Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist celebrated and reviled for his work on Covid, will return to Capitol Hill on Monday for a reunion with some of his fiercest antagonists: members of the Republican-led House panel that accused him. they helped overcome the worst pandemic in a century.
Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have spent 15 months rooting through emails, Slack messages and research proposals for evidence against Dr. Fauci. In half a million pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed testimony, the panel has so far found nothing linking the 83-year-old immunologist to the start of the Covid outbreak in China.
But the panel has produced emails that show that Dr. Fauci is trying to avoid public records laws at the medical research institute he served for 38 years until his retirement in December 2022.
Some of these emails paint Dr. Fauci is preoccupied with his public image; one April 2021 message from an assistant said that Dr. Fauci was “proud to be like Teflon,” he appeared “worried about the brown stuff hitting the fan” when asked about research funded by his agency, the National Institute. Allergies and Infectious Diseases.
Over the years, the agency has given research funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American nonprofit group that works with international scientists — including some at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the pandemic ultimately began — as part of efforts to anticipate disease outbreaks. .
The appearance of Dr. Fauci at a House panel hearing on Monday will be lawmakers’ first chance to question the agency’s recording practices. For Republicans on the committee, the hearing is also the culmination of, so far, a long campaign against American scientists and health officials who have been suggested they helped start the Covid pandemic.
No new evidence for pandemics emerging from laboratories, with or without the help of American taxpayer funds, has surfaced in several high-profile hearings over the past year. Democratic lawmakers warned that the work of the subcommittee was “an attempt to create concerns about the origins associated with the laboratory to encourage the nation’s scientists and public health officials to gain partisanship.”
But Dr. Fauci, who spent more than 50 years in government service and has advised presidents of both parties on outbreaks of infectious diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, anthrax and the flu, is undoubtedly the panel’s most valued mine. While working under President Donald J. Trump and then President Biden, Dr. Fauci became the face of the Covid response that generated respect and frustration from Americans.
Often appearing on television, Dr. Fauci became a hero to Mr Trump’s critics for correcting lies about the coronavirus. At the start of the pandemic, he also downplayed the importance of masks to the general public, trying to keep them from being used by medical workers, but later encouraged their use – prompting critics to say he was flip-flopping. And he publicly celebrated the Covid shot, turning the anti-vaccine movement against him.
In the House session Monday, Dr. Fauci will almost certainly face a cold reception. Republicans on the panel carefully tried to make the case that lab work funded by Dr. Fauci who once could have caused the start of the Covid pandemic.
The Republican Party focused mainly on funding the EcoHealth Alliance awarded agency that was passed on to Chinese scientists. He accused the scientists of cooking up the coronavirus in a Wuhan laboratory.
“Covid-19 was not created by bats in a wet market,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, insisted last year when the work of the subcommittee was underway. “It was produced in a laboratory funded by Fauci. They tried to cover it up.”
Scientists and health officials have repeatedly noted that the coronavirus being studied in an American-funded laboratory in Wuhan – as well as other viruses known to be the subject of research there – bears little resemblance to the one that caused the pandemic. A National Institutes of Health official testified last year before a different House committee that a comparison between the two was like “saying that humans are the same as cows.”
In closed-door testimony before a House coronavirus panel in January, Dr. Fauci said, as before, that laboratory research could have caused the pandemic and that he kept an “open mind” about its origins. But, he said, “Some people ignore things from the crazy.” And he stressed that, in his view, the weight of evidence points to the virus originating in animals before spilling over to humans outside the laboratory.
In the testimony, Dr. Fauci cited studies that relied on early cases and the virus’s genome as well as sampling at an illegal wild animal market in Wuhan that suggested the virus that caused the pandemic jumped from animals to people there.
“When I read the paper written by the respected international evolutionary virology group, I believe even more that this is a natural phenomenon,” said Dr. Fauci.
Republican lawmakers seized on another part of Dr. Fauci ahead of Monday’s hearing to attack America’s Covid response. In a memo circulated on Friday, Republicans highlighted comments from Dr. Fauci on, among other things, the six-foot separation rule, the masking policy and the vaccine mandate.
Dr. Fauci will also be scrutinized over new revelations that two of his former aides — Dr. David Morens, a senior adviser, and Greg Folkers, chief of staff – sent an email during the pandemic that looked like it. in violation of the public records law. In opening comments posted online Sunday afternoon, Dr. Fauci said he “knows nothing” about Dr. Morens, and said that Dr. Morens, who helped him write a scientific paper, “is not my advisor on institute policy or other substantive issues.”
Some of the emails suggest that agency officials who work to create records under transparency laws are helping colleagues dodge the regulations, a possibility government accountability experts say they find “deeply troubling.”
The email suggests that agency officials are not concerned about the emergence of evidence related to the origins of the pandemic, but rather about the ongoing disclosure of records discussing “political attacks” on research.
However, Dr. Morens suggested in an email that Dr. Fauci was also careful not to make sensitive comments where reporters or members of the public might find them.
“I can send things to Tony on his personal gmail, or deliver them to him at his office or at his home,” Dr. Morens wrote about Dr. Fauci convinced some scientists in April 2021 that there was no need to worry. public records request. “He’s too smart to let his friends send him things that could cause trouble.”
Dr. Fauci denied this in his introduction, writing that “to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business via private email.”
