Fauci to Face Grilling by Republican Committee on Covid Origins

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on Covid, is set to return to Capitol Hill on Monday for a reunion with some of his fiercest antagonists: members of a Republican-led House panel who accuse him of helping to set off the worst pandemic in a century.

Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have spent 15 months rooting 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 panel has so far found nothing linking the 83-year-old immunologist to the beginnings of the Covid outbreak in China.

But the panel has turned up emails suggesting that Dr. Fauci’s former aides were trying to evade public records laws at the medical research agency he ran for 38 years until his retirement in December 2022.

Some of those emails paint Dr. Fauci as being preoccupied with his public image; one April 2021 message from an aide said that while Dr. Fauci “prides himself on being like teflon,” he appeared to be “getting worried about the brown stuff hitting the fan” over questions about research funded by his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Over the years, the agency gave research grants to EcoHealth Alliance, an American nonprofit group that partnered with international scientists — including some at a coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the pandemic eventually started — as part of efforts to anticipate disease outbreaks.

Dr. Fauci’s appearance at a hearing of the House panel on Monday will be lawmakers’ first chance to ask him about his agency’s record-keeping practices. For Republicans on the committee, the hearing is also the pinnacle, so far, of a long campaign against American scientists and health officials who they have suggested helped start the Covid pandemic.