Congressional hearings into COVID-19's origins are extremely beneficial and will hopefully lead to good regulations and guidelines for future pandemics, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said.
"I'm glad we're having the hearings because it wasn't just that part of the hearing" when former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci's feet were held to the fire, "it was also the part of the hearing where for the first time I've really heard both sides of the aisle say, 'This virus could have come out of the lab,'" Birx said Saturday during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Count."
"If you remember, three years ago that was so hyperpartisan that they called the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory. Now we finally have gotten to the point where people are being openminded and saying it could have come from the lab.
"Why is that important? Because we need to put regulations and guidelines in place when you're working with these animal viruses in the laboratory and adapting them to human cell lines, and that's where these kinds of accidents occur," she added.
A GOP-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation's response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started — yet found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci was the public face of the government's early COVID-19 response under then-President Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President Joe Biden.
A trusted voice to millions, he also was the target of partisan anger and choked up Monday as he recalled death threats and other harassment of himself and his family, threats he said still continue. Police later escorted hecklers out of the hearing room.
The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city in China where the outbreak began. There's no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory.
A U.S. intelligence analysis says there's insufficient evidence to prove either way — and a recent Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the source of the virus in the first weeks of the outbreak.
Birx said she hopes the federal government gets to a place "where we're really learning from the states that did a really incredible job" during the pandemic.
"We had Gov. [Pete] Ricketts in Nebraska with a great vulnerable-population program for his long-term care facilities. He really saved a lot of elderly Americans," Birx said.
"We had Iowa opening schools. We had public university presidents opening schools despite all the controversy and keeping them open. We had Betsy DeVos working in K through 12 to keep them open, and I was working with community colleges and public universities."
"We can learn from all of these individuals who really did quite a good job to really show the American people that there are those real-life studies that can be applied to pandemics, and we can take a very different view in the future,” she said.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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