Breaking News: Dr. Fauci Goes to Congress

Ten questions that we'd really like Dr. Fauci to answer

On January 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, day one of two he’d promised in December 2022 as he left his post as chief White House medical advisor on Covid-19. According to reporting in The Hill, Fauci testified for seven hours, answering that he “could not recall” more than 100 times. His closed-door testimony will be transcribed and, hopefully, made public soon. (1)

Fauci’s career in government science, which ended during the devastatingly deadly Covid-19 pandemic, began in 1968. Fresh from his medical residency, Fauci accepted a three-year fellowship in infectious diseases and clinical immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He climbed quickly through NIAID’s ranks, becoming Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation in 1974 and Director of NIAID in 1984, a position he held until December 2022.

During those decades, Fauci was medical advisor to both Republican and Democratic presidents; the January testimony was his first before the current Republican-led House of Representatives. (2)

“It’s been very cooperative in there. We’ve asked a lot of questions,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the committee. “Dr. Fauci responds in the best way he can. I will say that there may be over 100 or so ‘I don’t recall’ or ‘I don’t remember’ answers. That just means that maybe we have to find the people that do recall.” (1)

Before the hearing, Wenstrup’s office said the chair “planned to ask questions on the origins of COVID-19, alleged federal records violations, conflicts of interest and guidance that seemed to conflict with itself at times during the pandemic. ... One particular issue that stood out to Wenstrup was Fauci’s definition of gain-of-function research.” (1)

Gain-of-function research involves rearranging some of a virus’s genes to make it more infectious to humans. (3)

“Research using Gain-of-Function (GoF) techniques is no different with respect to what it can achieve in the long term, at least according to many of the symposium participants,” according to a National Center for Biotechnology Research report from a symposium on GoF. “...In the short term GoF research is helpful for adapting viruses to growth in culture and for developing essential animal models for emerging pathogens, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and escape mutations to understand drug resistance and viral evasion of the immune system. ... Vaccine producers in particular disagree on whether GoF methods are essential for vaccine development, so the contributions of GoF research to vaccine development need careful evaluation.” (3)

For those who’ve not followed the debate over the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there are essentially two competing conventional theories. The original human infection is generally agreed to have occurred in or near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV, Wuhan, China), which has received years of funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization that manages the grant money allotted to the WIV, insists that none of the NIH funding was used in the gain-of-function research that could have resulted in the virus becoming able to infect humans. (1)

There are two theories about how the virus came to infection humans. Theory one contends that the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolved naturally to jump from an animal into humans. Theory two suggests that the virus causing Covid-19 was being studied in the Wuhan laboratory and viruses genetically manipulated to be more infectious—via the “gain of function” research referenced above—leaked from the Wuhan lab to spread throughout the world, ie., the “lab leak” theory. (1)

According to The Hill, Fauci told Congress that he was “open-minded” about how the virus came to infect humans.

“ ‘One thing that’s been most interesting is a new definition that we’ve heard and Dr. Fauci refers to this as his operational definition of gain-of-function,’ Wenstrup said. ‘And I don’t know that every scientist that deals with this type of viral research understands his … definition of gain-of-function.’ ” (1)

As often happens in House hearings, Democrats on the Subcommittee disagreed with that assessment by Republican Rep. Wenstrup. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) told The Hill that “Dr. Fauci was able to clarify that [gain-of-function definition] today.”

Be that as it may, the conclusion drawn by Rep. Wenstrup from Fauci’s first day of testimony was that there are “some tremendous flaws in our system” of awarding research grants. (1)

I hope that Congress continues to question Fauci about how he controlled research funding—and therefore the direction of biomedical research—over the past four decades or so.

Most of all, I wish that a member of the House or Senate—Republican, Democrat, or Independent—would conduct a two-day session with Fauci about how he allowed ME/CFS patients and research to be ignored, ridiculed and unfunded over the last 38 years.

I can contribute topics to that question-and-answer session, and here are my first ten questions for Dr. Fauci:

1.     Why did your government health agency—NIAID—abandon ME/CFS patients?
2.    Forty years after its first US outbreak in Incline Village, why isn’t there a test for ME/CFS?
3.     Why is there no funding for scientists who want to determine the cause of ME/CFS?
4.     Why isn’t there a reasonable educated guess at the cause of ME/CFS? 
5.     Why aren’t there any treatments for ME/CFS that do more than just temper symptoms?
6.     Why is the U.S. government—at the Food and Drug Administration—blocking the approval of Ampligen, a drug created in the U.S., to treat patients with ME/CFS?
7.     If ME/CFS is a “post-viral syndrome,” why isn’t anyone looking for the virus?
8.     Why have you essentially pretended for 30 years that non-HIV AIDS doesn’t exist?
9.     Since non-HIV AIDS patients and ME/CFS patients have the same immune dysfunction and are often literally the same individual, why haven’t you awarded grants that will figure out what the connection is?
10.  And why hasn’t anyone in a government health agency seriously examined whether AIDS and ME/CFS are related diseases of immunodeficiency?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.     Joseph Choi. “Fauci sits through first 7 hours of questioning with COVID select subcommittee.” The Hill, January 8, 2024. https://thehill.com/homenews/4396265-fauci-sits-through-first-seven-hours-of-questioning-with-covid-select-subcommittee/
2.     Farnoush Amiri. “Anthony Fauci to testify before Congress on COVID origins and the US pandemic response.” Associated Press, November 30, 2023. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/12/05/anthony-fauci-testify-congress-covid-pandemic/71813801007/
3.     “Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop.” Board on Life Sciences; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Committee on Science, Technology, and Law; Policy and Global Affairs; Board on Health Sciences Policy; National Research Council; Institute of Medicine. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2015 Apr 13.