Fauci's ruff day: Ex-NIAID director passes buck on puppy experiments, weak evidence for COVID rules

South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem likely euthanized her aspirations for higher office by volunteering that she shot and killed her dog to protect her children, then calling for President Biden to kill his because of the canine's penchant for biting people.

Congressional Republicans are hoping to make "America's doctor" just as despised by the American public by using Dr. Anthony Fauci's defense of gruesome experiments on puppies to cast a new light on his COVID-19 recommendations and his strategic silence when he thought an intervention went too far, as well as question his grip on the agency he ran for 38 years.

A year and a half after he retired from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and five months after a 14-hour transcribed interview the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic only released Friday, Fauci repeatedly challenged GOP assertions while passing the buck for alleged malfeasance by his staff in a rare Monday hearing.

Panel Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, opened by reminding members not to "engage in personalities," alluding to insults between Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Democratic Reps. Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about each other's physical appearance at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month.

Greene made a spectacle again by refusing to address Fauci as "doctor" after showing an image from an NIAID-funded fly-biting experiment on beagle puppies. (Fauci earned a doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University.) Animal experiment watchdog White Coat Waste Project sponsored a mobile "BeagleGate" billboard on Capitol Hill on Monday and took credit for Greene's image.

Fauci said the "humane" experiments followed "strict regulations" and that he signed off on funding because a peer-review committee approved it, echoing his explanation in Fauci's transcribed interview for "never" reading grant applications before approving them.

"That man does not deserve to have a [medical] license," Greene said after Democrats asked Wenstrup to declare her "mister" phrasing a violation of House rules. "Gentlelady will suspend," the chairman practically shouted as Greene kept talking.

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, grew exhausted with Fauci disclaiming responsibility for his decisions, such as signing grant approvals "en masse."

"There's no one to hold accountable because these systems of accountability have become systems of plausible deniability," Cloud fumed. "It would be physically impossible" for him to review every grant, Fauci said, "and you trust the expertise and the competence of the staff."

Fauci shrugged on a handful of questions, notably on why then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, a virologist, was left off the pivotal Feb. 1, 2020, conference call among Fauci and outside scientists who thought SARS-CoV-2 looked manipulated, like Redfield, but then wrote the "Proximal Origin" paper arguing the opposite.

Emails showed Fauci invited fellow lab-leak skeptic Francis Collins, then-National Institutes of Health director, to the call. Redfield told the subcommittee last year that he was told federal health officials excluded him to ensure "a single narrative" on COVID origins.

Fauci seemed surprised when Wenstrup told him the agency under his watch awarded three grants via the New York Blood Center to a Chinese People's Liberation Army official, Yusen Zhou, who reportedly conducted animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019 – a suspected source of COVID – and filed a COVID vaccine patent in February 2020.

He said he didn't know the State Department warned in 2005 that the Chinese government was working on bioweapons. Intelligence agencies briefed Fauci about "possibilities" of "activities going on in different laboratories" after the pandemic started, but those were his only conversations with U.S. intelligence, he told Wenstrup.

Echoing former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky's testimony last year, which her own January 2021 email contradicted, Fauci told Wenstrup "the first iteration" of COVID vaccines "did prevent infection and subsequently, obviously, transmission," while allowing it was "not 100%." 

He rephrased even more cautiously later in the hearing, telling Cloud that "in the beginning [vaccines] clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people."

Subcommittee Democrats released a staff report on the GOP's failure to offer evidence of Fauci's alleged lies on funding gain-of-function research and orchestrating a campaign to suppress lab-leak, but some made their own dubious claims in the hearing.

After accusing Republicans of a "medical big lie," House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin repeated a discredited claim about then-President Trump recommending Americans inject bleach to treat COVID, while Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., implied that social distancing was a life-saving mitigation.

After Fauci explained what he meant in his interview by saying the CDC's 6-foot rule "just sort of appeared" – it was not based on a "prospective clinical trial" but rather a study of how far droplets can carry – Ross gave him an out.

She asked whether social distancing "and other public health measures to reduce transmission save lives," using the "layered mitigation" talking points often used by public health officials to avoid evaluating any intervention in isolation. Fauci answered yes.

Fauci told Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa., he discussed social distancing recommendations with the CDC but didn't feel it was appropriate to publicly question a fellow agency's determination, even after it became clear aerosolization is COVID's primary driver. 

He waved off the lack of rigorous evidence behind many interventions when they were made, telling Cloud the "tsunami of deaths" from COVID justified business, church and school closures and stay-at-home directives, though the duration of mitigations is "debatable."

"There was no study that did masks on kids – you couldn't do the study, you had to respond" to 4,000 to 5,000 deaths a day, Fauci said when Cloud asked for evidence for one-size-fits-all mask mandates. Cloud said his own district's hospitals shut down routine care to prepare for a COVID tsunami that never came, resulting in needless deaths.

The retired director also repeatedly downplayed his closeness to his senior scientific adviser David Morens, whose emails show Morens explicitly pledging to evade Freedom of Information Act requests by deleting official email and using a private account for communications.

The "title" the agency gave Morens just means Fauci wrote research papers with him, not that he advised Fauci on "institute policy or other substantive issues," he said. "To the best of my recollection" Fauci said Morens didn't attend his weekly leadership or daily staff meetings.

Fauci called Morens an "aberrancy and an outlier" among NIAID staff. "Are your senior advisers not trusted staff?" Joyce asked incredulously.

Asked whether Morens reported directly to Fauci, he told House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., "I'm not sure" but it was more likely a lower official. Morens came into his office "occasionally" but could not enter as he pleased, Fauci said, contradicting Morens' characterization.

Morens violated NIH policy in some of his actions but in others simply behaved in a "wrong and inappropriate" way, Fauci said. "I don't know where" Morens got the idea, as his email said, that "Tony's recent numerous comments" suggest Fauci is trying to "protect" Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which passed through NIH grants to WIV.