The former director of the United States’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, is due to give public testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic later today (June 3). He is set to deny numerous accusations that have been levelled against him.

A transcript of Fauci’s opening statement is available here. The hearing will be live streamed here.

According to the transcript, Fauci will say in today’s hearing that any suggestion that the viruses studied under a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that was funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) resulted in the creation of SARS-Co V-2 “is without the slightest bit of evidence or feasibility”.

Fauci says that “any qualified evolutionary virologist” would confirm that the bat viruses that were studied at WIV under the NIH-funded grant were “phylogenetically so far removed from SARS-Co V-2 that it would be molecularly impossible for those viruses to be turned into SARS-Co V-2”.

An independent investigator who uses the handle @TheSeeker268 and has been digging into the Covid origins issue since the start tweeted today: “It is highly disingenuous of Fauci to claim that the viruses being studied with US taxpayer money at WIV couldn’t have caused COVID, when it’s now abundantly clear that WIV didn’t disclose all the sequences they were working on.”

One of the things Fauci denies is purposely using his private email address for official business.

The chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Brad Wenstrup, has requested access to Fauci’s personal email accounts and cellphone records. He says new evidence suggests that Fauci may have used his personal email account to communicate about official government business during the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the new transcript, Fauci will tell Wenstrup and other subcommittee members: “Let me state for the record that to the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my personal email.”

During a congressional hearing in January this year, Fauci said that his staff had no conflicts of interest regarding the possible origin of Covid-19.

Wenstrup said on May 31, however, that Fauci’s senior advisor, David Morens, was “best friends” with the “disgraced and soon-to-be debarred” president of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), Peter Daszak.

Morens states in one email that he sent to Daszak: “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work … He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

In a separate email, Morens referenced a “secret back channel” that he said he would use to communicate with Fauci outside the public eye.

Fauci says in his new testimony that he knew nothing of Morens’ actions in assisting Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance “or his conducting NIH business on his personal e-mail account or deleting emails to avoid FOIAs”.

He adds: “Several years ago, Dr Morens was transferred from a scientific division at NIAID to help me write scientific papers and review the scientific literature on infectious diseases. Following his transfer, we needed a title for him and the empirical title of ‘Senior Advisor to the NIAID Director’ was chosen.

“It is important to point out for the record that, despite his title, functionally Dr Morens was not an advisor to me on institute policy or other substantive issues. He is a scientist, science writer and historian. At NIAID we had a weekly executive committee meeting of the institute leadership, which to the best of my recollection he did not attend.

“We had a daily morning meeting of the immediate Office of the Director leadership staff, which to the best of my recollection he did not attend. Furthermore, his office is located in a different building from that of the NIAID Director.”

Bryce Nickels from the NGO Biosafety Now tweeted that Fauci’s disowning of Morens was “the most disgraceful attempt to abdicate accountability or personal responsibility that I have ever seen”.

Wenstrup says further evidence shows that Fauci’s former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, also used FOIA-evading tactics by strategically misspelling words.

“This evasion tactic ensures that when the NIH searches its email server for key words that are responsive to a FOIA request, Mr Folkers’s emails that contain the misspelled key word are not identified or produced as a responsive document,” Wenstrup said.

“In one email produced to the select subcommittee through a subpoena, Mr Folkers appears to have purposefully misspelled ‘EcoHealth’ as ‘Ec~Health’.”

Fauci also denies bribing scientists to influence their public position about the possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2.

He refers in his new testimony to a conference call held on February 1, 2020, and the controversial paper entitled ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’, published on March 17, 2020, which dismisses the lab-origin hypothesis.

The ‘Correspondence’, which was published in Nature Medicine, was authored by several of the scientists who attended the conference call. Fauci denies bribing these scientists.

He says: “An accusation has since been circulated that I influenced these scientists to change their minds by ‘bribing’ them with millions of dollars in grant money. There is no way to answer this accusation except to say that it is preposterous.

“The NIH system for allocating money to grantees would make this feat impossible even if someone were foolish enough to attempt it.

“Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about the culture and integrity of the independent­-minded scientists from several different countries who participated in the conference call would confirm how outlandish this accusation is. Importantly, participants on the call have testified before this subcommittee that I had no input into the content of the published paper.”

Fauci says he was advocating for “a prompt and thorough examination of the data and a totally transparent process”.

He says he has repeatedly stated that he has a “completely open mind” to either of the suggested origins of SARS-CoV-2 and that, if definitive evidence became available to validate or refute either theory, he would readily accept it.

Fauci denies trying to cover up the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory.

 “Another unfounded accusation that has circulated is that I actively tried to minimize and ‘cover up’ the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory,” he states.

“Assertions have been made that my e-mails prove this supposed ‘cover up’. In fact, those emails prove exactly the opposite, namely, that I was proactive in making sure that any possible ‘laboratory leak’ was actively investigated.”

In January, Fauci acknowledged that the lab-leak hypothesis about the possible 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,” select subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup said.

Fauci gave testimony in a 14-hour, two-day hearing on January 8 and 9. On May 31, Wenstrup released the full transcript of the interview (Part 1 and Part 2).

Fauci arriving at Congress on January 8.

Asked whether he thought that the possibility or the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a laboratory accident was a conspiracy theory, Fauci told the select subcommittee: “Well, it’s a possibility. I think people have made conspiracy aspects from it.  And I think you have to separate the two when you keep an open mind, that it could be a lab leak or it could be a natural occurrence.

