Former US government COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci fiercely denied Monday that he sought to cover up the origins of the pandemic, in his first public testimony before Congress since stepping down from office.
Anthony Fauci had become the United States’ most visible expert on the subject in the chaotic early days of the epidemic in 2020. But his differences with former President Donald Trump over the response to the crisis had sparked criticism. fury from the right.
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He now lives under protection, due to death threats against his family.
Republicans say the 83-year-old immunologist helped start the pandemic by approving funding passed to Chinese scientists, whom they accuse of creating the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the cause of COVID-19. 19.
Dr. Anthony Fauci
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The former face of the fight against the epidemic in the United States was pressed with questions by Republicans on the House of Representatives subcommittee on the pandemic, about his knowledge of so-called experiments gain of function” which aim to modify viruses in order to find ways to fight them.
This controversial technique is at the center of a theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory. It would be “molecularly impossible” that the bat viruses studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China had mutated into SARS-CoV-2, said Dr.r Fauci.
The accusations of certain Republicans according to which he influenced the CIA’s analyzes on the origins of the pandemic, natural or resulting from a laboratory, are “totally false and simply grotesque”, he insisted.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
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Anthony Fauci led the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years, until December 2022, and contributed to health policies implemented to combat the pandemic that killed 1.1 million Americans.
He made enemies among Donald Trump’s supporters by correcting misinformation about the former Republican president, who is seeking a second term in November.
During 15 months of investigation, the subcommittee listened to approximately 100 hours of testimony and reviewed mountains of documents without finding evidence linking Anthony Fauci to potentially dangerous research in Wuhan.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and scientists around the world have investigated the emergence of the virus and most believe it was transmitted from animals to humans in China.
US intelligence ruled in an analysis published last year that it was nevertheless possible that the virus was genetically modified and escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.
