House Republicans revealed on Saturday that the former director of the National Institutes of Health corroborated the perspective of White House COVID-19 policy adviser Anthony Fauci on the failures and origins of the pandemic.
Francis Collins, who stepped down from his directorship in 2021, was interviewed by members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Friday.
On Monday and Tuesday, Fauci, former director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the NIH umbrella, underwent 14 hours of transcribed interview testimony before the subcommittee.
According to a summary report released by subcommittee Republicans on Saturday, Collins corroborated that the 6-feet-apart social distancing recommendation promoted by public health officials during the pandemic was not based on scientific data.
Fauci reportedly told House Republicans on Tuesday that the social distancing guidance “just sort of happened.”
House Republicans also said Collins agreed with Fauci’s testimony from earlier in the week that the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a viral research lab in Wuhan, China, “is not a conspiracy theory.”
A spokesperson for Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), the subcommittee chairman, told the Washington Examiner that the transcriptions from this week’s interviews likely will require multiple levels of review prior to the production of a final report.
Democratic members of the subcommittee have been highly critical of Republican efforts to interview both Fauci and Collins, saying that the exercise is a partisan attempt to vilify public health officials.
A spokesperson for the Select Subcommittee Democrats told the Washington Examiner that they spoke with Collins about the NIH’s definition of gain-of-function research and clarified the agency’s protocol for evaluating research for dangerous pathogens.
Republican members released a report this summer with a timeline of events in the development of the influential scientific paper “Proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the authors said no “type of laboratory-based scenario [was] possible.”
Republicans allege that Collins and Fauci encouraged the authors to intentionally discredit the lab-leak theory of origin during a multi-person phone call on Feb. 1, 2020, shortly before the publication of “Proximal origins.”
Collins, according to subcommittee Democrats, “firmly refuted” these allegations
A Democratic aide told the Washington Examiner that Collins testified that the Feb. 1 call was orchestrated by World Health Organization Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar and that both Fauci and Collins played a minimal role in the conversation.
“Dr. Collins is a dedicated public servant who has worked tirelessly over the course of his career to advance America’s public health,” the Democratic spokesperson said, emphasizing “the need for forward-looking reforms that improve access to lifesaving vaccines, therapeutics, and care both now and in the event of a future public health crisis.”
