Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert until 2022, pushed back on Monday against Republican-led accusations that he had helped fund research that sparked the coronavirus pandemic.
Under heated questioning, Fauci, 83, who was the highest-profile public health official steering the US government’s pandemic response, also challenged allegations that he covered up the possibility that the virus causing the illness originated in a laboratory.
“The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds [about a possible lab leak] by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous,” the retired immunologist testified.
“I had no input into the content of the published paper.
“The second issue is a false accusation that I tried to cover up the possibility that the virus originated from a lab. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite,” he added.
Fauci then read an email that he sent on February 1, 2020, to a scientist who became concerned that such a leak had occurred.
In the missive, Fauci urged the scientist to “get a group of evolutionary biologists together to carefully examine the data to determine if his concerns are validated”, saying “they should report it to the appropriate authorities”.
Monday’s hearing culminated an investigation into Washington’s pandemic response, which the Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year pulling together.
Fauci led the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under former president Donald Trump, when Covid-19 emerged in the US, and became a special presidential adviser on the pandemic. He stayed in those roles under US President Joe Biden until he retired.
While Republicans hammered Fauci on topics ranging from research ties to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to the utility of mask mandates, Democrats mostly thanked the former civil servant for his long career.
Fauci’s tenure dates to the start of the HIV/Aids epidemic in the early 1980s. Democrats also said repeatedly that the investigation had found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong.
Much of the suspicion regarding China centres on grants that the medical research agency previously led by Fauci had given to EcoHealth Alliance, an American virus-hunting non-profit group.
The grants stipulated that EcoHealth collaborate with researchers abroad, including those at the Wuhan lab, which has been at the centre of yet-to-be-proved claims that a leak at the facility caused the Chinese city’s first Covid-19 outbreak at the end of 2019.
Fauci testified that the viral samples EcoHealth shared with the Wuhan lab “were phylogenetically so far removed from Sars-CoV-2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that have evolved or been made into Sars-CoV-2”.
“It’s just a virological fact that it was so far removed, that it could not possibly be a progenitor,” he said, referring to the virus cited as responsible for the pandemic.
The US Department of Health and Human Services recently suspended federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance and for its president, Peter Daszak, who joined a World Health Organization coronavirus fact-finding mission in China in 2021.
Monday’s hearing made public for the first time the full range of the allegations against Fauci as well as the angry responses coming from the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic.
In January, the retired immunologist spent 14 hours over two days being grilled by the panel behind closed doors.
Throughout the investigation, Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that his agency funded “gain-of-function” research – the enhancement of a virus in a lab to study its ability to infect humans – at the Wuhan lab.
California congressman Raul Ruiz, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, admonished Republicans for using an overly broad definition for gain-of-function research that he described as having “no regulatory significance”.
“Their definition is so broad that it would include the manufacture of flu vaccines as gain-of-function,” Ruiz said.
“Because it is so broad, the National Institute of Health does not use that definition when assessing whether proposed research is or is not, quote unquote, gain-of- function research.”
Lacking key pieces of evidence about the coronavirus’s origins, such as ancestral variants found in animals or people handling these animals, US government departments have reached different conclusions about the likelihood of a lab leak.
A report last year by the US Department of Energy which concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 likely originated from a lab leak in China has prompted many Republicans to claim vindication for their previous support of the theory.
In the US intelligence community, “low confidence” means that the analysts were unsure of the credibility of the available information from which a solid judgment could be drawn.
So far, only the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has backed the lab leak hypothesis with what the agency described as “moderate confidence”. Four other federal agencies, including the National Intelligence Council, have concluded with “low confidence” that the virus was transmitted naturally to humans through an animal host.
