House Republicans plan to press former top government adviser Anthony Fauci in person next week over allegations that he helped the government shut down debate and dialogue over critical medical and public health questions at the height of the pandemic, such as those relating to the efficacy of masks, vaccine mandates, and experimental treatments for COVID-19.
The closed-door testimony scheduled for Monday and Tuesday represents the first opportunity for the Republican majority on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to directly question Fauci, who Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called the “face of the pandemic,” since he retired from the government in December 2022.
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Many conservatives blame Fauci, who was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top COVID adviser to both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, for many of the disruptions imposed on businesses, civic organizations, and churches during the pandemic, and argue that he wielded influence through the government to silence dissenting experts.
“When it comes to your health, no one knows better than you and your doctor, but the doctors have to be provided with accurate data, correct information, and honest information to be able to have a scientific debate,” Wenstrup told the Washington Examiner in an interview previewing the questioning of Fauci.
The subcommittee has spent much of the past year reviewing the policies enacted by the government during the pandemic as well as investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in late 2019 — as well as whether officials have stymied efforts to learn about the possibility of a leak from a lab.
The efforts have yielded some bipartisan agreement on the need to strengthen biosafety standards in research, but the two parties are at odds over the approach to questioning Fauci. Subcommittee ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-CA) told the Washington Examiner that he sees the Republican push for a transcribed interview with Fauci as “a politically motivated probe to vilify Dr. Fauci and our nation’s public health officials” in the furtherance of “their extreme, conspiratorial narrative” that the virus originated in a lab.
Wenstrup says, however, that he also plans to ask Fauci about policy decisions made at the top levels of government during the pandemic, such as Fauci’s changing stance on the efficacy of masking and vaccine mandate policy. According to Wenstrup, examining the way federal actions interfered in the personal doctor-patient relationship is equally important to the discussion of COVID-19 origins if the goal is to rebuild “a public health system that Americans can trust.”
“To me, a lot of this is not so much of any type of interrogation — although some of it probably will seem that way,” Wenstrup said. “We’re trying to find lessons learned, so it’s a conversation to [establish] exactly what happened [and] why were decisions made.”
Wenstrup, co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus and former military physician, said that threatening to revoke doctors’ licenses for suggesting treatments like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine was a prime example of squashing academic debate in medicine.
“This is not science as I know it. This is not medicine as I know it,” Wenstrup said. “I’ve said from the very beginning … Americans needed to be hearing from the doctors that are treating COVID patients, not the politician and not the person in the lab.”
Although Wenstrup has supported the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and obtained the vaccination himself, he said he also plans to ask Fauci about vaccine mandates for employment and education.
“Americans don’t do well with ‘because I told you so.’ It’s just not in our nature,” Wenstrup said.
Scheduling Fauci’s transcribed interview was onerous, Wenstrup says, but not unlike the “very, very difficult” process of obtaining other information from the Department of Health and Human Services.
In November, Republicans from the Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees subpoenaed top HHS officials to address repeated stonewalling from the department on obtaining information on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The subpoena was a result of HHS staff informing the committees that the department did not have the staffing or technological capacities to fulfill congressional requests for information.
“Some in government think the truth is harmful to the American people, that they know better than you,” Wenstrup said. “That’s Soviet Union-style, where lying is OK as long as it benefits the state.”
Ruiz previously told the Washington Examiner that opacity among public health agencies, especially failure to comply with congressional subpoenas, is a bipartisan problem.
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Wenstrup said that his subcommittee will continue to push the public health agencies for information on how to learn from the failures of the pandemic.
“We created your agency, and we fund your agency, so you don’t get to not cooperate with us,” Wenstrup said, directing his comment toward HHS en masse. “Americans deserve a trusted public health arena that they can rely on, and it’s not there right now.”
