Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before Congress on Monday that COVID-19 may have come from a Chinese lab but that it was not created using U.S. government funding.
Fauci appeared before the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees on Monday in his first public testimony following his retirement in December 2022, saying that he “cannot account” for experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that were not funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic postulate that funds from NIAID given to the nonprofit research organization EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have led to a lab leak that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The former NIAID director responded to Rep. Morgan Griffith’s (R-VA) questions about the possibility of the lab leak by saying that it was possible — but not with NIH funding.
“What I’m saying is that I cannot account, nor can anyone account, for other things that might be going on in China, which is the reason why I have always said and will say now I keep an open mind as to what the origin is,” Fauci said. “But the one thing I know for sure is that the viruses that were funded by the NIH phylogenetically could not be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2.”
Fauci testified it was “molecularly impossible” that viruses experimented on under the EcoHealth subaward from NIAID could have been related to SARS-CoV-2 because they are “so far removed.”
“It’s just a virological fact,” Fauci said.
EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak testified before Congress in May that there were approximately 15,000 virus samples at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected under the EcoHealth subaward that he no longer had control over following the termination of the grant project by the Trump administration.
The Department of Health and Human Services has begun a debarment process against EcoHealth and Daszak personally to prevent them from receiving any federal funding.
Although Fauci said a lab leak could be a viable hypothesis for the origin of the virus, he explicitly denounced certain spinoff ideas regarding his role in the origins of the virus, including his visit to the CIA.
“What is a conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject like it was a lab leak, and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak,” Fauci said, referring to his alleged meeting with officials at the CIA.
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The lack of a record of Fauci’s meeting at the CIA in part fueled speculation regarding his influence in the intelligence community’s report on the origin of the virus.
Fauci denied going to the CIA during the COVID-19 pandemic.
