The Fauci witch hunt intensifies as the next threat looms

Editor’s note: Kent Sepkowitz is an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. To view more opinion on CNN.

Anyone eager to relive the harshness, madness and danger of the early Covid-19 pandemic may want to watch a few hours of Monday’s hearing of the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Members spent much of the day questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, among many other government roles, former chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden about Covid-19. The subcommittee had previously questioned Fauci during two days testimony behind closed doors in January.

In your statement to the audience, the Republican majority made it clear that, rather than a standard after-action review to collect lessons learned as a way to inform the next public health crisis, their goal was to put Fauci once again in the spotlight. As subcommittee chairman Dr. Brad Wenstrup, who is a podiatrist, said, the hearing was aimed at, among other things, reviewing Fauci “promoting singular and questionable narratives about the origins of Covid-19.”

During the long and exasperating hearing (I watched for over 3 hours), Republicans seemed intent on connecting U.S. support to virus search that began under the Obama administration with the origin of the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci was peppered repeatedly for questions that attempted to suggest an allegedly nefarious role played by the US and/or Fauci himself. The still uncertain history of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) is apparently seen as a promising topic for political gain.

Many articles have already been written and arguments presented on this issue. In one corner is the group that, like me, sees the pandemic as just another natural occurrence resulting from the standard exchange of genes between animals and people – back and forth until, accidentally, a very bad strain of the virus is involuntarily created.

The other argument, which admittedly has an irresistible James Bond feel to it, although with much less credibility, sees the virus as a man-made construction. Maybe the bandits (the Chinesein this movie script) with bad intentions, somehow deliberately hit the jackpot of evil by creating a modern doomsday virus. There are two subversions to this theory: one in which the bad guys were just being bad and I did a bad thingand another where US Funds were part of the evil plan as the money was used (knowingly or inadvertently) to start the whole evil program back 2014 and 2015.

Most of the hearing was spent trying to link the origin of the pandemic to a small grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). given to New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which, as planned, donated funds to the Wuhan laboratory to study coronaviruses in bats. No one disputes that this occurred. The plot thickens (or, in my opinion, thins) when the genetic fingerprint evidence is released.

Republicans appear convinced that the subsidy led, accidentally or inadvertently, to the doomsday virus, supporting “gain of function” research. This term refers to work that explores the consequences of playing with genetic material to add a new or improved capability to an organism. In fact, “gain of function” was a term frequently heard in the audience, a kind of new meme spoken with familiarity by people who knew nothing about this field of investigation until recently.

As listeners learned, “gain of function” has come to mean different things to different people. Viewed one way, an experiment that manipulates the genetic structure of a virus, bacteria, plant, or animal can be seen as a “gain-of-function” investigation. Imposing heavy regulation on this type of routine activity would paralyze all research. To prevent this from happening, the NIH has done meticulous work to defining what exactly it means from a narrow regulatory perspective that promises safety for the public through appropriate levels of scrutiny.

One of Fauci’s explanations for why the U.S.-funded Wuhan work was not “gain-of-function” research was simple: the genetic fingerprint of the Chinese bat coronavirus studied with U.S. dollars was a very distant corona cousin of SARS- CoV-2 to be making sequential and sinister trial-and-error manipulation a plausible explanation. The fingerprint of the pandemic strain is simply very different from the bat strain.

As Fauci saidthe theory of the laboratory’s origin linked to NIH funding is “molecularly impossible”.

It is important to highlight that this conclusion is based on insights from experts in the field of Phylogenetics of viral evolution, which was widely used to track the pandemic strain. Science is mature and reliable and places the conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt for those who believe in science.

As Fauci explained, this does not mean that other scientists in Wuhan, using other funds, could have taken other strains of coronavirus and altered and stimulated the genetic makeup to create the disaster (seems very implausible to me, but who knows?). “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China or in Wuhan… I keep an open mind about what the origin is,” Fauci counted legislators. But there is no way to link this to the US, the NIH or Fauci.

The House subcommittee 15-month drag investigation in thousands of emails and documents also revealed apparently incomplete practices of some scientists who had a relationship with some research carried out in Wuhan. One person, Dr. David Morens, worked on academic projects with Fauci and the other, Dr. Peter Daszak, a colleague of Morens, led the EcoHealth Alliance and worked with the Wuhan laboratory. Preliminarily, they appear to have used personal email for government work in non-compliance with policy and, worse, possibly developed some reprehensible solutions to avoid oversight of their work, such as deleting messages. None of this, however, is related to US funds or NIH-funded research or Fauci.

I suspect there will be more Congressional investigations into Morens and Daszak that will create more headlines. However, while the commission continues to hesitate about further emailsthese legislators will not bother trying to make the public safer.

Of course, even if they worked hard to update and optimize the government’s response to a pandemic, there would be no guarantee that a future administration would follow the cumulative wisdom of experts. As we learned in the early days of Covid-19, then-President Donald Trump did not consult the “pandemic handbook” developed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

But damn, the Covid subcommittee could at least try. As Fauci said – hopefully – about the hearing: “The reason we are here is [to determine] how we can do better next time. Unfortunately, this was a path not taken at this subcommittee hearing.

For more news and newsletters from CNN, create an account at CNN.com