Fauci Faces Senate GOP Questions Again 07/29 06:14

   

   (AP) -- Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. scientist who helped lead the nation's 
COVID-19 pandemic response, is set to face off -- again -- with a Republican 
senator probing the origins of the coronavirus.

   Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky subpoenaed Fauci to appear before a Senate 
committee Wednesday. It's part of Paul's yearslong accusations that the 
now-retired infectious disease expert had lied about the pandemic, something 
Fauci has called "preposterous."

   Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of 
Fauci's personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes 
about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the 
social media platform X that what Fauci "wrote privately and what he told the 
country are two different stories."

   Some of the diary entries -- including his uncertainty in the pandemic's 
earliest days as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus 
and how best to curb it before vaccines could be created -- already were 
reflected in Fauci's 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.

   But they're likely to further inflame a partisan divide that, years after 
the pandemic, still makes Fauci a target of vitriol from people who blame him 
for mask mandates and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as 
hundreds of thousands of people were dying.

   In an earlier letter to Paul, Fauci's attorneys called his allegations 
"absolutely baseless" and part of an "obsessive and groundless vendetta."

   Scientists scrambled to Fauci's defense ahead of the unusual hearing -- the 
second time the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has been back 
before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving the government in 
2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, he 
talked the nation through numerous outbreaks over decades, including HIV, Ebola 
and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.

   In a public letter, more than 150 infectious disease experts and other 
scientists wrote that "no credible evidence has been produced to support these 
absurd charges" and that they are "urging our elected representatives in 
Congress stop these witch-hunts."

   The expected crux of Wednesday's hearing: whether NIH-funded research in 
China may have played any role in how the pandemic started.

   Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped 
from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in 
the Chinese city of Wuhan. There's no new scientific information supporting 
that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul 
champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 did not 
find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

   Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories, but that 
there's more evidence supporting COVID-19's natural origins, the way other 
deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people.

   Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded 
"gain of function" research -- the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to 
study its potential real-world impact -- at a lab in Wuhan.

   NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance 
that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses 
commonly carried by bats. But the definition of "gain of function" covers both 
general research and especially risky experiments to "enhance" the ability of 
potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. 
Fauci has previously stressed he was using the risky experiment definition and 
that "it would be molecularly impossible" for those bat virus experiments to 
have turned into the pandemic virus.

   The Trump administration last year paused some federally funded 
gain-of-function research and on Tuesday announced new rules to tighten 
oversight.