At last week's House Select Committee on the Coronavirus, the GOP majority's lawyer Mitchell Benzine questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci about funding for the EcoHealth Alliance.
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00:00report. Some of the other emails from Dr. Morens, I just want to read into the record and ask you if
00:05his recollection is accurate. On April 27, 2020, Dr. Morens wrote, I am sure privately he would
00:12love to see Peter and EcoHealth fully restored, although he did once make the comment to me
00:17that Peter had screwed himself with the late report. I already told him that all that crap
00:21wasn't true. The late report was true, despite what Dr. Morens said. On April 21, 2021, Dr.
00:28Morens wrote that he was sure you would do anything you could to restore the funds to EcoHealth.
00:34On June 5, 2021, Dr. Morens wrote that you were working behind the scenes to undo the damage to
00:39EcoHealth. On October 21, 2021, Dr. Morens wrote, Peter, I had my regular meeting with Tony this
00:47morning. He immediately inquired about you and several times asked how you were doing.
00:51He used a lot of colorful language about the situation with attacks on EcoHealth.
00:56On October 25, 2021, Dr. Morens wrote that you were trying to protect EcoHealth.
01:01On March 22, 2021, Dr. Morens wrote, the most important is within NIH to get the decision
01:08reversed and the grant refunded. I believe Tony would like to do this. And on February 24, 2022,
01:15Dr. Morens wrote, it will be a small consolation to hear the following, but in my face-to-face
01:20meeting with Tony this morning, he once again brought up, as he usually does, your plight,
01:25Peter. Did you ever have any discussions with Dr. Morens about protecting EcoHealth or helping
01:30restore funding? Not at all. I don't know what, to be honest with you, Mitch, I just don't know
01:35what Dr. Morens is talking about with that. Maybe he's trying to, as he said, cheer up. He said that
01:42in front of this committee, cheer up Dr. Dasik. But to say that I'm getting involved in trying
01:48to help him or protect him, not so. Did you ever have any conversations with Dr. Morens about
01:54what Dr. Dasik was facing or about the termination of the grant?
01:59You know, he may have mentioned to me something like Dr. Dasik is going through terrible times,
02:06but I don't recall. It is conceivable that he would have mentioned that to me because,
02:10as he mentioned to you, that Dr. Dasik and he are very good friends. So it would not be surprising
02:16if sometime he had mentioned to me, boy, Dr. Dasik's going through some really tough times.
02:21Fine. That doesn't mean that I say you should help him.
02:24No, absolutely doesn't. So that's why we want to ask the questions and get the answers.
02:30During your transcribed interview with us, you were asked about whether or not Dr. Dasik
02:35had a conflict of interest in reviewing the origins of COVID-19. And you testified,
02:39you know, I hesitate to speculate about what someone else should do. The only people that
02:44I am involved with is my own staff, who we've mentioned many times in this discussion,
02:49who don't have a conflict of interest. With the benefit of hindsight and the work of this
02:54committee, do you believe Dr. Morens had a conflict of interest regarding EcoHealth?
02:58Well, from what we know now, he definitely had a conflict because he was communicating
03:04with a grantee of helping him in response to an NIH issue, which is a conflict of interest. I did
03:11not know that at the time when I made your statement. And I appreciate that. Yeah.
03:18Sticking with EcoHealth, in April 2020, NIH terminated and then subsequently reinstated and
03:25then suspended the EcoHealth grant that had the Wuhan Institute as a subgrantee. Do you recall
03:30that decision? Yes.
03:32Were you involved at all in that decision? No.
03:35You previously testified to House Energy and Commerce that you were in essence told to cancel
03:40the grant. Do you recall who told you? We got it from a number of... Now, retrospectively,
03:47we found out how it was. It was the White House told the department to tell the NIH to cancel
03:52the grant. Did you agree with the cancellation?
04:00What is that? Do we need to listen to that? He was escorted out.
04:04Yeah. Okay, good. I'm sorry. Repeat the question, Mitch.
