Officials will evaluate "cost-benefit ratio" of vaccine mandates in analysis of pandemic response, Fauci says
From CNN's Elise Hammond
When evaluating the United States’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health officials will take a closer look at “the cost-benefit ratio” of things like vaccine mandates, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
Fauci was answering a question about whether issuing mandates could have led to vaccine hesitancy.
“That’s something that I think we need to go back now, when we do an after-the-event evaluation about whether or not given the psyche of the country and the pushback that you get from those types of things — we need to reevaluate the cost-benefit ratio of those types of things,” Fauci said.
Earlier in the hearing, Fauci defended the government’s use of vaccines as saving “hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and millions of lives throughout the world.
US still needs to close communication gaps to be better prepared for next pandemic, Fauci says
From CNN's Elise Hammond
Dr. Anthony Fauci said there are still some things the United States needs to work on to be more prepared for another pandemic in the aftermath of Covid-19.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said in “some respects” the country is better prepared to deal with a health crisis than in 2020, “but in others, I am still disappointed.”
Fauci was answering a question from Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who served as the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management during the pandemic. The lawmaker said he felt that states were not ready to deal with Covid-19.
“I think one of the things that was really a problem with the response was the degree of divisiveness that we had in the country about a lack of a coherent response where we were having people, for reasons that had nothing to do with public health or science, refusing to adhere to public health intervention measures,” Fauci said.
One thing that he hopes the US will do better moving forward is tightening communication between the federal response and local public health officials.
He said there was a “disconnect between the healthcare system and the public health system” during Covid-19 in the US. Specifically, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) could not demand information from local agencies, which caused a lag in sharing data.
“We were at a disadvantage,” Fauci said, adding that the CDC is working on ways to fix this pain point.
California lawmaker whose parents died of Covid-19 thanks Fauci for live-saving policies
From CNN's Elise Hammond
California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, who said both of his parents died from Covid-19, thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for putting in policies that saved lives during the pandemic.
Garcia said his mother was a health care worker and she and his step-father both died from Covid-19.
“I lost both of my parents during the pandemic, so I take this very personally," he said, condemning other lawmakers “who are tasked to be responsible and actually help the American people” attack medical professionals, Garcia said.
The comments came after heated remarks from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who criticized mask mandates and called for Fauci to be put in prison.
“Your quote-unquote so-called science that the gentlewoman is referring to has saved millions of lives in this country and around the world,” Garcia said. “It’s important to note that my opinion is that you are an American hero and your team has done more to save lives than all 435 members of this body on both sides of the aisle.”
GOP chairman has to remind Marjorie Taylor Greene to be respectful as she refuses to call Fauci a doctor
CNN's Haley Talbot
GOP Chairman Brad Wenstrup had to remind Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be respectful after she insisted that she would not refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci by the title of doctor and would only refer to him as "Mr. Fauci."
"You're not doctor, you're Mr. Fauci in my few minutes," Greene said.
In response, Wenstrup ordered Greene to address Fauci as a doctor. “I have instructed her to address him as doctor,” Wenstrup said.
“I’m not addressing him as doctor,” she shot back.
Several Democratic lawmakers jumped in to criticize Greene over her refusal to address Fauci as a doctor.
Wenstrup then asked members to “afford all other members the respect they are entitled” and to “refrain from using rhetoric that could be construed as an attack on the motives or character of another member or the witness.”
Fauci: NIH official using unofficial email is an "aberrancy and an outlier"
CNN's Jen Christensen
Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Monday that he has not used his personal email to conduct business, and he was not aware before a congressional investigation that a former senior adviser at the National Institutes of Health had used unofficial email.
“What you saw, I believe, with Dr. Morens was aberrancy and an outlier,” Fauci testified on Monday, referring to a former senior adviser at NIH. “The individuals at the NIH and NIAID are a very committed group of individuals and this one instance that you point out is an aberrancy and an outlier.”
The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic previously released a series ofprivate emailsthat Republican members of the committee argue show that some NIH officials deleted emails and tried to get around requirements to disclose information through public records laws.
In a memopublished at the end of May, committee members said Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci, engaged in “nefarious behavior.” The committee points to email that Morens sent another colleague that suggests he would send email to Fauci’s private account and “there is no worry about FOIAs.” FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives the public the right to obtain federal records, including emails sent within government agencies.Morens’ email goes on to say that he can also hand information to Fauci to avoid it being a part of the public record.
“He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens said in a 2021 email to Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit virus research organization linked to controversy about the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19. The US Department of Health and Human Services suspended funding to the group in May.
