Fauci rejects attacks at House hearing on COVID origins

WASHINGTON – Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until he leaves the administration in 2022, appeared before Congress again on Monday and called Republican allegations that he tried to cover up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic “simply absurd.”

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, but it found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

He had already been questioned for 14 hours over two days behind closed doors in January. But on Monday, Fauci voluntarily testified publicly and on camera at a hearing that quickly degenerated into partisan attacks.

Republicans repeated unproven allegations against the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist, while Democrats apologized for Congress tarnishing his name and lamented a missed opportunity to prepare for the next frightening outbreak.

“He’s not a comic book supervillain,” said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, arguing that the special subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic had failed to prove a number of incriminating allegations.

Fauci was the public face of the administration’s early COVID-19 response under then-President Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President Joe Biden. A trusted voice for millions but also the target of partisan anger, he was moved Monday as he recalled death threats and other harassment against him and his family that he said are still ongoing. Police later escorted the hecklers out of the hearing room.

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 in China where the outbreak began. There is no new 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 said publicly that he is open to both theories but that there is more evidence for COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses, including coronavirus relatives SARS and MERS, have jumped to humans. He reiterated that position on Monday as Republican lawmakers raised questions about whether he was working behind the scenes to suppress the lab leak theory or even trying to influence intelligence agencies.

“I have repeatedly stated that I am completely open to both possibilities and that if there is definitive evidence to confirm or disprove either theory, I will readily accept it,” Fauci said. He later invoked a fictional secret agent and denounced a conspiracy theory that “I parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they really shouldn’t be talking about a lab leak.”

Republicans also accused Fauci of lying to Congress by denying that his agency had funded “gain-of-function” research in a Wuhan lab – that is, improving a virus in the lab to study its potential real-world effects.

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 stopped federal funding for EcoHealth, citing a lack of oversight of 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 severe disease in humans. Fauci stressed that he was using the risky experiment definition, saying it was “molecularly impossible” that the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth’s funds would turn into the virus that caused the pandemic.

In an exchange with Republican Rep. H. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Fauci acknowledged that the question of the lab leak was still open because it was not known whether another lab not funded by the NIH had conducted risky research on coronaviruses.

But Fauci has faced a new set of questions about the credibility of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he headed for 38 years. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIAID colleague that discussed ways to circumvent public records law, including by not discussing controversial pandemic topics in government emails.

Fauci condemned this colleague’s actions and stressed: “To my knowledge, I have never conducted official business through my private email.”

The origins of the pandemic were not the only hot topic. The House committee also criticized some public health measures taken to slow the spread of the virus before COVID-19 vaccines spurred by NIAID research allowed a return to normalcy. The order to stay 6 feet apart meant many businesses, schools and churches could not stay open, and the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), called it a “burdensome” and arbitrary rule, pointing out that Fauci had acknowledged in his previous closed-door testimony that it was not scientifically based.

Fauci responded Monday that the 6-foot distance was not his guideline but one created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before scientists discovered that the new virus is airborne and does not simply spread through droplets expelled over a distance.