Dr. Anthony Fauci, a former National Institutes of Health official who, for many, became the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, testified Monday before a subcommittee of Congress tasked with investigating the origins of the virus.

Fauci, 83, faced heated questions from Republicans and was mostly defended by Democrats during the three-hour hearing, which came in the wake of an email scandal involving one of his former senior advisers.

Here are three major takeaways from the grilling.

Fauci distances himself from adviser

One of the top questions going into the hearing was how Fauci would react to the scandal involving his former senior adviser David Morens, who, in subpoenaed emails, bragged about skirting open records laws and suggested Fauci was involved.

“We are getting FOIA’d nonstop,” Morens wrote in one of them, “so it’s most important that Tony not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.”

But in the hearing, Fauci said Morens was clearly violating agency policy, that the two worked in separate buildings, and that Morens was an adviser in title only.

“He should not have been doing that,” Fauci said. On Morens’s claims that Fauci tried to protect the scientist Peter Daszak, who has since been cut off from federal funding, Fauci added, “I don’t know where he got that, but that’s not true.”

While Morens implied that he spoke regularly with Fauci and that he could walk into his office or deliver materials to his home to avoid leaving a paper trail, Fauci told members of Congress those statements were not accurate.

“Dr. Morens testified that he could walk into your office anytime he wanted to. Is that true?” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) asked.

“No. That’s not true,” Fauci answered. “You don’t just walk into the office.”

Republicans on the committee are now attempting to get Fauci’s private email and phone records in the wake of Morens’s findings. During the hearing, he denied ever using those for government work.

“Let me state for the record that to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email,” he said. “I do not do government business on my private email.”

The Washington Examiner has contacted Fauci’s counsel to ask if he plans to comply with requests for his email records.

Fauci open to lab link but not with NIH funding

The doctor repeatedly stressed that he keeps an open mind to the possibility that COVID-19 could have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China — but with one caveat: It wasn’t developed with funding from the United States government.

Fauci said he “cannot account” for experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that were not funded by the NIH, but he was sure about the experiments it did fund.

“The one thing I know for sure is that the viruses that were funded by the NIH phylogenetically could not be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2,” he said.

Fauci testified it was “molecularly impossible” that viruses experimented on under the EcoHealth Alliance subaward from NIAID could have been related to SARS-CoV-2 because they are “so far removed.”

“It’s just a virological fact,” Fauci said.

He also explicitly denounced certain spinoff ideas regarding his role in the origins of the virus, including his reported visit to the CIA during the pandemic.

“What is a conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject like it was a lab leak, and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak,” Fauci said, referring to his alleged meeting with officials at the agency.

CDC kept at arm’s length

Though not as strongly as with Morens, Fauci kept recommendations at arm’s length from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to child masking and keeping a 6-foot distance from others to slow the spread of the virus.

Fauci insisted in a previous transcribed interview that he “didn’t flip-flop” on his masking position but rather that his position changed as more was learned about the virus.

During the same interview, Fauci told the subcommittee that he did not have any scientific evidence for the precise number of 6 feet for social distancing.

“It just sort of appeared,” Fauci said in his interview. “I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.”

On Monday, he added that the NIH was not responsible for the number, saying “it came from the CDC.”

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Fauci was then asked why he so vigorously defended those two positions if the science surrounding them was still emerging or nonexistent.

“It was [the CDC’s] decision to make, and they made it,” Fauci said before implying he did challenge the 6-foot rule behind the scenes. “It is not appropriate to be publicly challenging a sister organization.”