Fauci testifies on the origins of Covid-19

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), testified Monday at a House subcommittee hearing about the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus.

The hearing was Fauci’s first public testimony on Capitol Hill since his retirement from government service. It turned contentious at times as Republicans grilled Fauci over a wide range of topics, including the basis for public health recommendations during the pandemic and email use by public health officials.

Here are key takeaways from the hearing:

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Monday he supports suspending US grant funding to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based virus research organization that has been tied to question and controversy around the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19.

The US Department of Health and Human Services in May suspended funding to EcoHealth Alliance and proposed the group be blocked from receiving federal funds in the future, possibly for years.

Asked on Monday if he supposed the suspension and debarment of EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci responded “yes.” 

Before the pandemic, the US gave a $120,000 grant to EcoHealth Alliance with a subaward that funded work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April 2020, the National Institutes of Health terminated the grant.

Fauci said that he later learned that the White House had called to tell the NIH to cancel the grant. Asked Monday if he agreed or disagreed with the decision at the time, he said that wasn’t his problem with the request.

“It wasn’t a question of agreeing or disagreeing. It was like, ‘Can we really do that? I don’t think that you can do that.’ And as it turned out I was right, because the general counsel of HHS said, ‘By the way, you can’t do that. You’ve got to restore the grant,’ ” Fauci testified.

The grant was reinstated, then suspended pending a compliance review.

Fauci said once he learned that there were compliance issues with the grant, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was told to stay out of it.

Since that time, NIH found numerous violations of grant policies by EcoHealth and has since blocked funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and suspended and proposed blocking NIH funding to EcoHealth as an institution and Dr. Peter Daszak individually.

In a May letter to EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Dr. Peter Daszak, HHS lists 30 pieces of evidence some dating back to 2013 to support its decision. HHS said in a memo that EcoHealth failed to “adequately monitor” virus growth experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, notify the NIH that viruses studied there “appeared to grow beyond permissible thresholds” laid out in a grant or provide requested information in a timely manner.

In a statement last month, a spokeperson for EcoHealth Alliance said the organization was “disappointed by HHS’ decision” and that it would contest the decision.

In his closing statement, Ranking Member Raul Ruiz thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for his testimony and for his decades of service to the nation in dealing with various epidemics and pandemics.

He also blasted Republicans for pushing extreme narratives for political gain.

Ruiz added that the evidence found that “Dr. Fauci did not fund research through the EcoHealth Alliance Grant that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci did not lie about gain of function research in Wuhan China, Dr. Fauci did not orchestrate a campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory.”

Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup also thanked Fauci for coming voluntarily to testify.

He went on to say that the hearing was an opportunity to learn more about the government’s Covid-19 response and how the government can improve and do better. He said that while there some things that were done well, there were some wrongdoings in the office where Fauci served.

Wenstrup highlighted that moving forward, clarity is important in order to improve messaging.

“I think what I’m most concerned about as we go forward as a country and from our agencies is that we an be trusted and that we are better in our messaging and talk about clarity,” Wenstrup said.

When evaluating the United States’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health officials will take a closer look at “the cost-benefit ratio” of things like vaccine mandates, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

Fauci was answering a question about whether issuing mandates could have led to vaccine hesitancy.

“That’s something that I think we need to go back now, when we do an after-the-event evaluation about whether or not given the psyche of the country and the pushback that you get from those types of things — we need to reevaluate the cost-benefit ratio of those types of things,” Fauci said.

Earlier in the hearing, Fauci defended the government’s use of vaccines as saving “hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and millions of lives throughout the world.

Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies on Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said there are still some things the United States needs to work on to be more prepared for another pandemic in the aftermath of Covid-19.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said in “some respects” the country is better prepared to deal with a health crisis than in 2020, “but in others, I am still disappointed.”

Fauci was answering a question from Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who served as the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management during the pandemic. The lawmaker said he felt that states were not ready to deal with Covid-19.

One thing that he hopes the US will do better moving forward is tightening communication between the federal response and local public health officials.

He said there was a “disconnect between the healthcare system and the public health system” during Covid-19 in the US. Specifically, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) could not demand information from local agencies, which caused a lag in sharing data.

“We were at a disadvantage,” Fauci said, adding that the CDC is working on ways to fix this pain point.

Rep. Robert Garcia speaks during a hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill on Monday.

California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, who said both of his parents died from Covid-19, thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for putting in policies that saved lives during the pandemic.

Garcia said his mother was a health care worker and she and his step-father both died from Covid-19.

“I lost both of my parents during the pandemic, so I take this very personally,” he said, condemning other lawmakers “who are tasked to be responsible and actually help the American people” attack medical professionals, Garcia said.

The comments came after heated remarks from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who criticized mask mandates and called for Fauci to be put in prison.

