Fauci testifies publicly before House panel on COVID origins, controversies

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert until leaving the government in 2022, faces heated questioning Monday from Republican lawmakers about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong while missing an important opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.

Fauci – alternately a trusted voice during the pandemic and the target of partisan attacks, even death threats – spent 14 hours over two days in January being grilled by the House panel behind closed doors. On Monday, they’re questioning him again, in public and on camera for the first time since he ended more than five decades of government service.

This time around he’ll face a new set of questions about the credibility of his former agency, the National Institutes of Health. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIH colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not discussing controversial issues on government email.

The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory. A U.S. intelligence analysis says there’s insufficient evidence to prove either way — and a recent Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the source