Lawmakers grilled Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as chief medical advisor to President Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic, for his assertions that he wasn’t responsible for the six-foot social distancing rule and other policies during his Monday testimony to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The subcommittee’s chair, Ohio Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup, took aim at Fauci’s infamous “I represent science” comments in his opening remarks.
“Science doesn’t belong to any one person,” Wenstrup said.
Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin later offered the first trickle of what would become a torrent effusive praise and penitence from the subcommittee’s minority side.
“Dr. Fauci, You deserve better than this,” Democrats keep saying.
Reminder that this is the OVERSIGHT committee, which is supposed to provide oversight of the government.
When Fauci’s contacts in the Democratic Party and the media are long gone, historians are going to marvel…
— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) June 3, 2024
“The investigation of Dr. Fauci shows he is an honorable public servant who has devoted his entire career to the public health and the public interest and he is not a comic book supervillain,” Raskin claimed. “He did not fund research to create the COVID-19 pandemic. He did not lie to Congress about gain of function research in Wuhan and he did not organize a lab leak suppression campaign.”
Raskin’s assertions contradict a May announcement from the House Oversight Committee, which claimed that “documents … credibly suggest COVID-19 originated from a lab related accident in Wuhan, China.”
Fauci also claimed multiple times throughout the hearing that studies funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which he headed for 38 years, could not have been the origin of the SARS CoV2 virus.
“The viruses that were studied under the subawards to the Wuhan Institute … those viruses were phylogenetically so far removed from SARS CoV2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to have evolved from SARS COV2,” Fauci testified.
Fauci did, however, concede that there is “a difference between the viruses that were funded by the NIH subaward versus anything else anyone in China might be doing.”
Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance group, previously testified to the subcommittee that there was no way of knowing what viruses were collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology after 2015.
Fauci argued that his agency was not responsible for funding gain-of-function researching, insisting upon the narrow official definition of gain-of-function set forth in the government’s Potential Pandemic Pathogens Care and Oversight (P3CO) guidelines.
Fauci continues to falsely conflate gain-of-function (the operative framework at the time of the coronavirus experiments in Wuhan) and the P3CO (ePPPs).
This is perjury.
— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) June 3, 2024
Fauci also attempted to set the record straight on previous comments in which he said the six-foot social distancing rule was “made up.” The former public health official insisted the rule came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not from him.
Dr. Fauci is pressed on the 6-ft rule:
Rep. Joyce: “[Once we learned more], did you feel an indication to go back to the CDC and say let’s base this off science, let’s get rid of this 6-ft. rule? This 6-ft. rule crippled businesses, it allowed students to stay at home and not… pic.twitter.com/1w6FKrJTTh
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 3, 2024
Fauci also denied trying to censor dissenting views that supported a lab leak theory of the COVID-19’s origins.
“Do you agree that there was a push to downplay the lab leak theory?” Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan asked Fauci.
“Not on my part,” Fauci replied.
“I think most of the country would find that amazing,” Jordan responded.
Jordan then proceeded to read a series of texts between Fauci and Facebook executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, which appeared to show Fauci requesting the suppression of lab leak theories on the platform.
“Can we include that the White House put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” Facebook wrote to Fauci in 2021, according to Jordan.
The GOP majority’s staff director, Mitchell Benzine, also pressed Fauci on the pandemic’s origins.
“Is it possible that COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory related accident?” Benzine asked.
“Oh absolutely,” Fauci replied. (RELATED: ‘Jail Fauci’: Grandma Goes Viral After Epic Troll)
“Is the hypothesis that COVID-19 accidentally leaked from a lab a conspiracy theory?” Benzine asked.
“No … conceptually, the concept of it is not a conspiracy,” Fauci responded.
The hearing turned volatile when Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene refused to address Fauci as “doctor,” prompting Raskin to request a review of decorum.
“In terms of the rules of decorum, are we allowed to deny that a doctor is a doctor just because we don’t want him to be a doctor?” Raskin questioned.
“Yes, because in my time, that man does not deserve to have a license. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked and he belongs in prison,” Greene responded.
US Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Republican of Georgia, holds up an image of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as she questions him during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, June 3, 2024. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
