regarding the grant termination. does that violate policy? it was inappropriate for him to go doing that for a grantee as a conflict of interest, among other things. >> on march 29, 2021, dr. morens edited a letter that dr. das yak was sending to nih. does that violate policy? >> yes. >> he provided him with advice regarding how to mislead nih on eco health's late progress report. does that violate policy? >> it was wrong and inappropriate and violated policy. >> on december 7th, 2021, dr. morens wrote to the chair of eco health's board of directors to quote put in a word, end quote, for the doctor. does that violate policy? >> should not have done that. that was wrong. >> it violates policy. >> i'm not sure of a specific policy. i imagine it does. he should not have been doing that. >> in addition to all those actions dr. morens wrote to the doctor peter from tony's recent comments to me they are trying to protect you, end quote. did you ever talk to dr. morens about dr. daczak and eco health alliance. >> we knew he was a grantee. i may have mentioned and discussed him because he is a grantee but i never spoke about protecting him. >> he just made that up? you are testifying that dr. morens just made that up. >> i don't know where he got that but it is not true. >> by this point, dr. fauci, when these emails were written, you should have known that dr. daszak was two years later on a required progress report for his grant. he conducted an experiment that resulted in a novel virus showing excess growth. he failed to report that experiment, that he was protecting the wuhan lab and not sharing its lab notebooks and that he failed to disclose obvious conflicts of interest. so why were you trying to protect him and eco health alliance? >> i repeat on the record i have not tried to protect him and that's number one. number two, you said something that is not true. because i did not know about the compliance issues until well after the fact when i was being briefed for going to before a congressional committee. so it wasn't as if these things were going on i knew that he was withholding. >> did you know about dr. morens close relationship with dr. daczak. >> he made it clear he was his friend. i did not engage in the interaction between them. >> and just lastly, you testified and answered the chairman's question that you never had any communication with the intelligence community throughout all of covid? did i understand that correctly. >> no, you heard wrong. i said i did have communication. i was briefed by the intelligence community multiple times during the covid issue. >> gentleman's time is expired. i recognize the ranking member of the full committee mr. raskin for five minutes of questions. >> first, dr. fauci, thank you for your testimony. your service to the american people. was there anything you wanted to clear up in that last exchange that where were interrupted? >> no, i think i made it clear that we're talking about my knowing about a lack of compliance. that became clear, congressman raskin, well after the fact. it isn't as if they were not complying and i was not monitoring their non-compliance. i didn't know about it until it was a done deal. >> you've been a scientist and scientific administrator for 54 years, more than a half century and you were director of the national institute of allergies and infectious diseases for more than three decades, is that right? >> 38 plus years. >> okay. i assume that you've never been accused of trying to start a disease before, is that right? >> that is correct. >> you have devoted your life to fighting infectious diseases for the american people, is that right? >> that is correct. >> i want to go back to this email that you cited in your opening because i think it goes right to the heart of this campaign of character assassination against you. the claim was essentially that you tried to cover up the possibility of there having been a laboratory leak, which, of course, is perfectly possible and if committee were doing its job we could be working to advance the investigation of that. but they would rather assert that you tried to cover up this possibility. here is the email that you sent on february 1st at 12:38 a.m. to christian anderson with a copy to christian anderson but you sent it to ferrar. he related to me his concern about the site mutation and spike pro ten of the currently circulating ncov. i told him as soon as possible he and holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine the data and do it very quickly. if everyone agrees with this concern they should reportist to the appropriate authorities. this would be the f.b.i. in the u.s. and u.k.mi5 and get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the field of coronavirus and evolutionary bio biology. i will alert my colleagues and determine what further investigation they recommend. best regards, tony. was this the email where you were trying to cover up the possibility of a lab leak? >> yes, congressman raskin. that's the reason why i mentioned in my opening statement that it is inconceivable that anyone could get out of that that i was covering anything up. >> would you have a reason to cover up any knew sin type of i can evidence relating to the origins of covid-19 virus? >> absolutely not and the reason why it was important to get people together to discuss this in a transparent