Anthony Fauci questioned by members of the US Congress

By Annette Gartland on January 9, 2024

This article has been updated.

In two days of closed-door transcribed interviews with members of the US Congress, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, answered questions about his role during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The interviews, which lasted a total 14 hours, were conducted by members of the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The committee’s chairman, Brad Wenstrup, said that Fauci’s testimony on the first day of questioning on Monday (January 8) “uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems”.

He said that, while leading the nation’s Covid-19 response and influencing public narratives, Fauci “simultaneously had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID”.

Wenstrup said Fauci, who was formerly the chief medical adviser to the White House, said more than 100 times that he did not recall pertinent Covid-19 information or conversations.

Fauci “profusely defended” his previous Congressional testimony in which he stated that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the NIAID’s umbrella organisation, did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, Wenstrup said.

“He repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function in an attempt to avoid conceding that the NIH funded potentially dangerous research in China,” the congressman added.

Fauci testified that he signed off on every foreign and domestic NIAID grant without reviewing the proposals and was unable to confirm whether NIAID had any mechanisms to conduct oversight of the foreign laboratories they funded, Wenstrup said.

A 2020 email, previously released by the select subcommittee, proved that Fauci was aware of dangerous gain-of-function research occurring in Wuhan, he added. “Today, he backtracked by arguing he should not have stated that as ‘fact’,” Wenstrup said.

Wenstrup said that, during the second day of questioning, Fauci testified that the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was not a conspiracy theory.

“This comes nearly four years after prompting the publication of the now infamous ‘Proximal Origin’ paper that attempted to vilify and disprove the lab leak hypothesis,” Wenstrup said.

Wenstrup said Fauci “played semantics with the definition of a ‘lab leak’ in an attempt to cover up the inaccurate conclusions of ‘Proximal Origin’”.

It was impossible for Fauci to defend the conclusion of ‘Proximal Origin’ while simultaneously acknowledging that a lab leak was possible, Wenstrup said.

Wenstrup also said that Fauci denied allegations that he visited the CIA during the pandemic or influenced the CIA’s investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

In September last year, Wenstrup and the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Turner, called for action over a whistleblower’s allegations that six Central Intelligence Agency analysts were given a “significant monetary incentive” to change their stated viewpoint about the possible origin of Covid-19.

In a letter to the CIA director, William Burns, Wenstrup and Turner stated that a “multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer” had come forward to provide information to the committees about the CIA’s investigation into the origin of Covid-19.

Wenstrup and Turner wrote that, according to the whistleblower, the CIA assigned seven officers to a Covid Discovery Team that consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that Covid-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Wenstrup and Turner wrote.

“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe Covid-19 originated through zoonosis.”

According to Wenstrup and Turner, the whistleblower “further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position”.

Wenstrup said on January 10 that, during questioning on January 9 about the US authorities’ policies during the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci said that, when American universities approached him, he advised them to impose Covid-19 vaccine mandates on their students.

Fauci also said that that the six-feet-apart social distancing recommendation promoted by federal health officials was likely not based on any data, Wenstrup added.

“He characterised the development of the guidance by stating ‘it sort of just appeared’,” the congressman said.

The publication The Hill reported on Monday that Fauci was accompanied by two of his own attorneys and two government attorneys.

Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist working at Rutgers University, who is a member of the leadership team at the NGO Biosafety Now, tweeted on Monday that Fauci should be asked the following questions “about his negligence or misfeasance in funding reckless research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan in violation of US-government and agency policies”:

Why, in 2016–2018, did Fauci’s agency fund gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan, “in violation of the then-current US-government policy prohibiting federal funding of gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses”?
Why, in 2018, did his agency fail to stop funding gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan after being informed twice that the Wuhan researchers had created novel SARS coronaviruses “having 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 3x enhanced lethality” in violation of the then-current US-government policy prohibiting federal funding of gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses, and in violation of his agency’s policy requiring immediate stoppage of research that results in 10x or more enhancement of viral growth?
Why, in 2019, did his agency fund enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan without an HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] risk-benefit review, in violation of the then-current US-government policy prohibiting funding of the research without an HHS risk-benefit review?
Why, in 2019, did his agency fail to suspend or terminate funding for enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan after having been informed that the researchers had failed to submit a required annual progress report in violation of his agency’s policy requiring suspension or termination of funding for failure to submit a required annual progress report?
Were these violations the result of negligence, or were they the result of deliberate misfeasance?

Ebright said Fauci should also be asked the following questions about “his malfeasance in the subsequent cover-up of his funding of reckless research on SARS coronaviruses and its likely role in the origin of Covid-19”.

Why, from 2020, did Fauci attempt to cover up his agency’s funding of “reckless research on SARS coronaviruses” and “its likely role in the origin of Covid-19”?
Why, from 2020, did he “abuse US government resources” to push the false narrative that science showed SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover?
Why, in 2021–2022, why did he “falsely testify” in three US Senate hearings that his agency had not funded gain-of-function research or enhanced potential pandemic research in Wuhan?

“Your cover-up, abuse of US-government resources, and lies to Congress have obstructed investigation of the origin of Covid-19 and obstructed implementation of measures to prevent future lab-generated pandemics. What accountability is appropriate for malfeasance on this scale?” Ebright tweeted.

Senator Rand Paul, who has challenged Fauci numerous times in congressional hearings, said on Fox News on January 8: “The biggest lie from Anthony Fauci was that the United States government, and with his approval, did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

“We now have the Department of Energy, the FBI, and, actually, a group of scientists at the CIA, all agree that, in all likelihood, Covid-19 came from a lab in Wuhan that was funded by US taxpayer dollars.

“Anthony Fauci has continued to deny this and I believe that to be a lie, and I hope he’s challenged on that.”

The interviews with Fauci follow the questioning on November 14 last year of the president of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), Peter Daszak, by members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Daszak gave a voluntary, transcribed interview and testified for nine and a half hours.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is bipartisan, but no members of Congress from the Democratic Party attended the interview.

Peter Daszak on X before his interview. “Nice day for it”.

Daszak declines to answer questions posed by Arjun Singh from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Daszak has been under the spotlight since early on in the Covid-19 pandemic. There were serious concerns about his presence in the World Health Organisation team that went to Wuhan in January/February 2021.

The NIH in the US has given the EHA millions of dollars in funding to conduct research in collaboration with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak led the Lancet Covid-19 Commission’s task force that was set up to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but, in June 2021, it was announced that he was recused from commission work on the origins of the pandemic.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on March 6 this year, the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, said that NIH leaders, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, kept gain-of-function research hidden from the Congress and the public and repeatedly misled the Congress and the public about the subject.

In September 2021 an international group of ten scientists and health experts called on the EHA board to remove Peter Daszak as the organisation’s president.

Daszak “concealed several extreme situations of conflict of interest, withheld critical information, and misled public opinion by expressing falsehoods”, the ten experts said.

The ten experts alleged that Daszak failed to publicly disclose that the EHA had applied in March 2018 to receive a grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that would have funded a project “creating novel chimeric viruses that are optimised to infect humans and that could unleash unknown and untold havoc”.

The DEFUSE project would have included experiments with MERS-CoV “which is far more deadly than SARS-CoV-2”, they said.

The proposal, which was made to the DARPA under the umbrella of the PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) programme, misrepresented gain-of-function research, and was “incredibly sloppy” with regard to biosafety, dual use research of concern (DURC), and ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELSI), they added.