this pandemic,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday when asked if the emails changed the White House’s confidence in Fauci. “And, again, I would reiterate a lot of these emails are from 17 months ago or more, certainly predating this administration, but some time ago in — as we look to history.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity ripped Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pushback against the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, China on “Hannity” Thursday, claiming that “any idiot” could’ve discerned in January 2020 “that a Wuhan lab leak was plausible and possibly responsible for the pandemic.”

HANNITY: Now, Fauci and the entire world knew that the Wuhan facility was experimenting with gain of function with coronaviruses. Logically, any idiot could have realized on January 31, 2020, that a Wuhan lab leak was plausible and possibly responsible for the pandemic. If you brought the question up you are a conspiracy theorist. You’re talking about debunked conspiracy theories. Not so debunked anymore, are they? Emails now prove that Dr. Fauci knew that everything was happening in the lab and he was showing great concern that, in fact, NIH money that he was in charge of was being used to do all of this. 

We may have actually paid for this and for months in public Fauci treated the lab leak hypothesis as a Fox News conspiracy theory. He said there was no scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab, even though he got that note on January 31, 2020. He strongly implied that all signs pointed to the virus originating in nature, just the opposite of what he was told. So why did he do this? What did Fauci know and when did Fauci know it …

Even today, Fauci is still urging Americans don’t be too accusatory of China because they’re working hard to get to the bottom of what really happened. It’s in their best interest to tell the truth. He has emails that he got saying that they were covering up the number of people that were killed and then, in fact, their travel ban prohibited people from leaving Wuhan province and traveling anywhere within China or going to Wuhan Province. You’ve got to be kidding.

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The Georgia Board of Education is taking steps to prohibit schools from teaching that the U.S. is fundamentally racist and other controversial ideas associated with critical race theory (CRT).

By an 11-2 vote, the state adopted part of a resolution drafted by conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. It contains language restricting external, private influences from changing school teaching — an apparent attempt to exclude diversity consultancies or activist nonprofits from administrators’ decision-making.

The resolution also prevents teachers from being forced to teach that an individual’s worth or sense of shame should be dependent on their race or sex.

It reads, in part: “[C]oncepts that impute fault, blame, a tendency to oppress others, or the need to feel guilt or anguish to persons solely because of their race or sex violate the premises of individual rights, equal opportunity, and individual merit underpinning our constitutional republic, and therefore have no place in training for teachers, administrators, or other employees of the public educational system of the State of Georgia.”

WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY?

Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, reportedly urged the board last month to take steps against CRT, which is often seen as the source of these ideas.

Georgia’s is just the latest attempt to halt so-called “anti-racist” trainings and curricula in their tracks. Some have defended those types of teachings as a way to foster understanding and dismantle purportedly systemic inequities. Others, like Chris Rufo, have described them as a form of neo-racism that unfairly attributes certain concepts or actions to racial groups.

The issue gained steam in national media this year as controversial materials emerged. For example, the Oregon Department of Education was found to promote a teacher training program that argued white supremacy manifested itself in a focus on finding the right answer in math.

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Besides individual racial characteristics, American history has also been a subject of these trainings. Schools across the U.S. have started utilizing the “1619 Project,” which teaches, among other things, that the institution of slavery was the nation’s true founding. 

A series of the resolution’s statements seemed to be aimed at disputing those types of ideas. The board, it says, “[b]elieves the United States of America is not a racist country, and that the state of Georgia is not a racist state.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci gave a wide-ranging interview that was published late Thursday that mainly focused on the origins of the coronavirus, and he was asked if he believed his own National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases could have any responsibility for the global pandemic.

“Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance?” he asked, according to the Financial Times.

The paper did not post the precise question asked to Fauci, but the top disease doctor has been facing increased criticism by Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul over a $600,000 grant that went to a group called EcoHealth Alliance and ended up at the Chinese lab. The lab was reportedly tasked with studying the risk that bat coronaviruses.

FAUCI EMAILS SPARK BACKLASH

Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, said at a May 25 hearing that the taxpayer-funded grant was not approved to conduct gain-of-function research, which is research that involves modifying a virus to make it more infectious among humans.

NIAID did not immediately respond to an after-hours email from Fox News about the comments in the FT.

Medical records

Fauci told the paper that the medical records of the three workers who were said to have become sick at the Wuhan lab in late 2019 would be beneficial in the probe of the virus’ origin. 

“Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?” he asked.

NEW INTEL LENDS MORE CREDENCE TO WUHAN LAB THEORY AS WHO PRESSURED

“The same with the miners who got ill years ago. … What do the medical records of those people say? Was there [a] virus in those people? What was it? It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 was in that cave and either started spreading naturally or went through the lab,” he said.

Fauci was referring to 2012, when miners became sick after they entered a bat cave, the report said. Three of them died. The paper pointed out that Fauci still believes the virus jumped to humans through animals. 

David Asher, the former State Department investigator, told the paper that he respected Fauci, but was “stunned” that he would only now request the records. Asher pointed out that the Trump administration mentioned the reports of sick scientists in January.

FORMER STATE DEPT INVESTIGATOR ON FAUCI EMAILS: ‘I DON’T TRUST THESE SCIENTISTS’ ABOUT WUHAN LAB

China has promoted unproven theories that the virus may have originated elsewhere or even been brought into the country from overseas with imports of frozen seafood tainted with the virus, a notion roundly rejected by international scientists and agencies.

Robert Redfield, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Vanity Fair that in January 2020, he received a message from Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Gao warned him about sickened individuals in Wuhan. The report said “Redfield immediately offered to send a team of specialists to investigate” because he had suspicions about the Wuhan lab. If a team found antibodies in blood samples of workers there, that would be convincing evidence. China refused, he said.

Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report