Dr Anthony Fauci pushes back on attacks in fiery US House hearing

Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert until leaving the government in 2022, is back before Congress, calling “simply preposterous” Republican allegations that he had tried to cover up origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A GOP-led subcommittee has spent more than a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started - yet found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

He had already been grilled behind closed doors, for 14 hours over two days in January. But on Monday, Fauci testified voluntarily in public and on camera at a hearing that quickly deteriorated into partisan attacks.

Republicans repeated unproven accusations against the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist while Democrats apologised for Congress besmirching his name and bemoaned a missed opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.

“He is not a comic book super villain,” said Democrat Jamie Raskin, saying the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had failed to prove a list of damaging allegations.

Fauci was the public face of the government’s early COVID-19 response under then-president Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President Joe Biden. A trusted voice to millions, he also was the target of partisan anger and choked up on Monday as he recalled death threats and other harassment of himself and his family, threats he said still continue. Police later escorted hecklers out of the hearing room.

The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city in China where the outbreak began. There is no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory.

Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there is more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people. It was a position he repeated on Monday as Republican lawmakers questioned if he worked behind-the-scenes to squelch the lab-leak theory or even tried to influence intelligence agencies.

“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will ready accept it,” Fauci said.

He later invoked a fictional secret agent, decrying a conspiracy theory that “I was parachuting into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.”

Fauci did face a new set of questions about the credibility of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led for 38 years. In May, the House panel revealed emails from an NIAID colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not discussing controversial pandemic issues in government email.

Fauci denounced the actions of that colleague and insisted that “to the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my personal email.”

The pandemic’s origins weren’t the only hot topic. The House panel also blasted some public health measures taken to slow spread of the virus before COVID-19 vaccines, spurred by NIAID research, helped allow a return to normality. Ordering people to stay two metres apart meant many businesses, schools and churches couldn’t stay open, and subcommittee chairman Republican Brad Wenstrup called it a “burdensome” and arbitrary rule, noting that in his prior closed-door testimony Fauci had acknowledged it wasn’t scientifically backed.

Fauci responded that the two-metre distancing wasn’t his guideline but one created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before scientists had learned that the new virus was airborne, not spread simply by droplets emitted a certain distance.