“I’ve mentioned in this committee that I believe the evidence that I’ve seen weighs my opinion towards one, which is a natural occurrence, but I still leave an open mind. So I think that in and of itself isn’t inherently a conspiracy theory, but some people spin off things from that are kind of crazy.”

In conjunction with the transcript, the select subcommittee also released a staff memorandum that highlights the key takeaways from Fauci’s transcribed interview.

Wenstrup said Fauci repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research “in an effort to avoid conceding that the NIH’s funded this dangerous research in China”.

As the head of NIAID “and the face of America’s response to the pandemic”, Fauci certainly understood the common definition of gain-of-function, yet he repeatedly refused – both behind closed doors and to Senator Rand Paul during a 2021 hearing – to clarify a general understanding of the term and instead only referred to his own operative definition, Wenstrup said.

Fauci told the select subcommittee that, when he was asked whether something was gain of function, he was referring to the operative definition of gain of function according to the P3CO (the framework that governs proposed research that could enhance the lethality or transmissibility of a potential pandemic pathogen).

“That is the regulatory operational definition,” Fauci said. “And as we were talking about before, other people use the word ‘gain of function’ this, ‘gain of function’ that, and everybody’s got their own interpretation of it.

“But when you’re deciding whether a grant should be funded, this is the operational definition. And when I was asked anywhere by the Congress, by the Senate, by Senator Paul this is what I was referring to.”

According to the new transcript, Fauci will state in today’s hearing that the viruses studied under the NIAID-funded EHA sub-award to the WIV had never been shown to infect humans, much less to cause high transmissibility or significant morbidity and mortality in humans.

“Their study, therefore, could not and did not constitute GoF research according to the operative P3CO definition, which is the definition I have always used,” Fauci is set to tell select subcommittee members.

He is set to tell the hearing that the design and objective of the WIV experiments was not to enhance the transmissibility or pathogenesis of the viruses in humans or any other species. Nor were the anticipated outcomes of these experiments expected to alter those attributes of the viruses, he will say.

“Therefore, according to the P3CO framework, which provided the then-operative and regulatory definition of GoF research, those experiments clearly were not GoF research,” Fauci says.

Richard Ebright, a microbiologist working at Rutgers University, who is a member of the leadership team at Biosafety Now,  tweeted on June 1 that Fauci’s definition did not match the “official, legally controlling, definitions in the US policies in effect in 2014-2017 and 2018-present”.

Ebright also tweeted: “Fauci did not ‘play semantics.’ Fauci perjured himself. Fauci misfeasantly violated US policies in effect in 2014-2017 (“Pause”) and 2018- (“P3CO”), and in his testimony repeatedly perjured himself about the definitions in the policies and his violations of the policies.”

Emily Kopp from the investigative research group ‘U.S. Right to Know’ (USRTK) tweeted on May 30: “ … Fauci has claimed the term ‘gain-of-function’ did not apply to enhancing bat coronaviruses and that it only really applies to viruses that have already been proven to cause severe disease. In this letter NIAID classifies enhancing the ability of SARS-related coronaviruses to latch to human cells as ‘gain-of-function research.’ Fauci’s explanation is bogus, according to this letter from his own NIAID.”

According to the transcript of Fauci’s opening statement for the June 3 hearing, he will give the select subcommittee details of who attended the February 1, 2020, conference call.

Fauci states: “On January 31, 2020, Jeremy Farrar (then the director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK) and Kristian Andersen (a highly regarded scientist at Scripps Research Institute) informed me in phone calls that they and Edward Holmes (Professor of Viral Evolution at University of Sydney, Australia) were concerned that the recently published genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory.

“I participated in a conference call the next day … with about a dozen highly regarded virologists and other relevant individuals to discuss the possibility that the virus emerged as the result of manipulation in a laboratory rather than from a natural spillover from an animal reservoir.”

Fauci specifies that the participants on the conference call included Farrar, Anderson, and Holmes, as well as the director of the NIH, Francis Collins; the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Valance; the director of Human Virology at the German Centre for Infection Research at Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Christian Drosten; professor of molecular evolution at Edinburgh University Andrew Rambaut; the deputy head of the Department of Viroscience at the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at the Tulane University School of Medicine in the US Robert Garry; professor of life sciences at University of Dundee in Scotland Michael Ferguson; and the head of the Department of Viroscience at the Erasmus Medical Centre, Marion Koopmans.

“The discussion on the conference call was lively, and arguments were made for both theories of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have emerged,” Fauci states.

“At the end of the call, it was decided that several of the participants would examine the SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequence more carefully to try to clarify the issue.

“Contrary to the disinformation circulated on social media and elsewhere that I tried to influence the discussion on that call away from a lab leak theory, two participants on that call have verified to this subcommittee that I did not try to steer the discussion in one direction versus another.”

Fauci added: “I am not an evolutionary virologist and would not be qualified to do so in any case. I left the issue of the origin of the virus to the experts on the call.”

He said that, after the conference call, “and upon more careful examination of the genomic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus”, several of the participants who at first were concerned about a laboratory manipulation “became convinced that there was no indication that the virus was manipulated and that the most likely scenario was that it emerged as a natural spillover from an animal reservoir, even though they kept an open mind”.

Soon afterwards, these individuals published their opinions in the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper, Fauci says.

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