House Republicans have asked former White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony to testify before Congress as they launch a latest investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The GOP leaders of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Committee on Oversight and Accountability sent a letter to Fauci on Monday requesting a transcribed interview. Fauci said in November that he would cooperate with any oversight hearing within the Republican-led House.
“If there are oversight hearings I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” Fauci told reporters during his final briefing on the White House. “I haven’t any trouble testifying — we will defend and explain every part that we have said.”
Fauci, considered one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, was the general public face of the U.S. pandemic response in the course of the Trump and Biden administration. He stepped down from his posts on the White House and on the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December.
House Republicans also sent letters requesting testimony from EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins. EcoHealth Alliance provided funding, which originated at NIH, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to check coronaviruses.
The inspector general on the Health and Human Services Department found that EcoHealth Alliance received about $8 million in funding from NIH during 2014 through 2021, in response to a report published last month. About $600,000 of that cash went on to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to check the threat posed by bat coronaviruses.
The study of bat coronaviruses on the virology institute in Wuhan, China, town where the pandemic first began, has raised suspicions amongst some scientists and investigators that Covid-19 could have escaped from a lab. But Fauci, Collins and lots of others have maintained that a natural origin by which the virus spilled over from bats through an intermediate animal into people is more likely.
“The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus,” Collins told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in 2021. “To not say that it couldn’t have been under study secretly on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we do not learn about that. However the virus itself doesn’t have the earmarks of getting been created intentionally by human work.”
In 2021, President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to provide their evaluation on how the pandemic began. 4 agencies assessed with low confidence that the pandemic began through natural exposure, while one assessed it was the results of a lab accident. Three other agencies couldn’t agree on either explanation.
House Republicans on Monday also sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines requesting classified briefings with seven intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Additionally they sent a letter to Health Secretary Xavier Becerra requesting interviews with greater than two dozen U.S. health officials.
Republicans, who won control of the House with a narrow margin in last November’s midterms, had vowed to launch several investigations into the pandemic’s origins, the federal response, and the way taxpayer money was spent.
“This investigation must begin with where and the way this virus got here about in order that we will try and predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said in a press release.
