WASHINGTON (AP) 鈥 Anthony Fauci, former chief White House medical adviser, is expected to testify before Congress early next year as part of Republicans' yearslong investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and the U.S. response to the disease.
Fauci, who served as the nation's top infectious disease expert before retiring last year, will sit for transcribed interviews in early January and a public hearing at a later date. It will be his first appearance before the Republican-controlled House.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic first requested a sit-down with Fauci , but an agreement over the timing and details of the interviews was just reached with Fauci鈥檚 attorneys earlier this month, according to a letter sent Thursday from the committee.
"It is time for Dr. Fauci to confront the facts and address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic," , the GOP chairman of the committee, said in a statement.
House Republicans have investigated whether Fauci or other U.S. government officials took part in any sort of cover-up about the origin of the deadly virus. Fauci, who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has repeatedly called the GOP criticism nonsense.
Wenstrup, who is also a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused Fauci and U.S. intelligence of withholding key facts about its investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee last year issued a staff report arguing that there are 鈥渋ndications鈥 that the virus may have been developed as a bioweapon inside China鈥檚 Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That would contradict a released in unclassified form in August 2021 that said analysts do not believe the virus was a bioweapon, though it may have leaked in a lab accident.
Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Biden鈥檚 chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as a spillover event. Virus researchers have not publicly identified any key new scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely.
But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May 2022 that the 春色直播 Institutes of Health funded 鈥済ain of function鈥 research 鈥 the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world 鈥 at a virology lab in Wuhan. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci鈥檚 statements.
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Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Nomaan Merchant contributed to his report.
