Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist who has drawn both praise and scorn for his work on the coronavirus, returned to Capitol Hill on Monday, reuniting with some of his toughest opponents: members of Republican-led House committees who accuse him of helping to unleash the worst pandemic of a century.
Republicans on the House Select Committee on COVID-19 have spent 15 months combing through emails, Slack messages and research proposals for evidence against Dr. Fauci. In half a million pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed-door testimony, the committee has so far found no evidence linking the 83-year-old immunologist to the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in China.
But the committee uncovered emails suggesting former aides to Dr. Fauci sought to circumvent public records laws at the medical research institute he ran for 38 years until his retirement in December 2022.
Some of the emails paint a picture of Dr. Fauci as preoccupied with his public image: One message from an aide in April 2021 said Dr. Fauci “proudly prides himself on being Teflon tough” but seemed “worried that questions about research funded by his organization, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, could make things worse.”
For years, the agency has awarded research grants to the American nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which partners with international scientists, including those at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began, as part of efforts to predict disease outbreaks.
Dr. Fauci's appearance before a House committee on Monday will be the first time lawmakers can question him about the agency's record-keeping practices. For Republicans on the committee, the hearing marks the culmination of a long-running campaign so far against the U.S. scientists and health officials they say helped spark the COVID-19 pandemic.
A series of high-profile hearings over the past year have produced no new evidence that the pandemic originated in a lab, funded or not by American taxpayers. In a report titled “The Republican Fauci Debacle,” Democrats said Monday that Republicans on the committee have failed to advance the case that the coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab leak.
“Republicans on the Select Subcommittee spent time and taxpayer money examining federally funded research that has failed to significantly advance our understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and instead has done significant damage to the public's trust in public health authorities,” the report said.
But Dr. Fauci, who has served in government for more than 50 years and advised presidents of both parties on infectious disease outbreaks, including AIDS, Ebola, anthrax and influenza, has always been the committee's most valuable catch. Working for President Donald J. Trump and then President Biden, Dr. Fauci became the face of the coronavirus response that earned him both respect and resentment from the American public.
Dr. Fauci's frequent television appearances to debunk Trump's falsehoods about the coronavirus have made him a hero to his critics. Early in the pandemic, he downplayed the importance of masks for the public and tried to save them for health care workers, but critics said he was backtracking when he later encouraged their use. He also publicly celebrated getting the COVID-19 vaccine, making him an enemy of the anti-vaccination movement.
Dr. Fauci will almost certainly face a cold reception at a House hearing on Monday, where Republicans have been eager to build their case that research funded by a lab that Dr. Fauci once ran may have contributed to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Republicans have particularly focused on lab funding given to EcoHealth Alliance that went to Chinese scientists who they accuse of hoaxing the coronavirus in a lab in Wuhan.
“COVID-19 wasn't made by bats in a wet market,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, argued last year as the subcommittee's work began. “It was made in a lab that Fauci funded. And he tried to cover it up.”
Scientists and health officials have repeatedly noted that the coronavirus being studied at the U.S.-funded Wuhan lab and other viruses being studied there bear little resemblance to the virus that caused the pandemic. A National Institutes of Health official testified before another House committee last year that comparing the two is “like saying humans are the equivalent of cows.”
Dr. Fauci, in closed-door testimony before the House Coronavirus Committee in January, said, as he has done in the past, that he was “open-minded” about the origins of the pandemic, saying that lab work could have started it, but that “some people are going to make some crazy spin off of it,” and reiterated that in his view, the weight of evidence suggests that the virus originated in animals and jumped to humans outside of a lab.
In his testimony, Dr. Fauci pointed to studies based on early cases and the virus' genome, as well as samples taken at an illegal wildlife market in Wuhan, to suggest that the virus that caused the pandemic jumped from animals to humans there.
“When you read the paper, written by an international group of highly respected evolutionary virologists, it strengthens the case that this is a natural phenomenon,” Dr. Fauci said.
Ahead of Monday's hearing, Republican lawmakers used other parts of Dr. Fauci's January testimony to attack the US's COVID-19 response. In a memo circulated on Friday, Republicans highlighted Dr. Fauci's comments on the six-foot spacing rule, mask-wearing policies and vaccination mandates.
Dr. Fauci may also face increased scrutiny following recent revelations that two of his former aides, senior adviser Dr. David Morens and chief of staff Greg Folkers, sent emails that appeared to circumvent public records laws during the pandemic. In opening remarks posted online Sunday evening, Dr. Fauci said he had “no knowledge” of Dr. Morens' email practices and that Dr. Morens, who helped him write scientific papers, “was not my advisor on institute policy or other substantive matters.”
Some of the emails suggested that agency employees tasked with producing records under transparency laws helped their colleagues circumvent those regulations, a possibility that government accountability experts called “deeply concerning.”
The emails suggest that officials were concerned not about the emergence of evidence related to the origins of the pandemic, but rather about the disclosure of memos in which they frankly discussed “political attacks” against their research.
Still, Dr. Morens suggested in his email that Dr. Fauci had also been careful to avoid posting sensitive comments in places where journalists or the public might find them.
“Either send it to Tony's private Gmail or hand it over to him at work or at home,” Dr. Morens wrote about Dr. Fauci in April 2021, while reassuring several scientists that they didn't need to worry about public records requests. “He's smart enough not to let his colleagues send him materials that will get him in trouble.”
Dr Fauci disputed this in his opening remarks, writing, “To my knowledge, I have never conducted official business through personal email.”