In the past two weeks, the Biden administration suspended federal funding for Peter Daszak and his organization EcoHealth Alliance. The administration also proposed barring both Daszak personally and the organization from receiving federal money in the future.
Though the Department of Health and Human Services maintains these decisions were “independent actions,” they were made after bipartisan questioning of Daszak during a hearing examining his compliance with federal grant requirements.
The committee followed up Daszak’s hearing by bringing in David Morens, a top deputy and longtime advisor to Anthony Fauci. Morens faced bipartisan grilling about apparent efforts to hide his emails from Freedom of Information Act requests.
Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) noted the anger at Morens was not political.
“It is not antiscience to hold you accountable for defying the public’s trust and misusing official resources,” Ruiz said during the hearing.
Still, the questions about the origins of the coronavirus are far from settled and some Democrats on the panel have bemoaned the opportunities that they feel have been missed because of partisanship.
Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) told The Hill she doesn’t think that the subcommittee has really used its influence “for good,” and that there have been so many missed opportunities for bipartisan work “that it almost breaks my heart.”
The ultimate test of the committee’s productivity could come next week, when Anthony Fauci is set to testify.
Fauci is no stranger to congressional hearings, but this will be the first since he retired from public service and comes on the heels of Morens’s testimony, which seemed to indirectly implicate Fauci as being aware of misconduct.
“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens wrote in one email to Daszak brought up during the hearing.
Fauci sat for a closed-door transcribed interview over two days earlier this year, and Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) appears eager to publicly ask about Fauci’s description of “serious systemic failures in our public health system that deserve further investigation.”
“On June 3, Americans will have an opportunity to hear directly from Dr. Fauci about his role in overseeing our nation’s pandemic response, shaping pandemic-era polices, and promoting singular, questionable narratives about the origins of COVID-19,” Wenstrup said in a statement.
