House Republicans began their investigation Monday into the origins of COVID-19 by releasing a series of letters to current and former Biden administration officials for documents and testimony.
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee and its subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic requested information from several people, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the hypothesis that the coronavirus was accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
“This investigation must start from where and how this virus happened so that we can try to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chairman of the virus subcommittee, in a statement.
Rep. James Comer, R-Tenn., chairman of the oversight committee, added that Republicans will “follow the facts” and “hold the US government officials involved in the cover-up accountable.”
The letter to Fauci, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others is the latest attempt by the new Republican majority to keep promises made during the 2022 midterms campaign.
Wenstrup, who is also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused US intelligence of withholding important facts about the investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee last year released a staff report saying there were “indications” that the virus may have been developed as a biological weapon at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This would contradict a US intelligence community assessment released in unclassified form in August 2021 that said analysts do not believe the virus is a biological weapon, although it may have been leaked in a laboratory accident.
Letters sent on Mondays do not require the cooperation of recipients. But when announcing the Republican staff report in December, Wenstrup said lawmakers would issue subpoenas if potential witnesses did not cooperate.
Initially rejected by most public health experts and government officials, the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from an accidental laboratory leak began to be examined after President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the matter in May 2021.
The 90-day review is intended to push American intelligence agencies to gather more information and examine what they already have. Former State Department officials under President Donald Trump have publicly pushed for further investigation into the origins of the virus, as have scientists and the World Health Organization.
Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December was Biden’s chief medical adviser, said they still believe the virus likely arose in nature and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as spillover events. Virus researchers have yet to publicly identify new scientific evidence that could lead to the lab leak hypothesis.
But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health was funding “gain of function” research — the practice of increasing viruses in the lab to study their potential real-world effects — in virology. lab in Wuhan, China. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statement.
Fauci, who has been the nation’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, called the GOP’s criticism nonsense.
Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., previously said an October 2021 letter from the NIH to Congress contradicted Fauci. But there is no clear evidence or scientific consensus that “gain of function” research is funded by the NIH, and there is no link between US-funded research and the emergence of COVID-19. The NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding is not being used for research that involves increasing the infectivity and lethality of pathogens.
However, Fauci indicated in November that he would “fully cooperate and testify” if Republicans follow through on plans to investigate the origins of COVID.
“I have no problem testifying — we can defend and explain everything we said,” he told reporters during a White House briefing last year.
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