OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has responded to the threats from the incoming Republican Congress that he may be called to testify during an investigation.
“There have been all these House Republican calls for investigations into to the origins of Covid and saying they’re gonna bring you up to Capitol Hill. Do you think that wanes as you step down?” ABC ‘Face The Nation’ host Margaret Brennan said on Sunday.
“Well, I don’t think it’s gonna wane for me. The Republican House has said that they’re gonna — and that’s fine with me,” the doctor said.
“You’ll appear?” the host said.
“Oh, of course. I mean, I’m very much in favor of legitimate oversight. Absolutely. I mean, I’ve testified before Congress, given the 38 years that I’ve been director, literally hundreds of times in many oversight hearings,” he said.
“They’ve clearly politicized it — I’m not political at all, period,” he said. “I’ve never been. And anybody who knows anything about me knows that that’s the case. But it is very clear when people are running their campaigns with an anti-Fauci element to it. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I mean, this is a public health issue.”
“I’d be more than happy to explain publicly or otherwise everything that we’ve done, and I could defend and explain everything that we’ve done from a public health standpoint present by,” he said.
NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci tells @margbrennan he will testify in front of the next Congress if called upon. “The Republican House has said that they're going to and that's fine with me.” pic.twitter.com/dT6YzIbJ9E
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 27, 2022
Republican Rep. Andy Biggs issued a brutal warning to Dr. Anthony Fauci as he is set to give his last address to reporters before leaving government.
Fauci is set to address reporters on Tuesday, in what is expected to be the last time he gives a briefing before he leaves government for the first time in five decades at the end of the year. But that is not going to save him from the new Republican Congress and its investigations, the Arizona representative said.
“Fauci is scheduled to give a final briefing today before he leaves government. He thinks resigning will prevent him from being held accountable. He’s wrong. We’ll be bringing him in ASAP,” the representative said.
Fauci is scheduled to give a final briefing today before he leaves government.
He thinks resigning will prevent him from being held accountable.
He's wrong.
We'll be bringing him in ASAP.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) November 22, 2022
It comes a month after Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul threatened an investigation into Fauci if Republicans won in the midterms.
Paul said he plans to subpoena Fauci’s records if Republicans retake the Senate and he becomes chairman of a committee.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said. “We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again.”
Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan made similar comments, saying Republicans will “uncover” what Fauci knew about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, an ally to Jordan, released Fauci’s financial records. The records appear to show that Fauci and his wife have a combined net worth of around $10 million.
Records also showed that Fauci and his wife were paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend four galas and ceremonies — three of them virtual — during the pandemic.
Jordan argued that these revelations and recently released emails prove there’s a “need to investigate Fauci.”
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this,” Jordan said, adding that his colleagues would push for a congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
“Because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Jordan argued. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.’”
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now-famous letter The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did,” Jordan continued.
“The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, that the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. The virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab,” he added.
“They changed their position,” Jordan argued. “And a few months later, guess what? They get an $8.9 million, both him and Dr. [Robert] Garry – the guy who said it couldn’t happen naturally.”
