By FARNOUSH AMIRI (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Anthony Fauci, former chief White House medical adviser, is predicted to testify earlier than Congress early subsequent yr as a part of Republicans’ yearslong investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and the U.S. response to the illness.
Fauci, who served because the nation’s high infectious illness skilled earlier than retiring final yr, will sit for transcribed interviews in early January and a public listening to at a later date. It shall be his first look earlier than the Republican-controlled House.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic first requested a sit-down with Fauci in February, however an settlement over the timing and particulars of the interviews was simply reached with Fauci’s attorneys earlier this month, in line with a letter despatched Thursday from the committee.
“It is time for Dr. Fauci to confront the facts and address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the GOP chairman of the committee, stated in a press release.
House Republicans have investigated whether or not Fauci or different U.S. authorities officers took half in any kind of cover-up in regards to the origin of the lethal virus. Fauci, who served below each Republican and Democratic presidents, has repeatedly known as the GOP criticism nonsense.
Wenstrup, who can be a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused Fauci and U.S. intelligence of withholding key details about its investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee final yr issued a employees report arguing that there are “indications” that the virus could have been developed as a bioweapon inside China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That would contradict a U.S. intelligence group evaluation launched in unclassified kind in August 2021 that stated analysts don’t imagine the virus was a bioweapon, although it could have leaked in a lab accident.
Many scientists, together with Fauci, who till December served as Biden’s chief medical adviser, say they nonetheless imagine the virus almost certainly emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, a well-documented phenomenon referred to as a spillover occasion. Virus researchers haven’t publicly recognized any key new scientific proof that may make the lab-leak speculation extra doubtless.
But Republicans have accused Fauci of mendacity to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” analysis — the follow of enhancing a virus in a lab to review its potential affect in the true world — at a virology lab in Wuhan. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to nominate a particular prosecutor to analyze Fauci’s statements.
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Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Nomaan Merchant contributed to his report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”