Dr. Anthony Fauci ripped by House Republicans at high-profile hearing: ‘You belong in prison’ (2024)

Republican members of aHouse subcommittee investigating the origins of COVID-19blastedDr. Anthony Fauci for his “hypocrisy” during the pandemic Monday, as the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director returned to Capitol Hill for ahighly anticipated public hearing.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in a scathing opening statement that Fauci, 83, had presided over “one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the US has ever seen,” citing draconian restrictions that the ex-public health official recently admittedhad no supporting scientific evidence.

“Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of COVID,” Wenstrup said.

“And it should not have been the case that Americans were forced to comply with oppressive mandates, when those who chose to illegally cross over our southern border were not,” he added. “Or when [California] Gov. [Gavin] Newsom or [Michigan Gov. Gretchen] Whitmer were throwing parties at lavish restaurants. Not a good look.”

“Dr. Fauci, you once said, ‘If you disagree with me you disagree with science,’” Wenstrup also said. “Americans do not hate science. But Americans know hypocrisy when they see it.”

Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) followed up by playing an audio recording of Fauci dismissing concerns about the efficacy of the coronavirus vaccine as “ideological bullsh–t.”

“It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls–t, and they get vaccinated,” Fauci said in an audiobook written by New Yorker journalist Michael Specter.

“Are all objections to COVID vaccinations ideological bullsh–t, Dr. Fauci?” McCormick asked.

“No, they’re not, and that’s not what I was referring to,” Fauci began to answer.

“You affected people’s ability to work, travel, be educated — to actually flourish in American society, to self-determine,” McCormick butted in. “Shame on you.”

Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took the ex-NIAID head to task for pushing “six feet apart” social distancing policies, which Fauci hassince admittedhad no scientific basis, and advocating masking of children, the efficacy of which he claims is “up in the air.”

“Do the American people deserve to be abused like that, Mr. Fauci? ‘Cause you’re not ‘doctor,’ you’re ‘mister’ in my few minutes,” Greene exploded during her line of questioning, at one point holding up pictures of schoolchildren encased in COVID mitigation bubbles.

“Children all over America were forced to wear masks — healthy children — forced to wear masks, muzzled in their schools,” she added. “And then they were forced to work from home because of your so-called ‘science.’”

“You should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci.”

Other attendees heckled the ex-White House COVID czar as he took his seat,—with one calling him “traitor” and another saying, “You killed my grandma.”An elderly woman from the anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense sat in the front row of the gallery wearing a shirt that read “Jail Fauci.”

Some spectators were later escorted out of the hearing by US Capitol Police for minor disruptions.

Faucirejected that he had anyrole in suppressing the so-called“lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

“Do you agree that there was a pushto downplay the lab leak theory?”House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pressed Fauci.

“None on my part,” Fauci replied,ignoring his clandestine discussionswith globally recognized virologists who authored a controversial paper to debunk the lab leak theory.

“Really?” Jordan said. “I think most of the country would find that amazing.”

“But look at the facts,” Fauci added. “I’ve kept an open mind throughout the entire process.”

Asked in aFebruary 2020 podcast interview with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Fauci had dismissed concerns about SARS-CoV-2 escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — which the US intelligence community confirmed last year did research on behalf ofthe Chinese military—as a “conspiracy theory.”

On Monday, he acknowledged the possibility of COVID-19 escaping from a lab, while sticking tohis past testimony in Januarythat it most likely spilled over naturally to humans.

Fauci also doubled down on his claims that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which oversaw his NIAID, did not fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at WIV — contradicting recent congressional testimony by NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak that thoseexperiments occurred.

“I would not characterize it as dangerous gain-of-function research,” he told Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) during one exchange. “The operative and regulatory definition of [Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight] does not include at all the viruses that were studied.”

“How do you know that, sir, if there were no lab books, nothing from China?” Lesko prodded.

The NIH award of nearly $600,000 to thesince-suspended EcoHealth Alliance“included genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains,” according toa June 2023 Government Accountability Office report.

The agency has revealed to Congress that the research, which resulted in a virus 10,000 times more infectious, violated EcoHealth’s grant terms, was conducted at sub-standard biosafety levels and was not reported.

EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszakrevealed in his own testimonybefore the COVID subcommittee last month that he had also not received any sequences of viruses from WIV since before the pandemic began in late 2019.

Another 2018 EcoHealth proposal, which did not receive US funding, has since been highlighted by scientific experts as “smoking gun” evidence that the coronavirus was created in Wuhan.

At several points, Fauci said it was “molecularly impossible” for the WIV viruses to have resulted in SARS-CoV-2 and claimed that he was not intimately involved in the grant’s approval — but added that he supported the US Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to suspend the grant and propose EcoHealth for debarment last month.

“This is one of the things that’s really troubling to the American people, because they look at their lives being destroyed, and there’s no one to hold accountable because these systems of accountability have become systems of plausible deniability,” said Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas).

“Your name is on every single grant, but yet you absolve yourself of any sort of responsibility,” Cloud added.

Faucialso denied any knowledge ofwill also likely have to explaina trove of more than 150 explosive emails obtained by the subcommittee showing his former senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, bragging about evading Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests anddeleting federal records.

Morens wrote in some of the emails that he and Fauci also had a “secret back channel” to thwart congressional investigations andpress inquiries about COVID-19.

“I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about. There’s no back channel at NIAID,” Fauci told Staten Island GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. “I do not do government business on my private email.”

“The Dr. Morens issue that was discussed by this committee violates NIH policy,” Fauci declared, saying also that he never tried to “protect” Daszak from having his grant funding pulled, as his ex-adviser claimed in emails.

“I don’t know where he got that, but it’s not true,” Fauci told House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) “I have not tried to protect Dr. Daszak. … I did not know about their compliance issues until well after.”

COVID-19 emerged from Wuhan, China in late 2019 and went on to kill morethan1.1 million Americans.

“Under my leadership we were well-positioned to respond to COVID-19,” Fauci insisted in his opening statement, citing billions of dollars in research that “led to the swift development of vaccines” for the novel coronavirus — the efficacy of which was also questioned by panel members.

“If I make a mistake, I answer to the people of Ohio and my own conscience,” Wenstrup said“When you, or your agency, made mistakes, Dr. Fauci, what happened?”

“You took the position that you presented ‘the science,’” he added.“Your words came across as final and as infallible in matters pertaining to the pandemic.”

“To be successful, our federal public health institutions must be accountable to the people again.”