way. >> have you spent your whole life trying to determine the causes of infectious diseases and then to stop them to protect a american people? >> yes, i have. >> well, dr. fauci, i want to join my colleague from florida in apologizing to you that some of our colleagues in the united states house of representatives seem to want to drag your name through the mud. they are treating you, dr. fauci, like a convicted felon. actually i probably wish they were treating you like a convicted felons. they treat them with love and admiration. some blindly worship them. anything else you want to say to the american people about your service to america during the course of the covid-19 pandemic? >> my main job during the covid pandemic was to play a role with my team at the vaccine research center to develop a safe and effective vaccine and we did that in an unprecedented short period of time never seen before in the anals. as we all know, that vaccine and those vaccines have resulted in saving of hundreds of thousands of lives in the united states and millions of lives throughout the world. >> well, you have fought aids and h.i.v. and fought covid-19 and you are fearless in doing so. do you have any reason to be afraid of scientific evidence or data or the truth? >> not at all. >> thank you, i yield back to you, mr. chairman. >> now recognize mr. griffith from virginia for five minutes of questioning. >> thank you, mr. chairman. good to see you, dr. fauci. take a deep breath because my questions change sometimes based on things that happen in the hearing. i want you to follow the bouncing ball with me. and there is no gotcha at the end of this. i'm trying to figure this out. you told dr. ruiz in his questioning that it was absolutely impossible for any of the viruses that you all were funding, i get that, it was impossible for sars covid two known as covid-19 to have come from any of the work that was being done at wuhan. at the same time, you told mr. comer that you didn't know about the non-compliance by eco health until after the fact and when the virus was already out there, however it got there. in light of the fact that part of that non-compliance was a report where we uncovered and i believe dr. daszak was untruthful to this committee in one of his reports to niaid and in the two most sensitive years related to the humanized mice experiments we never got lab notebooks from wuhan institute of virology, can you understand following the bouncing ball, why some of us doubt not that you had some hand in it or you knew about it, but doubt that you can state with certainty that it was impossible because they might have been doing stuff you didn't know about? isn't that true? >> actually, it is not incompatible at all, congressman, with what i said. the viruses that were studied, whether you did or did not give a five-year report on time, was still the viruses that follow genetically would be impossible to be the precursor of sars covid two. it was completely compatible with the statement i made. >> is that accurate knowing they had worked on adding a site to mers? >> there is difference between the viruses that were funded by the nih sub award versus anything else anybody else in china might be doing. we were talking about did the nih -- >> you were talking about what you funded, all right. >> that's the point. >> that goes to my next question. i thought you might go there and i appreciate that. in an off the record member level briefing in february of 2022 i asked about the likelihood of nature of a sars-related coronavirus to have a cleavage site since it takes the 12 nuclear chains in there to make it as viral as this was going on. at the time you said to me what you just said. well, that wasn't us. if that wasn't done it wasn't us and you confirmed that for the record. it wasn't what you were funding. >> what i'm saying is 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. but the one thing i know for sure is that the viruses that were funded by the nih could not be the precursor of sars covid two. >> i appreciate that. i never thought nih or niaid went out to create this thing but i do believe it came out of the lab and you made it clear. sometimes people miss this, one side says one thing, one side says the other. the actual fact may be that at some time working on that maybe they used some of our money to get started, maybe they didn't. but a group of scientists getting together might very well at wuhan have said let's see what happens if we go over here and do this. not that nih funded it but on their own went off and did something. isn't that possible? >> well, i actually would also want to say that one thing we should put out on the table that you were talking about a $120,000 a year grant in a $6 billion budget. if they were going to do something on the side, they had plenty of other money to do it. they wouldn't necessarily have to use $120,000 nih grant to do it. >> i appreciate that. it means something could happen. i'm glad you kept an open mind. one final thing. do you think they could have done it without the humanized mice that we gave them? >> could have done what, sir? >> could they have done any other research with the humanized mice that we gave them? china didn't have humanized mice before we gave them to wuhan. isn't it accurate they might have been able to do extra stuff with our mice? >> that's a