Ahead of a highly anticipated hearing with former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci, House Democrats released a report casting doubt on the findings and motivations of Republicans leading the investigation.
“Under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins, House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how COVID-19 came to be,” Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-CA) said, “and instead weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain.”
Democrats released a report titled “Republicans’ Fauci Flop: Select Subcommittee’s Fifteen-Month Probe Fails to Find Evidence of Extreme Claims Linking Dr. Fauci to COVID-19’s Origins.”
The report contains three core claims, which are that Fauci was not aware of a grant to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology until after the COVID-19 outbreak, that Fauci did not lie in saying his agency didn’t fund gain-of-function research, and that he did not orchestrate the “Proximal Origin” paper arguing against the lab leak origin theory of the virus.
“Instead of objectively examining the pathways by which the novel coronavirus could have emerged, Select Subcommittee Republicans have spent the 118th Congress probing federally funded research in an effort to substantiate their extreme allegations baselessly linking Dr. Fauci to the pandemic’s origins,” the Democrats alleged.
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Fauci, who for many was the face of the coronavirus pandemic, retired in late 2022, but he has been dragged into a scandal involving his former aide David Morens, who bragged in subpoenaed emails about skirting open records laws for information related to the virus’s origins.
Members of both parties are grilling the doctor before the cameras on Monday, and the committee is seeking his phone and email records.