Fauci pushes back partisan attacks in fiery House hearing over COVID origins and controversies – The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until leaving the government in 2022, was back before Congress on Monday, calling simply preposterous Republican allegations that hed tried to cover up origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A GOP-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nations response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started yet found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

Hed already been grilled behind closed doors, for 14 hours over two days in January. But Monday, Fauci testified voluntarily in public and on camera at a hearing that quickly deteriorated into partisan attacks.

Republicans repeated unproven accusations against the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist while Democrats apologized for Congress besmirching his name and bemoaned a missed opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.

He is not a comic book super villain, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., saying the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had failed to prove a list of damaging allegations.

Fauci was the public face of the governments early COVID-19 response under then-President Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President Joe Biden. A trusted voice to millions, he also was the target of partisan anger and choked up Monday as he recalled death threats and other harassment of himself and his family, threats he said still continue. Police later escorted hecklers out of the hearing room.

The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city in China where the outbreak began. Theres no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory. A U.S. intelligence analysis says theres insufficient evidence to prove either way -- and a recent Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the source of the virus in the first weeks of the outbreak.

Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that theres more evidence supporting COVID-19s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people. It was a position he repeated Monday as Republican lawmakers questioned if he worked behind-the-scenes to squelch the lab-leak theory or even tried to influence intelligence agencies.

I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will ready accept it, Fauci said. He later invoked a fictional secret agent, decrying a conspiracy theory that I was parachuting into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.

Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying to Congress in denying that his agency funded gain of function research the practicing of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact at a lab in Wuhan.

NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. Last month, the government suspended EcoHealths federal funding, citing its failure to properly monitor some of those experiments.

The definition of gain of function covers both general research and especially risky experiments to enhance the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci stressed he was using the risky experiment definition, saying it would be molecularly impossible for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealths funds to be turned into the virus that caused the pandemic.

In an exchange with Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., Fauci acknowledged that the lab leak is still an open question since its impossible to know if some other lab, not funded by NIH money, was doing risky research with coronaviruses.

Fauci did face a new set of questions about the credibility of NIHs National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led for 38 years. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIAID colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not discussing controversial pandemic issues in government email.

Fauci denounced the actions of that colleague and insisted that to the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my personal email.

The pandemics origins werent the only hot topic. The House panel also blasted some public health measures taken to slow spread of the virus before COVID-19 vaccines, spurred by NIAID research, helped allow a return to normalcy. Ordering people to stay 6 feet apart meant many businesses, schools and churches couldnt stay open, and subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, called it a burdensome and arbitrary rule, noting that in his prior closed-door testimony Fauci had acknowledged it wasnt scientifically backed.

Fauci responded Monday that the 6-feet distancing wasnt his guideline but one created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before scientists had learned that the new virus was airborne, not spread simply by droplets emitted a certain distance.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Fauci pushes back partisan attacks in fiery House hearing over COVID origins and controversies - The Associated Press