GOP Chairman Brad Wenstrup had to remind Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be respectful after she insisted that she would not refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci by the title of doctor and would only refer to him as “Mr. Fauci.”

“You’re not doctor, you’re Mr. Fauci in my few minutes,” Greene said.

In response, Wenstrup ordered Greene to address Fauci as a doctor. “I have instructed her to address him as doctor,” Wenstrup said. 

“I’m not addressing him as doctor,” she shot back.  

Several Democratic lawmakers jumped in to criticize Greene over her refusal to address Fauci as a doctor.

Wenstrup then asked members to “afford all other members the respect they are entitled” and to “refrain from using rhetoric that could be construed as an attack on the motives or character of another member or the witness.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Monday that he has not used his personal email to conduct business, and he was not aware before a congressional investigation that a former senior adviser at the National Institutes of Health had used unofficial email.

“What you saw, I believe, with Dr. Morens was aberrancy and an outlier,” Fauci testified on Monday, referring to a former senior adviser at NIH. “The individuals at the NIH and NIAID are a very committed group of individuals and this one instance that you point out is an aberrancy and an outlier.”

The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic previously released a series of private emails that Republican members of the committee argue show that some NIH officials deleted emails and tried to get around requirements to disclose information through public records laws.

In a memo published at the end of May, committee members said Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci, engaged in “nefarious behavior.” The committee points to email that Morens sent another colleague that suggests he would send email to Fauci’s private account and “there is no worry about FOIAs.” FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives the public the right to obtain federal records, including emails sent within government agencies. Morens’ email goes on to say that he can also hand information to Fauci to avoid it being a part of the public record.

“He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens said in a 2021 email to Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit virus research organization linked to controversy about the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19. The US Department of Health and Human Services suspended funding to the group in May.

Anthony Fauci detailed the threats he received during his time as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describing death threats against him and threats against his wife and daughters.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell asked Fauci to explain what some of the threats were, where he replied:

“Everything from harassments from emails, texts, letters of myself, my wife, my three daughters. There have been credible death threats leading to the arrest of two individuals – and credible death threats means someone who clearly was on their way to kill me. And it’s required my having protective services essentially all the time,” Fauci said.

Fauci said he feared that the threats against public health workers during the Covid-19 pandemic would serve as a “powerful disincentive” for the best and brightest candidates to take up the profession.

“They say to themselves, ‘I don’t want to go there. Why should I get involved in that?’” he said.

“They’re reluctant to put themselves and their family through what they see their colleagues being put through,” he testified.

Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies on Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci clarified that the 6-foot guidance for social distancing given during the beginnings for the Covid-19 pandemic did not come from him, but from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

“It actually came from the CDC. The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines to schools, not me,” Fauci said.

Fauci, who repeated the guidance during the pandemic, once said that there was no science behind it — but he meant that there were no clinical trials to back it up.

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

He added that he believed the CDC used studies about droplets years ago as reasoning for the 6-foot guidelines.

More background: When the CDC first promoted the idea of 6-foot “social distancing” for people who had to be around others during the pandemic, scientists thought that larger contaminated droplets would fall out of the air quickly and couldn’t travel farther than 6 feet. At the time, the World Health Organization recommended that people keep a meter, or 3.3 feet, between them. But even as early as 2021, scientists were starting to understand that the coronavirus is airborne.

CNN’s Jen Christensen contributed to this report.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin took a swipe at the Republican party for their treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci by comparing how Republicans treat Fauci to how they have treated former President Donald Trump, though Raskin did not mention Trump by name.

Raskin apologized to Fauci for the fact 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.”

Raskin’s comments allude to the recent finding of guilt against the former president in a criminal hush money case.

Raskin then asked Fauci if he had anything he wanted to say for himself while appearing at the hearing, to which Fauci defended the government’s use of vaccines as saving “hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and millions of lives throughout the world.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at the Rayburn House Office Building on June 3, in Washington, DC.

In Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony Monday, he addressed what he said were “certain issues that have been seriously distorted concerning me,” particularly around the origin of the virus that led to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci testified that in early 2020, he was informed through phone calls with two scientists — Jeremy Farrar, then the director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Kristian Andersen, a scientist at Scripps Research Institute — that they and others were concerned that the virus that causes Covid-19 could have been manipulated in the lab. The day after those calls, Fauci said he participated in a conference call with several international virologists to discuss manipulation in the lab or possible spillover from animals to humans. He characterized the discussion as “lively,” with arguments on both sides. Fauci said he did not try to steer the discussion in any direction.

Fauci said the virologists on the joint call decided to more carefully examine the genomic sequence and after further examination, Fauci said, “several who at first were concerned about lab manipulation became convinced that the virus was not deliberately manipulated.” Scientists found the most likely scenario, Fauci said, was a virus that transferred from an animal to a human, “although they still kept an open mind,” Fauci said.

