Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, vowed to cooperate with the oversight efforts of House Republicans during a White House press conference on Tuesday.
“If there are oversight hearings, I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” said Fauci. “You may not know, but I’ve testified before the Congress a few hundred times, okay, over the last 40 years or so, so I have no trouble testifying. We can defend, and explain, and stand by everything that we’ve said, so I have nothing to hide.”
The new GOP majority in the House of Representatives is expected to investigate whether Fauci was fully transparent about his knowledge of the origins of the pandemic and whether it related to NIH-funded gain-of-function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China, among other issues.
Fauci has insisted that he believes that it is “highly likely” the novel coronavirus developed naturally before spreading to humans, despite a growing chorus of scientists who contend otherwise.
The first human cases of the virus were diagnosed in the Wuhan, China, and while it was widely believed at the outset of the pandemic that the virus emerged from a local “wet market,” some speculated that it may have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where research is conducted on coronaviruses in bats.
In those early days, Fauci referred to the lab-leak theory as a “shiny object” while he and his colleagues privately debated how to discredit it. Since then, much of the scientific community has moved toward favoring the lab-leak theory given that Beijing has failed to locate the virus in animals living in and around Wuhan despite its extensive efforts.
The longtime NIAID head has also denied that the National Institutes of Health has “ever” funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Experts, as well as Senator Rand Paul, have disputed this claim, arguing that gain of function research, which consists intentionally altering and enhancing viruses, is exactly what the NIH funded through a grant to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance.
Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University told National Review last year that Daszak’s research “matches — indeed epitomizes — the definition of 'gain of function research of concern' for which federal funding was 'paused' in 2014-2017."
Fauci has insisted during Senate hearings that Daszak’s research did not meet that definition, even going so far as to call into question Senator Paul’s intelligence for suggesting otherwise.
Comments
Post a Comment