This article has been updated.

Photo credit: C-SPAN.

The much-awaited appearance of the former director of the United States’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic yesterday (June 3) was a strange affair in which little new information was revealed.

Apart from several notable exceptions, the Republicans were weak in their questioning. The Democrats praised Fauci at every turn.

Reactions to the hearing ranged from “What a disappointment!” to a “frustrating shitshow”.

Member of the DRASTIC group of independent investigators Charles Rixey described the hearing as a “massive missed opportunity”.  Another commentator said it was “pitiful theatre”.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded The Intercept, says Fauci is a “pathological liar”. He tweeted: “It’s such a gross abdication of Congressional duty to take one’s entire time being able to ask questions of Fauci and use it all to heap hero-praise on him and scorn for anyone questioning him. Whatever else is true, COVID was a huge historical event and requires investigation.”

Greenwald linked to a video clip of Democratic Party congressman Robert Garcia criticising congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and other House Republicans who, Garcia said, “spent our whole Covid hearing attacking Dr Fauci”.

The select subcommittee chairman, Republican Brad Wenstrup, said in his introductory remarks that Americans were “aggressively bullied, shamed, and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of Covid”.

He said that, whether intentionally or not, Fauci became so powerful that any disagreements the public had with him were forbidden and censored on social and most legacy media time and time again.

“Dr Fauci, you once said, if you disagree with me, you disagree with science. Science doesn’t belong to any one person,” Wenstrup said.

“Any dissent from your chosen scientific position was immediately labelled as ‘anti-science’. Anything less than complete submission to the mandates could cost you your livelihood, your ability to go into public, your child’s ability to attend school.”

Ranking subcommittee member Raul Ruiz, who is a Democrat, said in his opening comments that, “under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins”, House Republicans had “abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how Covid-19 came to be and instead weaponised concern about a lab-related origin”.

The subcommittee had pored over more than 425,000 pages of documents provided by government agencies, universities, and private citizens and had conducted more than a hundred hours of closed-door interviews with twenty current and former federal officials and scientists, Ruiz said.

He said the committee had found that Fauci did not fund research that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, did not lie about gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and did not orchestrate a campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory.

“After 15 months, the select subcommittee still does not possess a shred of evidence to substantiate these extreme allegations that the Republicans have levied [sic] against Dr Fauci for nearly four years,” Ruiz said.

Fauci remained mostly cool and collected during yesterday’s hearing, only occasionally appearing rattled. He came across as arrogant and did himself no favours with such comments as “What do dogs have to do with anything that we’re talking about today?”.

This was a comment Fauci made to Taylor Greene, who sparked calls for decorum when she entered into a no-holds-barred criticism of scientific experiments on beagles that Fauci authorised.

“As a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil what you signed off on … these experiments that happened to beagles, paid for by the American taxpayer,” Taylor Greene said.

“And I want you to know, Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this. So the type of science that you are representing, Mr Fauci, is abhorrent and it needs to stop.”

Taylor Greene refused to use the title Dr and referred to Fauci as Mr. Pulled up on this during the hearing, she said: “… in my time, that man does not deserve to have a licence. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked, and he belongs in prison.”

Bryce Nickels from the NGO Biosafety Now tweeted: “The experiments authorized by Fauci on beagles exposed in the BeagleGate scandal were torture with no benefit to public health – Fauci’s lack of concern speaks volumes.”

The watchdog group the ‘White Coat Waste Project’ tweeted: “Citing WCW’s #Beaglegate investigations, @RepMalliotakis forces Fauci to finally admit that he personally signed off on wasteful & horrific animal experiments in which puppies were de-barked, infested with biting flies & ticks, and worse.”

Taylor Greene also challenged Fauci about social distancing mandates and she held up a photo of Fauci not following his own masking guidelines when at a baseball game in July 2020.

Much time was spent during yesterday’s hearing on the matter of the six-foot social distancing recommendation, which Fauci said “sort of just appeared”.