“The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false, and simply preposterous,” Fauci said, noting he had no input into the content on a paper published in March 2020 that discussed the possible origins of the virus.

In the year since the virus emerged, some of the world’s leading scientists have investigated the origins of the virus, including a committee of experts from the World Health Organization. Most scientists believe that the virus spread from animals to humans in China. Some studies have also said that the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, cannot be ruled out.

Most US intelligence agencies say the virus was not genetically engineered, but it is still not totally clear how the pandemic started. A US intelligence analysis released last year said either origin was possible, and the community remains split on the issue. The US Department of Energy assessed last year that it had “low confidence” in the lab leak theory. No US federal agency believes that the virus that causes Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon.

“I cannot account nor can anyone account for other things that might be going on in China, which is the reason why I have always said and will say now, I keep an open mind as to what the origin is,” Fauci said Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci used part of his opening statement to push back against a claim that he may have used his personal email for official business.

Fauci addressed the accusation made in a Majority Staff Memorandum from May 24.

Fauci reiterated that he did not use his personal email for official purposes when asked by Republican Rep. James Comer.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is sworn in during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, on June 3.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has now been sworn in to the House subcommittee hearing.

As former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), he will testify about the US government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

In his testimony, Fauci will tell lawmakers “misinformation and disinformation” led to “considerable and understandable” public confusion as part of his opening statement before their panel Monday.  

This is the first congressional testimony from Fauci since he retired from his position.

Ranking Member Raul Ruiz said Republican members of the subcommittee abdicated their duty to objectively investigate the origins of Covid-19 for political gain and shift blame.

“Nearly a year and half into House Republicans’ extreme and chaotic majority, I believe we need to take stock of what the select subcommittee has accomplished or whether it has meaningfully improved our preparedness for the next public health threat in our nation,” the Democratic representative from California said.

Under the guise of investigating the origins of Covid-19, “House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how Covid-19 came to be” and instead weaponized the concern the origins of a lab related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain, Ruiz added.

He said that Dr. Anthony Fauci became the Republicans’ target saying, “They did so with one particular health official in mind, Dr. Anthony Fauci” to deflect blame way from former President Donald Trump.

In his opening remarks, Republican Chair Brad Wenstrup criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci for what he claimed was a failure to listen to science.

“While policy and decisions should have been based on scientific data, some, frankly, were not,” he said.

One decision Wenstrup claimed was not based in science was the six-foot social distancing rule.

“The burdensome six-foot social distancing rule did not have sufficient scientific report. In your words, ‘it just sort of appeared.’ Distancing made sense, but the six feet was arbitrary,” Wenstrup said noting that the rule prompted schools and workplaces to shut down.

“Under your leadership, the United States health agencies adopted specific policy aims as a single dogmatic truth without the benefit of debate. Out of desire for a single narrative,” he added.

Rep. Raul Ruiz speaks at a press conference ahead of Dr. Fauci's testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic at the US Capitol on June 3 in Washington, DC.

Democratic members of the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic defended Dr. Anthony Fauci ahead of Monday’s hearing about the US’ Covid-19 pandemic response, policies and transparency.

The representatives blasted claims of Fauci’s involvement in starting or covering up the pandemic as a “dangerous” and “cartoonish” narrative. “The Select subcommittee has become an echo chamber of extreme narratives intended to vilify our nation’s public health officials. Rather than tackling forward-looking reforms to strengthen public health data collection, improve future testing and contact tracing capacity or address the inequities that we laid bare by the pandemic, our majority colleagues have spent time and taxpayer dollars fishing for evidence to back up their most extreme members’ claims about Dr. Fauci,” said Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz, a ranking member on the panel.

“This investigation of Dr. Fauci shows that he is an honorable public servant, committed to public health and he is not a comic book supervillain. He did not fund research to create the Covid-19 pandemic. He did not lie to Congress about gain of function research in Wuhan. And he did not organize a lab leak suppression campaign to cover his tracks. These are outrageous concoctions, fabrications and distortions,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin said.

Republican Chair Brad Wenstrup apologized to Dr Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the threats he received over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wenstrup opened the House subcommittee hearing into the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus on Monday morning.

“Regardless of whatever disagreements we may have, you chose to serve and I want to extend our appreciation and gratitude,” Wenstrup added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will begin testifying shortly at a House hearing on the US’s Covid-19 pandemic response and the origins of the virus.

Our reporters will bring you the latest updates as we get them here, but if you want to watch the hearing live, click on the play button at the top of this page.

Speaking to “CNN This Morning” in April 2023, Dr Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave his assessment of the country’s performance during the pandemic.

On the whole, Fauci said, he saw two big problems that caused the US to stumble as it tried to control Covid-19.

The first was the divisiveness of our politics, which led many conservatives to distrust public health recommendations to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.

The second major problem, as he explained, is the fracturing of the US health care delivery system.

Read more from his interview here.