Fauci admits he 'never' read research grant applications before approving them

After months of gripes by Democratic lawmakers, the GOP majority on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has finally released the full two-part transcribed interview for Dr. Anthony Fauci, one business day before the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director testifies before the subcommittee.

Republicans released some tidbits soon after Fauci's interview in January, including his admission that the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origins was not a conspiracy theory and that he had no evidence for the six-foot social distancing rule, but issued a longer cheat-sheet to the full interview Friday.

They also posted transcribed interviews with Fauci's former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, whose unearthed emails show apparently intentional misspellings of proper nouns likely to be searched in Freedom of Information Act requests on COVID origins, and NIAID Principal Deputy Director Hugh Auchincloss, Deputy Director for Clinical Research Cliff Lane and NIAID Associate Director for International Research Affairs Gray Handley.

Among the revelations: Fauci admitted he "never" read a research grant application, including the EcoHealth Alliance's proposal with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for alleged gain-of-function research that may have unleased SARS-CoV-2, before approving them. He just signed whatever the National Advisory Council agreed should be funded.

Fauci said he didn't know whether NIAID would "independently verify the biosafety of a foreign lab?" such as WIV or its grants "go through any type of national security review," such as through the National Security Council or intelligence community.

He denied that his former senior scientific adviser David Morens, who also got caught intentionally evading FOIA, had a "conflict of interest," despite calling EcoHealth President Peter Daszak his "best friend" and showing Daszak FOIA requests so he could prepare for the releases.

Fauci was unable to "recall specifically reading "any studies or data supporting masking for children" but said it's "still up in the air" whether such masking contributes to "learning loss and speech and development issues," citing "a lot of conflicting studies."

A Biden administration official blocked Fauci from answering whether he recommended "instituting travel restrictions in response to the pandemic," after Fauci said he "fundamentally" agreed with every Trump administration travel restriction. The GOP majority said this undermines "the public narrative" that the restrictions were "xenophobic."

After implicitly supporting COVID vaccine mandates by saying that making life "difficult" for holdouts makes them "lose their ideological bullshit," Fauci said it was time to "look at the psyche of  the country" through "social-type studies to figure out" whether vaccine mandates "actually cause more people to not want to get vaccinated, or not."

Fauci's hearing is at 10 a.m. June 3.