During yesterday’s hearing, Fauci confirmed that the six-foot guidance came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that, despite this guidance not being based on established science, it was implemented.

“It had little to do with me since I didn’t make the recommendation and my saying there was no science behind it means there was no clinical trial that proved that,” Fauci said yesterday.

One commentator who uses the X handle @mar15164 tweeted: “Well, they covered the “6-ft rule” pretty thoroughly. The least-important topic I can think of in any case, but especially re: C19 origin. This is all theatre.”

Richard Ebright, a microbiologist working at Rutgers University, who is a member of the leadership team at the NGO Biosafety Now, pulled no punches in his comments about the hearing and Fauci’s answers.

He tweeted: “Perjury in almost every answer. Fauci needs to be referred for prosecution for perjury.”

Ebright described Robert Garcia as “a buffoon” and tweeted: “It is preposterous–and perjurious–to claim that Fauci did not cover up COVID origins.”

In another tweet Ebright said: “A parade of perjury by the witness. A parade of partisanship by the Subcommittee, especially the Subcommittee minority.”

A commentator who uses the X handle @clwnwrldobsrvr replied: “A parade of partisanship 100% . Not a single Democrat dared to ask a hard question. They all praised Fauci like good comrades they are. These people are either brainwashed or complete cowards. This issue is beyond the party, and every sensible human understands that.”

Bryce Nickels tweeted about Democrat Jamie Raskin, who said to Fauci during the hearing: “I want to join my colleague from Florida in apologising to you that some of our colleagues in the United States House of Representatives seem to want to drag your name through the mud. They’re treating you, Dr Fauci, like a convicted felon.”

Nickels commented: “Unfortunate that Jamie Raskin is prioritizing protecting the legacy of Fauci ahead of the interests of the entire global population. The US taxpayers deserve better from their elected officials. They deserve honesty, transparency, and accountability, not misguided hero worship.”

Yesterday Fauci said that he supported the suspension of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) from participating in United States federal government procurement and non-procurement programmes and its proposed debarment. This, Ebright said, was the one new development of yesterday’s hearing.

The suspension and debarment decision taken by US Department of Health and Human Services came just two weeks after the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an extensive report about the EHA and recommended funding debarment.

The HSS has also suspended the EHA’s president, Peter Daszak, from participating in federal government procurement and non-procurement programmes and has proposed him for debarment.

Congressman Michael Cloud raised the issue of accountability. He asked Fauci about the process for approving grants. The process involves a peer review committee, which gives research proposals a priority score. The proposal then goes to an advisory council and eventually ends up on Fauci’s desk for signature.

“This is one of the things that’s really troubling to the American people because they look at their lives being destroyed and there’s no one to hold accountable because these systems of accountability have become systems of plausible deniability,” Cloud said. “And so your name is on every single grant, but yet you absolve yourself of any sort of responsibility …”

Fauci’s response was: “Look at the number of grants. We fund thousands of grants. I would be physically impossible for me to go through every single grant in a detailed way to understand it. That is true, not only for me, but for virtually every institute at the NIH.”

Republican Ronny Jackson said Fauci had “failed miserably” during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I believe your failures stem from both an effort of self-preservation, manifested by a series of lies and cover up, and by a total failure of leadership,” Jackson said.

“It was obvious to everyone that you and your organisation NIH had a lot to lose if the American people were to discover that Covid-19 was most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and that you via EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak actually funded this research and that this lab was actively and recklessly conducting gain-of-function research.”

Jackson accused Fauci of doing everything in his power to deflect and cover up the possibility of a lab leak, even recruiting others to help him in this effort.

“Unfortunately, this cost our country and the world valuable time, time that may have led to answers regarding origin, may have blunted the spread, and would have almost certainly saved lives,” Jackson said.

During the June 3 hearing Fauci doubled down on his claim that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This directly contradicts recent testimony from former acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak.

Fauci insists that, “according to the regulatory and operative” P3CO definition, the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the WIV. (P3CO is the framework that governs proposed research that could enhance the lethality or transmissibility of a potential pandemic pathogen.)

