During his Capitol Hill testimony behind closed doors on Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci responded that he “did not recall” over 100 times when questioned about the Covid-19 pandemic. During the first seven hours of the transcribed interview Fauci repeatedly defended his previous Senate testimony in which he claimed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which was conducting research on bat coronaviruses that may have produced the Covid pandemic.
“The face of our nation’s response to the world’s worst public health crisis ‘does not recall’ key details about COVID-19 origins and pandemic-era policies,” House Coronavirus Select Subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) said in a statement Monday night. The “potentially preventable pandemic” ultimately resulted in the deaths of nearly 1.2 million Americans, the Ohio Republican noted.
National Review reports the timeline of Monday’s hearing; in late November, Wenstrup announced that Fauci had agreed to testify before his subcommittee in a private setting over the course of two days. Before retiring at the end of 2022, Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor under the Trump and Biden administrations.
As he did during his famous hearing exchanges with Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.), Fauci disagreed with Congress’s definition of “gain-of-function” to avoid admitting that the NIH funded potentially dangerous research that led to the pandemic’s outbreak.
Fauci also testified that he approved of all foreign and domestic NIAID grants without reviewing the proposals, and conceded that he was unable to confirm whether NIAID has any procedure in place to conduct oversight of the foreign labs they fund.
“Dr. Fauci’s testimony today uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems,” said Wenstrup. “While leading the nation’s COVID-19 response and influencing public narratives, he simultaneously had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID.”