During congressional hearings on Monday and Tuesday, former White House Covid czar Anthony Fauci ducked more than 100 questions on the Covid pandemic, including key queries on his ties to the Wuhan, China lab where the virus is believed to have originated.
According to the House Select Committee on Coronavirus, Fauci denied remembering key details "more than 100 times."
Significantly, he also changed his past narrative on the U.S. government's involvement, including his own official role, in research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in communist China.
Republicans also said Fauci during the closed-door hearings backtracked on his earlier insistence that the U.S. did not fund gain of function research that could make viruses more transmissible and deadly.
Fauci also claimed that he had signed off on millions of dollars worth of grants without reviewing the proposals and appeared to admit the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that he headed had little oversight of the foreign labs it bankrolled.
Critics say Fauci's claim of not reading the proposals is convenient now given he oversaw the approval of $3 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers tinkered with coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans months before the pandemic.
In Tuesday’s session, Fauci admitted that the six-foot social distancing guideline which resulted in businesses nationwide placing all manner of keep six feet of distance notifications “was likely not based on any data.”
“It just sort of appeared,” the committee quoted Fauci as saying.
The committee also revealed that Fauci "acknowledged that the lab-leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory."
“This comes nearly four years after prompting the publication of the now infamous ‘Proximal Origin’ paper that attempted to vilify and disprove the lab-leak hypothesis,” the committee said, noting that Fauci also admitted that vaccine mandates could “increase vaccine hesitancy in the future.”
Despite that, the committee revealed that Fauci “advised American universities to impose vaccine mandates on their students.”
Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, who headed up the hearings, said that, under Fauci's direction, it was "clear the dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely."
During Monday's hearing, Fauci backtracked on his earlier claims that the NIAID never allocated government money to risky virus research.
In December 2022, Dr. Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, became a whistleblower and said he believed grant funding provided to the organization by the NIH was linked to the "creation of SARS-CoV-2." Huff claimed the pandemic was the result of the U.S. government funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.
Fauci had insisted during Senate testimony last summer that his former department "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Recently publicized emails dated Feb. 1, 2020 showed Fauci acknowledged that "scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan."
Westrup said: "Dr. Fauci’s testimony today [Monday] uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems."
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