Antony Fauci became the nation’s most trusted expert in the chaotic early days of the 2020 outbreak.
Washington:
Former US government scientist Anthony Fauci vehemently denied covering up the origins of Covid-19 on Monday, in his first public testimony before Congress since retiring as the face of the fight against the pandemic.
Fauci became the nation’s most trusted expert in the chaotic early days of the 2020 outbreak, but his clashes with former President Donald Trump over the response sparked fury on the right, and he now lives with security protection following threats from death against his family.
Republicans accuse the 83-year-old immunologist of helping trigger the worst pandemic in a century by approving funding given to Chinese scientists they accuse of manufacturing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
He came under pressure from Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for his knowledge of “gain-of-function” research, which seeks to improve viruses as a way to find ways to combat them.
The technical controversy is at the heart of a theory that the pandemic originated in a laboratory leak.
But Fauci said it would be “molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to mutate into the virus that caused the pandemic.
And he rejected as “absolutely false and simply absurd” Republican claims that he influenced the CIA’s analysis of whether the pandemic began naturally or escaped from the laboratory.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years until leaving the post in December 2022, Fauci helped craft federal policy during an outbreak that killed 1.1 million Americans.
His regular TV appearances correcting Trump’s misinformation about the pandemic have earned him enemies among allies of the billionaire, who is running for a second term in November.
The panel took more than 100 hours of testimony and examined a mountain of documents in a 15-month investigation, but was unable to find any evidence linking Fauci to potentially dangerous research in Wuhan.
The World Health Organization and scientists around the world have investigated the origins of the virus, with many believing it to have spread from animals to humans in China.
A US intelligence analysis released last year said it was also possible that the virus had been genetically modified and escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.
Fauci told lawmakers it was “not a conspiracy theory” to discuss the merits of the lab leak theory.
“What a conspiracy theory is is the kinds of distortions of this particular issue, like, it was a lab leak and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they really shouldn’t be talking about a laboratory leak.” he said.
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