WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the US to date leaving the government in 2022 faces heated questions from Republican lawmakers on Monday about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
a Republican-led subcommittee has spent more than a year investigating the country’s response to the pandemic and whether US-funded research in China may have played a role in its origins. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong while missing a key opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.
Fauci — alternately a trusted voice during the pandemic and the target of partisan attacks and even death threats — spent 14 hours over two days in January questioning the House of Representatives behind closed doors. They will question him again on Monday, in public and on camera, for the first time since he ended more than fifty years of government service.
This time he faces 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 detailing ways to circumvent public records laws, including by not discussing controversial issues via government email.
The main problem: Many scientists think the virus most likely originated in nature and jumped from animals to humans, probably at a natural market in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. There is no new scientific information to support that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory. a US intelligence analysis says there isn’t enough evidence to prove either way – and a recent one Associated Press investigation found that the Chinese government halted crucial efforts to trace the source 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 COVID-19’s natural origins, such as how other deadly viruses, including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS, have jumped to humans .
“I have repeatedly stated that I am completely open to both possibilities and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will be willing to accept it,” he said in an opening statement for the hearing. Monday.
Republicans have also accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that his agency was funding “gain of function” research — the practice of improving a virus in a laboratory to test its potential impact in the real world to study – in a laboratory in Wuhan.
For years, NIH gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the money to collaborate with a Chinese laboratory that studies coronaviruses commonly transmitted by bats. Last month, the government suspended federal funding for the EcoHealth Alliance — and proposed excluding it from future funding — after failing to properly monitor some of those experiments.
The definition of “gain of function” includes both general research and especially high-risk experiments to “increase” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread in humans or cause serious disease. In transcripts of Fauci’s interviews with the House panel in January, he emphasized that he was using the high-risk experiment definition.
“It would be molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth funds to convert into the virus that caused the pandemic, he reiterated in Monday’s opening statement.
As for hiding 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 during the pandemic — first under President Donald Trump and later as chief adviser to President Joe Biden — trying to explain the latest public health advice to a fearful public even as scientists struggled to learn more about the new virus . Research from the agency he led for 38 years, NIH’s National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led to vaccines that enabled a return to normalcy.
The House panel will also question him about the science behind some controversial advice, including social distancing.
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