At a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Monday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) spoke to Dr. Anthony Fauci about his work and Covid-19.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 And I yield back.
00:03 I now recognize Mr. Griffith for a three-minute statement.
00:07 Good morning.
00:08 I want to again thank the leadership of this committee for including the Energy and Commerce
00:11 Committee in this hearing.
00:13 Dr. Fauci, the recent revelations that Dr. Moran, a senior advisor and your chief of
00:18 staff, Greg Fulkers, routinely evaded federal records laws, including the Freedom of Information
00:24 Act, or FOIA, and those were a shock.
00:27 That was a shock.
00:28 I've been doing oversight now for over 14 years, or right at 14 years, and the scale
00:33 of the effort to evade FOIA by some at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
00:38 Diseases, or NIAID, has surprised even me.
00:42 These men were among your most senior and trusted staff at an agency you led for nearly
00:47 40 years.
00:48 They worked for you for decades.
00:50 Your calendars show that you met with them multiple times a week during the pandemic.
00:54 You co-authored dozens of papers with Dr. Moran.
00:59 He directly implicates you.
01:02 Even the head of the NIAID FOIA office was apparently in on some of this conspiracy.
01:09 And I know my colleagues on the other side love to say we're always talking conspiracy,
01:13 but when the facts lead you there, whether you knew about it or not, when the facts lead
01:16 you that your agency was involved in some form of a conspiracy related to COVID origins,
01:22 we have to follow those facts.
01:24 It is hard to believe that all of this occurred without your knowledge and/or approval.
01:32 In civil law, when one party has destroyed or refuses to produce evidence that's within
01:37 its possession, a jury is allowed to draw an adverse inference that the information
01:43 destroyed or not produced was unfavorable.
01:47 Therefore, until we get a full accounting of all of the communications among NIAID's
01:52 leadership, it's reasonable for us to assume that missing information would mirror the
01:58 private doubts expressed by so many virologists and other scientists related to your public
02:04 positions.
02:06 While telling the public, the media, and Congress that COVID-19 almost certainly emerged from
02:10 nature, experts you convened as a team privately worried that a research-related incident was
02:18 a possible, if not the probable, origin of the virus.
02:23 Dr. Christian Anderson even said in February of 2020, quote, "I think the main thing still
02:29 in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened
02:35 because they were already doing this type of work and molecular data is fully consistent
02:40 with that scenario."
02:41 Further, while you and other NIAID officials were assuring us that the virus could not
02:47 have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIAID didn't actually have an idea as to what
02:54 the full scope of Wuhan's coronavirus research was or even the trajectory of its gain-of-function
03:00 research.
03:01 Now, that may be because EcoHealth wasn't giving you the reports.
03:03 I grant that.
03:04 But this joint investigation has shown just how little oversight NIAID does of risky experiments
03:11 involving potential pandemic pathogens.
03:15 NIAID set up a system designed to greenlight potentially risky experiments while avoiding
03:19 HHS department-level review.
03:22 The same program officers who act as advocates for their scientific area are responsible
03:27 for assessing whether an experiment is too dangerous.
03:30 That creates a conflict of interest.
03:32 I think that means that when an agency is taking the final approval, we ought to take
03:37 that final approval away from the agencies like NIAID that fund it.
03:41 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
03:42 I yield back.
03:43 I now recognize Ms. Castor for a three-minute statement.