The viruses that were studied under the sub-award to the WIV were phylogenetically so far removed from SARS-CoV-2 that it was “molecularly impossible” for them to be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Fauci says.

In an article in Reason, Christian Britschgi writes that Fauci’s latest defence is “evasive, misleading, and arguably downright dishonest”.

The P3CO framework is not the only relevant definition of gain-of-function research found in federal regulations, Britschgi writes. He adds that EcoHealth’s work in Wuhan arguably did meet the definitions established by the P3CO framework, and we don’t know all the viruses that EcoHealth and the Wuhan researchers were experimenting on with NIH funding.

“If Fauci doesn’t know the full extent of the work the NIH funded, he can’t say with certainty that it didn’t spark a pandemic,” Britschgi writes.

Fauci was not challenged during the June 3 hearing about his repeated claim that the Covid vaccines saved millions of lives (a claim based on no actual evidence, only modelling) or about his extraordinary and unfounded statement that people who refused to get vaccinated were “probably responsible” for an additional 200,000 to 300,000 deaths in the US (Fauci cited “analysis” by the much-discredited Peter Hotez).

Robert Garcia was one of the many representatives who spoke during the hearing about what they considered to be the benefits of Covid vaccination.

He asked Fauci: “Do you believe that the vaccine that you all helped create and ensure is safe and effective for the public?”

Fauci replied: “Yes, and its track record has proven that.”

Garcia asked: “Do  you also agree that it’s saved hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of lives, in America and across the world?”

Fauci answered: “That is absolutely correct. And it’s very clear that it’s saved millions of lives here and throughout the world.”

In response to a question from Brad Wenstrup, Fauci also erroneously claimed that “the first iteration” of the Covid vaccines prevented infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

Fauci then toned down his claim, stating that, as the months went by, it became evident that “the durability of protection against infection, and hence transmission” was relatively limited.

“We did not know that at the beginning,” he said. “In the beginning, it was felt that in fact it did prevent infection and thus transmission, but that was proven as time went by to not be a durable effect.”

One of the few representatives who expressed strong criticism of Fauci’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic was Rich McCormick, who is an emergency room physician.

McCormick played audio in which Fauci said: “It’s been proven that, when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.”

He told Fauci: “You affected people’s ability to work, travel, be educated, to actually flourish in America, to self-determine …

“Shame on you. Dr Fauci, you’ve become Dr Fear. Americans do not hate science. I don’t hate science. The American people hate having their freedoms taken from them.

“You inspired and created fear through mask mandates, school closures, vaccine mandates that have destroyed the American people’s trust and our public health institutions. This fear you created will continue to have ripple effects over generations to come.

“You have already seen its effects in education, in the economy and everything else. Quite frankly, you said if you disagree with me, you disagree with science. Dr. Fauci, I disagree with you because I disagree with fear.”

McCormick cited the example of Allison Williams, a former reporter with the ESPN cable sports channel, who was fired from her job in 2021 because she refused to receive a Covid vaccine. Williams testified before the select subcommittee in July 2023.

“She and her husband were actively working with a fertility expert, a physician, on how to get pregnant and agreed with the premise that she was young, healthy, wanted to get pregnant, and shouldn’t get the vaccine for medical purposes, but she was fired,” McCormick said.

Senator Rand Paul, who has been in numerous head-to-head confrontations with Fauci in Congress, tweeted about Fauci’s comment about people losing their “ideological bullshit”, saying “Sounds like words you’d expect in China rather than the USA!”

Democrat congresswoman Deborah Ann Dingell asked Fauci about the threats he has received since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There had been harassments by emails, texts, and letters to himself, his wife, and his three daughters, Fauci said.

“There have been credible death threats, leading to the arrest of two individuals; and credible death threats being someone who clearly was on their way to kill me,” Fauci told the hearing.

“And it’s required my having protective services, essentially all the time. It is very troublesome to me. It is much more troublesome because they’ve involved my wife and my three daughters.”

Dingell was one of the Democrats who criticised Republic representatives for targetting Fauci.