Fauci details threats he and his family have received
From CNN's Antoinette Radford
Anthony Fauci detailed the threats he received during his time as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describing death threats against him and threats against his wife and daughters.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell asked Fauci to explain what some of the threats were, where he replied:
“Everything from harassments from emails, texts, letters of myself, my wife, my three daughters. There have been credible death threats leading to the arrest of two individuals – and credible death threats means someone who clearly was on their way to kill me. And it’s required my having protective services essentially all the time," Fauci said.
“It is very troublesome to me, it is much more troublesome because they’ve involved my wife and three daughters," he added.
Fauci said he feared that the threats against public health workers during the Covid-19 pandemic would serve as a “powerful disincentive” for the best and brightest candidates to take up the profession.
“They say to themselves, 'I don’t want to go there. Why should I get involved in that?'” he said.
“They’re reluctant to put themselves and their family through what they see their colleagues being put through,” he testified.
The 6-foot social distance guideline came from the CDC, Fauci clarifies
From CNN's Maureen Chowdhury
Dr. Anthony Fauci clarified that the 6-foot guidance for social distancing given during the beginnings for the Covid-19 pandemic did not come from him, but from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
"It actually came from the CDC. The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines to schools, not me," Fauci said.
Fauci, who repeated the guidance during the pandemic, once said that there was no science behind it — but he meant that there were no clinical trials to back it up.
"It had little to do with me since I didn't make the recommendation and my saying 'there was no science behind it' meant there was no clinical trial behind that," Fauci said.
He added that he believed the CDC used studies about droplets years ago as reasoning for the 6-foot guidelines.
More background: When the CDC first promoted the idea of 6-foot “social distancing” for people who had to be around others during the pandemic, scientists thought that larger contaminated droplets would fall out of the air quickly and couldn’t travel farther than 6 feet. At the time, the World Health Organization recommended that people keep a meter, or 3.3 feet, between them. But even as early as2021,scientists were starting to understand that the coronavirus is airborne.
CNN's Jen Christensen contributed to this report.
Raskin takes swipe at Trump and Republican party as he apologizes to Fauci
From CNN's Antoinette Radford
Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin took a swipe at the Republican party for their treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci by comparing how Republicans treat Fauci to how they have treated former President Donald Trump, though Raskin did not mention Trump by name.
Raskin apologized to Fauci for the fact that “some of our colleagues in the United States House of Representatives seem to want to drag your name through the mud. They’re treating you, Dr Fauci, like a convicted felon.”
“Actually you probably wish they were treating you like a convicted felon, they treat convicted felons with love and admiration. Some of them blindly worship convicted felons,” Raskin said.
Raskin's comments allude to the recent finding of guilt against the former president in a criminal hush money case.
Raskin then asked Fauci if he had anything he wanted to say for himself while appearing at the hearing, to which Fauci defended the government’s use of vaccines as saving “hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and millions of lives throughout the world.”
Fauci testifies about possible origins of virus that caused Covid-19
From CNN's Jen Christensen
In Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony Monday, he addressed what he said were “certain issues that have been seriously distorted concerning me," particularly around the origin of the virus that led to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fauci testified that in early 2020, he was informed through phone calls with two scientists — Jeremy Farrar, then the director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Kristian Andersen, a scientist at Scripps Research Institute — that they and others were concerned that the virus that causes Covid-19 could have been manipulated in the lab. The day after those calls, Fauci said he participated in a conference call with several international virologists to discuss manipulation in the lab or possible spillover from animals to humans. He characterized the discussion as “lively,” with arguments on both sides. Fauci said he did not try to steer the discussion in any direction.
Fauci said the virologists on the joint call decided to more carefully examine the genomic sequence and after further examination, Fauci said, “several who at first were concerned about lab manipulation became convinced that the virus was not deliberately manipulated.” Scientists found the most likely scenario, Fauci said, was a virus that transferred from an animal to a human, "although they still kept an open mind,” Fauci said.
“The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false, and simply preposterous,” Fauci said, noting he had no input into the content on a paper publishedin March 2020 that discussed the possible origins of the virus.
In the year since the virus emerged, some of the world’s leading scientists have investigated the origins of the virus, including a committee of experts from the World Health Organization.Most scientists believe that the virus spread from animals to humans in China. Some studies have also said that the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, cannot be ruled out.
Most US intelligence agencies say the virus was not genetically engineered, but it is still not totally clear how the pandemic started. A US intelligence analysis released last year said either origin was possible, and the community remains split on the issue. The US Department of Energy assessed last year that it had “low confidence” in the lab leak theory. No US federal agency believes that the virus that causes Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon.
"I cannot account nor can anyone account for other things that might be going on in China, which is the reason why I have always said and will say now, I keep an open mind as to what the origin is," Fauci said Monday.
