Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Congress he was not “involved” in a controversial grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — and still denied that gain-of-function research occurred there, according to newly released congressional testimony.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released transcripts Friday of a two-day interview with the ex-Biden White House COVID czar held in January, during which Fauci said “more than 100 times” that he “did not recall” information about the grant process, reasons for US pandemic restrictions and other details of the outbreak that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall,” Fauci said of the six-feet social distancing mandate imposed on federal agencies, businesses and schools.
“Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished,” he added of the federal emergency guidance that wasn’t dropped until August 2022, two and half years after the start of the pandemic.
Fauci also refused to admit that mask mandates for children as young as 2 years old had led to widespread learning loss and speech development issues in children — or that he had flip-flopped on that recommendation.
“I didn’t flip-flop,” he said at one point, adding later that there were “conflicting studies” on masks and their efficacy was still “up in the air.”
“Was there ever a cost-benefit analysis done on the unintended consequences of masking kids versus the protection that it would give them?” a committee staff member asked him at another point.
“Not to my knowledge,” Fauci replied.
He also refused to walk back any of his statements on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 — and defended President Biden’s remarks during a CNN town hall that year claiming the jab would totally protect people from hospitalization and death.
In an accompanying 17-page memo, committee staff for the majority highlighted other evasions, saying it was “deeply concerning that Dr. Fauci is entirely unaware of the grants he is personally approving.”
Explosive emails released last week by the House COVID subcommittee also revealed Fauci’s senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, was intimately involved in reversing the suspension of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant for risky Wuhan research — and kept his boss in the loop through a “secret back channel.”
Fauci testified that before the pandemic he did not “recall any specific interaction” and even after the outbreak, he did not have “back-and-forth discussions” with EcoHealth president Dr. Peter Daszak — whom Morens has said was his “best friend.”
But the emails show Morens telling Daszak that Fauci had expressed “concern” about the EcoHealth grant and indicated that they both were evading Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about it by communicating with private email accounts.
“Peter, from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations,” Morens wrote to Daszak on Oct. 25, 2021, five days after an National Institutes of Health (NIH) official disclosed to Congress that EcoHealth failed to abide by the terms of its grant for WIV.
“I had face to face meetings with Tony to discuss science issues,” Morens wrote in another Nov. 18, 2021, email to a former NIH colleague. “He asked how Peter was doing, as he often does, and seemed to commiserate with him to a degree.”
The Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance received millions of US taxpayer dollars and conducted gain-of-function research at the WIV, according to the COVID subcommittee’s investigation and the testimony of officials at NIH, the agency that oversees NIAID.
Unlike NIH principal deputy director Tabak and now-NIAID director Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci denied that the risky experiments took place under the “operative definition” of the term.
“It is not gain-of-function of concern that is associated with the regulatory operative definition of gain-of-function,” he testified.
He also worried aloud about the public backlash if he admitted to it: “[I]f I say yes, then, ‘Ah, yes, he says it was gain-of-function.’”
Even under the 2017 policy definition to which Fauci was referring, known as the “Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” scientific experts and former federal officials have said the Wuhan research involved gain-of-function experiments.
“The P3CO policy does not limit coverage to pathogens ‘known to infect humans’ and ‘shown to be transmissible in humans,’” said Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University. “The P3CO policy contains no ‘safe harbor’ for research with pathogens not known to infect humans and not shown to be transmissible in humans.”
Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins used the same policy framework to deny the research occurred.
The US barred WIV from receiving further federal funding last year, and EcoHealth has since been suspended as a grantee and proposed for debarment for failing to defend its repeated claims that it did not fund research that “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety.”
NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak has said the “sequences of the viruses” from the grant — “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — were “genetically very distant” from COVID-19.
However, other EcoHealth grant proposals have since been identified as “smoking gun” evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a Wuhan lab.
In early drafts of one unfunded proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, Daszak sought to “downplay” the involvement of Chinese researchers.
Fauci will appear Monday before the House COVID subcommittee for a public hearing about his handling of the US pandemic response, his awareness of the EcoHealth grants and his potential evasions of federal record-keeping requirements.
Two of the last several witnesses to appear before the panel have opened themselves up to criminal liability, according to its chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), based on their false statements to lawmakers.