“Instead of actually taking a serious look at the various ways by which this virus could have emerged in a lab or in nature, my Republican colleagues and friends have spent the last 15 months trying to pin blame on NIH, NIAID, and specifically Dr Fauci for the Covid-19 pandemic,” Mingell said.

Edward Hammond, a researcher and writer who has worked since the mid-1990s on policy issues related to biodiversity, agricultural genetic resources, infectious disease, laboratory biosafety, and intellectual property, tweeted: “I don’t know what will be written tomorrow, but I found that to be a frustrating shitshow. From Fauci’s obvious lack of candor to the R’s lack of management of details (ex Counsel), to the D’s utter lack of curiosity and vapid ‘Fauci good, Majority bad’ message.”

Applied machine learning scientist Tom Czerniawski tweeted: “The @COVIDSelect Republicans could have performed a lot sharper today. Bit let down, @RepBradWenstrup. Not a single question about Lt. Col. Murphy’s whistleblower report. HIV inserts. Other proof of engineering. I hope you noticed how nervous serial passage questions made Fauci.”

Adding to the comments about Fauci turning against colleagues, Czerniawski tweeted: “… They’re not just turning on each other, 𝑻𝑯𝑬𝒀 𝑨𝑳𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑫𝒀 𝑯𝑨𝑽𝑬. Fauci is clearly desperate to protect his legacy, no matter how many underlings he must sacrifice to do so.”

Rand Paul said in an interview with Fox News that during yesterday’s hearing Fauci threw his assistant David Morens “under the bus” and acted as if he’d hardly ever met him.

Morens has talked in an email about a “secret back channel” that he said he would use to communicate with Fauci outside the public eye.

He states in one email that he sent to Peter 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.”

Fauci says 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 said during yesterday’s hearing: “What you saw, I believe, with Dr Morens was an aberrancy and an outlier.”

Fauci denies purposely using his private email address for official business. He told yesterday’s hearing: “Let me state for the record that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email.”

Richard Ebright tweeted: “Fauci has made it clear he will throw his stooges under the bus, even after they perjure themselves on his behalf. Morens should take note and cooperate. As should Fauci’s other stooges who perjured themselves on his behalf: Folkers, Auchincloss, Stemmy, Andersen, and Garry.”

The select subcommittee has obtained evidence that Fauci’s former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, 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 has said.

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

Republican congressman Jim Jordan asked Fauci yesterday whether he would agree that there was a push to downplay the lab-leak theory and was surprised when Fauci answered “None on my part”. Jordan’s response was “wow”.

Fauci denies trying to cover up the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. “In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite,” he said yesterday.

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.

In closed-door testimony in January, Fauci acknowledged that the lab-leak hypothesis about the possible origin of SARS-CoV-2 was not a conspiracy theory.

He said yesterday that he did not edit the now infamous paper, ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ that was published on March 17, 2020, and dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis.

The ‘Correspondence’, which was published in Nature Medicine, was authored by several of the scientists who attended a conference call with Fauci on February 1, 2020.

Fauci said at yesterday’s hearing”: “The accusation being circulated that I influenced these scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous. I had no input into the content of the published paper.”

At the start of yesterday’s hearing, Brad Wenstrup thanked Fauci for his decades of public service and for his willing cooperation with the select subcommittee.

“Beginning early in 2020, you became the figurehead of public health,” Wenstrup said. “There were drinks named after you. You got bobbleheads made in your likeness. You were on the cover of Vogue throughout the first pitch of the Washington Nationals game. Almost overnight you became a celebrity and a household name in addition to being a public health official.

“Americans from coast to coast and beyond listened to your words, and this is where I think we could have done better, and this goes to both sides of the aisle. We should have been more precise. We should have used words and phrases that are accurate and not misleading and we should have been honest, especially about what we didn’t know.”

On May 31, Wenstrup released the transcript of a closed-door interview with Fauci conducted during a 14-hour, two-day hearing on January 8 and 9 (Part 1 and Part 2).

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