WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until he leaves the administration in 2022, faced heated questioning from Republican lawmakers on Monday about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Republican-led subcommittee has been investigating the country’s response to the pandemic for more than a year and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played a role in its outbreak. Democrats opened the hearing by saying the investigation has so far found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong and missed an vital opportunity to prepare for the next frightening outbreak.
Fauci – at times a trusted voice during the pandemic, at times the target of partisan attacks and even death threats – was questioned for 14 hours over two days behind closed doors by a House committee in January. On Monday, he was questioned again, publicly and on camera for the first time since he joined the government after more than five decades.
This time, he faced a fresh 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 that discussed ways to circumvent public records law, including by not discussing controversial topics in government emails.
The main problem: Many scientists believe the virus most likely originated in nature and jumped from animals to humans, presumably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. There is no fresh science to suggest the virus may have escaped from a lab instead. A U.S. intelligence analysis says there is not enough evidence to prove one or the other — and a recent Associated Press investigation found that the Chinese government froze key efforts to identify the virus’s source in the early weeks of the outbreak.
Fauci has long stated publicly that he is open to both theories, but that there is more evidence that COVID-19 is of natural origin and that other deadly viruses, including the related coronaviruses SARS and MERS, have jumped to humans.
“I have repeatedly stated that I am completely unbiased on both possibilities and that if definitive evidence is presented to confirm or disprove either theory, I will readily accept it,” he said in his opening statement at the hearing on Monday.
Republicans also accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that his agency had funded “gain-of-function” research – improving a virus in the laboratory to study its potential effects in the real world – at a lab in Wuhan.
For years, the NIH gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the funds to collaborate with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. Last month, the administration suspended federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance — and proposed stripping it of future funding — on the grounds that it had failed to properly oversee some of those experiments.
The definition of “gain of function” includes both general research and particularly risky experiments designed to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause earnest disease in humans. In transcripts of Fauci’s interviews with the House committee in January, he emphasized that he was using the definition of a risky experiment.
“It would be molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth’s resources to transform into the virus that caused the pandemic, he said in his opening speech on Monday.
Regarding hiding public records, Fauci said in his opening remarks, “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 — as he tried to explain the latest health recommendations to a frightened public while scientists were still struggling to learn more about the fresh virus. The research at the agency he led for 38 years, the NIH’s National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led to vaccines that enabled a return to normalcy.
The House committee also questioned him about the scientific basis for some controversial advice, including social distancing.
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