Fauci testifies publicly before House panel on the origins of Covid

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until he leaves government in 2022, faced heated questioning Monday from Republican lawmakers about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Republican-led subcommittee spent more than a year investigating the country’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research into China may have played a role in how it all began. Democrats opened the hearing by saying the investigation has so far found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong and missed an important opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.

Fauci — alternately a trusted voice during the pandemic and the target of partisan attacks, even death threats — spent 14 hours over two days in January being grilled by the House panel behind closed doors. On Monday, they questioned him again, in public and on camera, for the first time since he ended more than five decades of government service.

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This time, he faced a new set of questions about the credibility of his former agency, the National Institutes of Health. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIH colleague about ways to get around public records laws , including not discussing controversial issues in government emails.

The bottom line: Many scientists believe the virus likely emerged in the wild and passed from animals to people, likely at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. There is no new scientific information to support that the virus could have leaked from a laboratory. A US intelligence analysis says there is not enough evidence to prove anything – and a recent Associated Press report investigation found that the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the origin of the virus in the early weeks of the outbreak.

Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories, but that there is more evidence supporting the natural origins of COVID-19, the way other deadly viruses, including the coronavirus cousins ​​SARS and MERS, spread through people.

“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence emerges to validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it,” he said in an opening statement at Monday’s hearing. .

Republicans also accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that his agency funded “gain-of-function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — in a lab. in Wuhan.

For years, the NIH has awarded grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the funds to work with a Chinese laboratory studying coronaviruses commonly transmitted by bats. Last month, the government suspended federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance – and proposed banning it from future funding – citing its inability to adequately monitor some of these experiments.

The definition of “gain of function” encompasses both general research and especially risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause serious illness in humans. In transcripts of Fauci’s January interviews with the House panel, he emphasized that he was using the definition of a risky experiment.

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“It would be molecularly impossible” for bat viruses studied with EcoHealth funds to mutate into the virus that caused the pandemic, he reiterated in Monday’s opening statement.

As for the concealment of public records, Fauci said in opening remarks that “to my knowledge, I have never conducted official business through my personal email.”

Fauci became a household name in the pandemic — first under President Donald Trump and later as President Joe Biden’s chief adviser — trying to explain the latest public health advice to a frightened public even as scientists struggled to learn about it. the new virus. Research at the agency he led for 38 years, the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led to vaccines that allowed a return to normalcy.

The House panel also questioned him about the science behind some controversial advice, including social distancing.