- Closed-door sessions will mark Dr Fauci’s first trip to Capitol since retirement
- Fauci has clashed with lawmakers over perceived coverups about covid origins
- READ MORE: Rand Paul accuses Anthony Fauci of LYING to Congress under oath
Former White House doctor Anthony Fauci will be grilled by Congress today over his handling of the Covid pandemic and links to a Chinese lab feared to have started the outbreak.
Dr Fauci, 82, will appear before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday and Tuesday for two seven-hour closed-door sessions.
The ex-official will face questions about his perceived efforts to quash scientific debate about the lab leak theory, the idea that a genetically manipulated coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab.
Since his last appearance in front of Congress more than a year ago, it has been revealed that Dr Fauci oversaw federal spending on risky research on viruses during his time working in the federal government’s main scientific research agency.
He is also expected to be grilled on his flip-flopping on vaccine and mask mandates, as well as the long-term effects of lockdowns, which have been linked to falling test scores and performance in school, higher rates of severe diseases like cancers, and mental health issues.
Dr Fauci’s closed-door testimony is expected to get heated as previous hearings have. In the past, Dr Fauci has clashed with lawmakers including Sen Rand Paul of Kentucky over his perceived coverup of funding for gain of function research as well as the Covid lab leak theory
Dr Fauci has been accused on squashing dissenting opinions that argued the covid pandemic likely emerged as a result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology where researchers performed gain of function work
The private hearings mark Dr Fauci’s first visit to Capitol Hill since his retirement, and they are expected to become heated.
Members of the Subcommittee have compiled ‘more than 200 pages of questions and approximately 100 exhibits’, likely including evidence such as private emails between Fauci and other scientists that showed efforts to coverup dissenting opinions about the coronavirus’ origins.
The Subcommittee said Monday: ‘Serious work needs serious answers.’
The Select Subcommittee first requested a sit-down with Fauci in February, but an agreement over the timing was only just reached with Fauci’s attorneys earlier this month, according to a letter sent last year from the committee.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the GOP chairman of the committee, said last fall: ‘It is time for Dr. Fauci to confront the facts and address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic,’
The infectious disease expert was found to have suppressed voices of those who contended that the coronavirus that spurred the global pandemic was the product of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
One such email from former National Institutes of Health head Dr Francis Collins to Dr Fauci in 2020, said that the lab leak theory was being pushed by ‘fringe epidemiologists’ and it required a ‘quick and devastating published take down’.
So far, no US or World Health Organization-sanctioned investigations have been able to rule out the lab leak theory. In the midst of criticism over the controversy, Dr Fauci has since said that he keeps an ‘open mind’ although insisting that it remains ‘most likely’ that the virus spilled over from animals to humans.
The WIV contains biolabs where scientists tinker with coronaviruses in ways that make them either more transmissible to humans or more or less virulent, a type of research known as ‘gain of function’.
Dr Fauci famously insisted to Congress members in 2021 that his former department, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
Yet recently-published emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci acknowledged that ‘scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.’
While the emails show Dr Fauci was aware of gain-of-function research going on in the lab, he never admitted the NIH funded it.
Advocates for the lab leak theory, including some members of Congress and government agencies, have pressed for a more comprehensive investigation into the pademic’s origins, going back as far as to probe federal funding for the controversial research organization EcoHealth Alliance run by British scientist Peter Daszak, between 2014 and 2021.
The organization has subcontracted taxpayer-funded grants to several labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $8 million in federal grants between 2014 and 2021, which it subcontracted to eight research facilities including the WIV.
White Coat Waste, a watchdog group that calls for the elimination of medical experiments on animals and a harsh critic of EcoHealth, said on Monday: ‘We’ve been working for years to have [Dr Fauci] taken to task for abusing his authority to violate a federal gain-of-function funding ban, conspiring to cover it up, and repeatedly lying to Congress about it.
‘Anthony Fauci is the poster child for waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, and taxpayers deserve answers and accountability for his role in recklessly bankrolling and running interference for an adversary’s animal lab that probably prompted a pandemic using U.S. taxpayers’ money.’
Dr Fauci has long been one of the most sought-after authorities on infectious disease, particularly on the rise of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s.
But he has seen a precipitous fall from grace in recent years for promoting misguided policies for locking down cities and schools for extended periods of time, with disastrous consequences, which are now coming back to haunt him.
It started in the wake of early 2020 guidance to discourage Americans from using face masks, instead urging the public to keep as much of the limited protective equipment available to healthcare workers as possible.
Since then, though, he has been a staunch advocate for masking up in public despite dubious evidence that it actually makes a difference in preventing transmission and severe disease.
The sessions come amid skyrocketing levels of new Covid hospitalizations and flu and respiratory syncytial virus cases, all threatening to overburden hospitals again.