Fauci grilled by lawmakers on masks, vaccine mandates and lab leak theory

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on COVID, on Monday forcefully denied Republican allegations that he had helped fund research that sparked the pandemic or had covered up the possibility it originated in a laboratory.

In an appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci read aloud an email from February 2020 in which he urged a prominent scientist who was then suspicious about a lab leak “to determine if his concerns are validated” and, if so, “very quickly” report them to the FBI.

“It is inconceivable that anyone who reads this email could conclude that I was trying to cover up the possibility of a laboratory leak,” Fauci testified.

Monday’s session was the culmination of a 15-month inquiry that was billed as an investigation into the pandemic’s origins, but that has lately turned into a referendum on Fauci, an 83-year-old immunologist who spent more than half a century as a government scientist and became the public face of the pandemic response.

Democrats painted Fauci as an American hero. Republicans blamed him for school closings, mask ordinances and other “invasive” policies.

The Republican-led subcommittee is the only congressional panel charged with weighing the origins of the worst pandemic in a century and the U.S. policy failures that made it so devastating. Fauci, the panel’s most prized quarry, was at the center of a COVID response that left the country with far more deaths than many other wealthy nations.

The hearing Monday occasionally touched on the country’s vulnerability to the pandemic. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the committee’s chair, bewailed the haphazard way rules had been applied and lamented that public health officials had not been more honest “about what we didn’t know.”

But the House panel rarely lingered over evidence that concerned the origins of the coronavirus, or responsibility for its brutal toll in the United States.

And for all the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed-door testimony the panel reviewed, lawmakers produced nothing linking Fauci to the beginnings of the COVID outbreak in China.

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