COVID-19 lab leak “not a conspiracy theory,” Fauci says

More than four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and government officials still don’t know exactly how it started. Republicans in Congress still want answers—and accountability.

On Monday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee questioned former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, about whether U.S. funding for overseas research played a role in the outbreak.

“We are following the facts, holding wrongdoers accountable, and planning for a better, more prepared future,” Committee chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said at opening statements.

Lingering questions over how the COVID-19 pandemic originated have overlapped in recent years with scrutiny over so-called gain-of-function research conducted in China. The possibility that COVID could have originated as a man-made virus has heightened concerns among Republicans over whether Fauci enabled research to develop viruses not found in nature.

Republicans’ alarm stems from an NIAID grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, a global environmental health nonprofit. From there, the nonprofit presented a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in China that studies dangerous pathogens. Fauci was director of NIAID at the time.

According to the NIH, “an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen” (P3CO) is defined as “bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that are likely highly transmissible and capable of wide, uncontrollable spread in human populations and highly virulent, making them likely to cause significant morbidity or mortality in humans.”

When asked by Republicans if he had knowingly authorized any such experiments, Fauci said he believed the research conducted in China didn’t meet that bar.

“I would not characterize it the way you did,” Fauci said. “The National Institutes of Health through a subaward to the institute of virology funded research on the surveillance of and the possibility of emerging infections. I would not characterize it as ‘dangerous gain-of-function research.’”

Gain-of-function research involves modifying naturally occurring animal viruses in a lab to make them more contagious among humans. On its own, it isn’t illegal. House Republicans tried to ban the practice last fall, but the bill, a component of a larger spending package, went nowhere in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

“Influenza is a gain of function virus to make it grow better in eggs,” Fauci said, referencing one of the ways flu vaccinations are made. “Making an E. coli to manufacture insulin is telling the E. coli to do something it wasn’t able to do before by mutations.”

The National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens guidelines forbids experiments which could cause a pandemic.

Fauci contends that anything the Wuhan institute did with NIAID funds would have fallen far short of the P3CO definition, but he was unable to say he had an exhaustive view of what the institute did or what viruses it studied. He strongly affirmed that the viruses he was aware of that had been studied under the grant were impossibly far from COVID’s genetic material for them to explain its possible origin.

Democrats coming to the defense of Fauci on Monday stressed the significance of the definitional distinctions used to describe gain of function.

“This has been a cause of great conspiratorial accusations that are false,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif. “Under the P3CO [definition] it is not allowed to enhance the transmissibility or the pathogenicity of a potential pandemic pathogen,” Ruiz said. “That’s already been settled. NIAID and Dr. Fauci did not fund P3CO-defined gain of function research.”

With a gap between the P3CO definition and a wide net of research that could have been happening in Wuhan, could have COVID come from a man-made virus, related to some kind of research at the Institute of Virology? Fauci isn’t ruling it out.

“I keep an open mind as to what the origin is,” Fauci said. “I feel, based on the data that I have seen, that the more likely—not definitive—explanation is a natural spillover from an animal reservoir, but since there has not been definitive proof one way or the other, we have to keep and open mind that it could be either.”

When asked if that possibility was a “conspiracy theory,” Fauci said it was not.

“No, I mentioned that several times. Conceptually, no, it’s not a conspiracy theory,” Fauci added.