04:08Did you agree with the cancellation? You know, it wasn't a question of agreeing
04:12or disagreeing. It was like, can we really do that? I don't think that you can do that. And
04:18as it turned out, I was right because the general counsel of HHS said, by the way,
04:24you can't do that. You've got to restore the grant.
04:27And that's why they restored it and then suspended it pending the compliance review.
04:31Exactly. Not to keep reading Dr. Moran's emails,
04:35but on June 24th, 2020, Dr. Moran's wrote an email. He, referencing you, made some additional
04:43comments to the effect that this came from the White House and he was totally opposed to it.
04:48You weren't totally opposed to it? Well, see, he's doing a lot of
04:52interpretation, Mitch. His interpretation, I was totally opposed to it. It was more of,
04:58can we really legally do that? And the answer turned out, I was right. No, you can't.
05:04Um, do you recall the, did the department ask you first or Dr. Collins first to terminate?
05:10I think it went directly to building 10, uh, excuse me, building one, the directors.
05:15Is that the NIH director's office? Yeah. Yeah. I think it went, it went
05:18from the department to NIH to us. Okay. Um, were you, prior to your
05:24retirement in December of 2022, were you involved in any of the compliance actions NIH took against
05:29EcoHealth? I don't believe so. I think the, the actual,
05:33and again, I'm, I'm a little unclear about the time, but I think most of the disciplinary actions
05:38actually occurred after I left, if I'm not mistaken. The, yes, the actual suspension and
05:44debarment occurred after you left, but there were a number of letters requesting lab notebooks or
05:49further information while you were still there. What happened, Mitch, and it's important to point
05:54this out. Once it was clear that there was compliance issues while I was still there,
06:03we were told that NIAID stay out of it. Compliance is going to be handled by building one, i.e. the
06:10NIH director and Mike Lauer. So the compliance was said, don't touch it. Don't go near it. Just
06:17we'll take care of it. And you just brought this up since the
06:21original termination, then suspension. NIH found numerous major violations of grant policies,
06:28has since debarred the Wuhan Institute of Virology and suspended and proposed for debarment,
06:33both EcoHealth as an institution and Dr. Daszak individually. Are you aware of those?
06:37Yes, I am.
06:40During previous TIs and hearings, when asked if they supported every one of these actions and
06:47supported the suspension and debarment, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Tabak said yes.
06:52Sitting here today, do you support the suspension and debarment of EcoHealth?
06:56Yes.
06:59I want to move on to the kind of like known unknowns of COVID origins to quote Dr. Lipkin's
07:06paper from early 2020. On October 20th, 2021, Dr. Tabak sent a letter to then ranking member,
07:15Mr. Comer, that said the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could
07:21not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. You've testified similarly,
07:26both back in January and today. Some of the things that I believe Chairman Griffith brought
07:33up was just kind of that statement results on some things, rests on some things that we just
07:39can't know. In your experience, Dr. Fauci, do researchers publish every virus that they sequence?
07:48No, I mean, I think researchers don't always publish every single thing they do.
07:55Do they routinely publish every experiment that they conduct?
08:01I'm sure there are people who don't publish every single experiment that they do.
08:06And then is there a lag time between the sampling, the analysis, and the publication?
08:14Yeah, I mean, publications often take months before they come out.
08:18Is it possible, if not plausible, that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
08:23have samples from between 2020 when they originally published a paper, or excuse me, 2015
08:30when they originally published a paper with all of their samples and now that are unpublished?
08:36Sure, it's possible. But Mitch, I might just throw in there, you can't get away from the fact
08:44that the viruses that were studied, that we, that the NIH gave them a grant to study,
08:52don't pull back on the fact that no matter what you did with those viruses, they were
08:57phylogenetically so different, they could not possibly be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2.
09:03And I agree with that. I guess my only point is that you don't know all the viruses they were
09:09working with. Yeah, and let's make that clear, because Congressman Griffith asked it, and I
09:15answered you quite honestly, that none of us can know everything that's going on in China,
09:23or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that's the reason why I say today, and I've said at the TI,
09:29I keep an open mind as to what the origin is. The last thing...