Fauci Grilled by Lawmakers on Masks, Vaccine Mandates and Lab Leak Theory

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on Covid, on Monday forcefully denied Republican allegations that he had helped fund research that sparked the pandemic or had covered up the possibility it originated in a laboratory, calling the accusations “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”

In an occasionally testy appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Fauci read aloud an email from February 2020 in which he urged a prominent scientist who was then suspicious about a lab leak “to determine if his concerns are validated” and if so, “very quickly” report them to the F.B.I.

“It is inconceivable that anyone who reads this email could conclude that I was trying to cover up the possibility of a laboratory leak,” Dr. Fauci testified.

Monday’s session was the culmination of a 15-month inquiry that was billed as an investigation into the pandemic’s origins, but that has lately turned into a referendum on Dr. Fauci, an 83-year-old immunologist who spent more than half a century as a government scientist and became the public face of the pandemic response under two presidents.

Democrats painted Dr. Fauci as an American hero, with Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, disparaging the Republican-led inquiry as “a witch hunt.” Republicans blamed him for school closings, mask ordinances and other “invasive” policies. One, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, tore into Dr. Fauci, saying, “You belong in prison.”

The Republican-led subcommittee is the only Congressional panel charged with weighing the origins of the worst pandemic in a century and the American policy failures that made it so devastating. Dr. Fauci, the panel’s most prized quarry, was at the center of a Covid response that left the country with far more deaths than many other wealthy nations.