Anthony Fauci to Answer Questions Under Oath, Appear in Public Hearing

Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington on Dec. 9, 2022. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Dr. Anthony Fauci has agreed to testify under oath in a private and public hearing, a U.S. House of Representatives committee announced on Nov. 30.

Dr. Fauci will appear to answer questions behind closed doors on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9, 2024, according to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

He will give seven hours of testimony each day.

Two personal lawyers and two government lawyers are being allowed to attend, the panel stated.

Dr. Fauci has also agreed to testify during a public hearing at a later date.

“Dr. Fauci was the face of America’s public health response during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his testimony will serve as a crucial component of the select subcommittee’s investigations into the origin of COVID-19, coercive mandates, gain-of-function type research, scientific censorship, and more,” Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

“It is time for Dr. Fauci to confront the facts and address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic. Americans deserve trusted public health leaders who prioritize the well-being of our people over any personal or political goals. Thankfully, retirement from public service does not shield one from Congressional oversight nor accountability to the American people. During Dr. Fauci’s upcoming testimonies, honesty is non-negotiable.”

Dr. Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until late 2022.

The committee expects to ask questions about evidence that Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of a paper called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The “Proximal Origin” publication claimed that COVID-19 didn’t come from a laboratory in China.

Kristian Andersen, one of the publication’s authors, wrote in an email on Feb. 12, 2020, that the study was “prompted by” Dr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci’s boss Dr. Francis Collins, and British research funder Jeremy Farrar.

Mr. Andersen wrote in a separate email that the focus of his group’s work was to “disprove any type of lab theory.”

Dr. Fauci, Mr. Andersen, and others also took part in a teleconference on COVID-19 origins that remained secret for some time after it took place in 2020.

Other emails showed Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins regularly in touch with the authors of “Proximal Origins,” tracking the paper through its process of being reviewed and published.

Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and other National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials exerted “undue influence,” Dr. Wenstrup’s subcommittee said in a report summarizing what it found through mid-2023. The NIH includes the NIAID, the agency that Dr. Fauci headed.

Dr. Fauci promoted the proximal origin theory from the White House without naming his involvement, according to the subcommittee report. It was part of a pattern of downplaying the possibility that COVID-19 came from a laboratory that received funding from his agency.

Scripps Research, which employs Mr. Andersen, said in his defense previously that Dr. Fauci didn’t “attempt to influence” Mr. Andersen.

“When I outlined my initial hypothesis about a potentially engineered virus, Dr. Fauci told me—and I’m paraphrasing here—if you think this virus came from a lab, you should write a scientific paper about it,” Mr. Andersen testified in a House hearing.

The House subcommittee also revealed over the summer that Dr. Fauci sent an email noting that scientists on the teleconference “were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the [virus], there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats, and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.”

Dr. Fauci said the suspicion “was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and that outbreak originated in Wuhan.”

Dr. Fauci has publicly maintained that the United States didn’t fund gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, contradicting documents released by the NIH.

In August, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) referred Dr. Fauci to the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution for allegedly lying under oath, following the release of the email.

The department didn’t return requests for comment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland “is not paying attention to the referral, but [Dr. Fauci] did lie to Congress,” Mr. Paul said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Dr. Robert Kadlec, who worked closely with Dr. Fauci in the early days of the pandemic, also disclosed recently that top U.S. officials like himself and Dr. Fauci downplayed the lab leak theory in the hopes it would result in transparency from China.

Dr. Kadlec said that Dr. Fauci was likely motivated by the fact that his agency provided funding to the lab in Wuhan near where the first cases were detected.

Dr. Fauci didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The former NIAID director last answered questions in a deposition in late 2022. He lied at least once, files indicate.

During the deposition, Dr. Fauci said he didn’t have the expertise to determine whether COVID-19 came from nature or a lab.

“I am not qualified, since I am not an evolutionary virologist, to make any kind of definitive determination about whether a genome could or could not be a laboratory construct or experimentally manipulative,” he said at one point. “I have relied, as anyone would, [on] highly qualified, respected evolutionary virologists to come to that conclusion or not.”