Retired Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served as the public health voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, will face a tough line of questions from the House subcommittee investigating the response, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, its chair, told Newsmax on Sunday.
The grilling, scheduled for Monday, comes after the transcript from two days of Fauci's closed-door interviews with the subcommittee earlier this year, and the Ohio Republican told Newsmax's "Sunday Report" that the hearings revealed several details that need further investigation.
"During that process, Dr. Fauci said the 6 feet of distancing just sort of appeared. He said that there was really no science behind the idea of using masks, especially for children," Wenstrup said. "We talked about the mandates that were inflicted upon the American people.
"Look, I think the vaccine saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But the decision to get a vaccine should be between the doctor and the patient, not mandated."
Fauci, said Wenstrup, "has some remorse" about the mandates, and that "the American people didn't respond in the way he thought they would."
But "Americans don't do well with 'because I said so,'" said Wenstrup. "There really wasn't much bedside manner. The other thing, too, is why were we mandating that people get vaccinated or they lose their jobs?
"People were coming across our border by the thousands and they weren't tested and they weren't getting vaccinated."
Fauci also said during the interviews that there are different definitions for the term gain of function research, said Wenstrup.
But Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the former acting director of the National Institutes of Health, testified "more than once that what we were doing was we were funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China," said Wenstrup. "You know what's even worse? This is where their bioweapons program is and this is a dangerous thing to be doing."
The committee will also be asking Fauci about how, although he was the highest-paid person in the federal government, there was a "huge lack of accountability and responsibility" when it came to how his position was being run."
Meanwhile, in this past month, the committee has heard testimony from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and David Morens, a senior adviser who worked closely with Fauci. Daszak, said Wenstrup, was doing gain-of-function research in China and got grants from Fauci's agency, but "Dr. Fauci said he never looked at the grants. An advisory board looks at it and then he just signs it."
Fauci, meanwhile, answered many questions in his prior interviews saying that he didn't remember what happened.
"In our first day of a transcribed interview, he said that he didn't remember over 170 times," said Wenstrup. "We also found in the emails that Dr. Fauci was using his Gmail, which they were using to avoid the American people seeing what they were writing."
Some referrals may need to be made to the Department of Justice, he added, but at the same time, "there are a lot of places in our agencies where they don't have laws and they need to have laws."
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