hypothetical that i can't really answer what they could. >> you can't say it count have happened. i yield back. >> you want me to prove a negative. >> now recognize miss castor from florida. >> these special investigative committees are intended at the outset to bring light to difficult matters and i think unfortunately this select committee has brought more heat than light to things. one example is nearly five months ago dr. fauci sat for a 14-hour voluntary interview with the subcommittee. i was there for that interview, which included exchanges on many important questions on research safety, long covid, vaccine development, and the importance of strong public health systems in our local communities and also we discussed pandemic preparedness, like stockpiling supplies for our hospitals in advance of the next pandemic. but i want to public to know that for five months the republicans sat on that transcript. they could have released it at any time. it was released last friday. if the public had seen it five months ago, they would know that the republicans failed to find a shred of evidence of their far-fetched conspiracy linking dr. fauci to a cover-up of the origins of the pandemic. instead, the republicans contorted and mischaracterized dr. fauci's words over twitter to gin up conspiracies about nih's role in the origins of the pandemic. in the lead-up to this hearing parts of the interview have been cherry picked and distort evidence in press releases and tweets. dr. fauci, i want to make sure you have an opportunity to publicly clear anything up. does anything come top of mind right off the bat in how they cherry picked parts of your 14-hour transcript? >> i don't want to be casting stones at the distortions of what was said in that but there were a couple of things that come to mind. one, i'm sure will come up later is the issue of the six-foot distance and i made the statement that it just appeared and that got taken like i don't know what's going on. it just appeared. it came from the cdc. the cdc was responsible for those kinds of guidelines to schools, not me. so when i said that it just appeared, it appeared. was there any science behind it? what i meant by no science behind it is that there wasn't a controlled trial that said compare six foot with three feet to ten feet. this wasn't that scientific evaluation of it. what i believe the cdc used for their reason to say six feet is that studies years ago showed that when you are dealing with droplets, which at the time the cdc made that recommendation, it was felt that the transmission was primarily through droplet, not aerosol. which is incorrect because we know now aerosol does play a role. that's the reason why they did it. it had little to do with me since i didn't make the recommendation and my saying there was no science behind it means there was no clinical trial that proved that. that's just one of the things that got a little distorted in the response to that. >> i've learned and watched you over the years. i have to go back to the zika outbreak where we didn't know how exactly it was being transmitted and at one point we weren't aware that some of it was sexually transmitted. that is an example of why with these public health threats that you learn unfortunately as we go along. talk a little bit about the zika health threat and how we didn't know what was happening in the early days. >> well, i'm glad you brought that up because it really is also reflective of what went on in the early months of covid. when you are dealing with an outbreak that is a novel outbreak, the zika outbreak was novel, we had never seen that before. covid was novel, we had seen that before. when you are dealing with a new outbreak, things change. the scientific process collects the information that will allow you at that time to make a determination, a recommendation or guideline. as things evolve and change and you get more information, it is important that you use the scientific process to gain that information and perhaps change the way you think of things, change your guidelines and change your recommendation. and that really goes across the board because you are dealing with something that needs to be modified because it is a moving target. zika was a moving target. covid was a moving target. >> thank you very much. i want to thank the democratic staff for your minority report and if it's not already submitted for the record i would like to ask unanimous condition sent to offer into the record the democratic staff report just completed. republicans fauci flops led committees 15 month probe fails to find evidence of extreme claims linking dr. fauci to covid-19's origin. thanks the staff. an outstanding report folks should read. >> thank you, mr. chairman. many of the us are the committee are disturbed by revelation toes this committee there were officials at nih that deleted government records, deleted -- used personal emails to communicate and circumvent freedom of information laws. so i just had a couple questions about that. dr. fauci, did you delete any emails or records related to the wuhan labor origins of the virus? >> no, i did not. >> okay. dr. morens said in a may 2021 email he indicated that he was connecting people to you in a quote secret back channel. do you know what he was referring to? >> i don't have any idea what he is talking about. there is no back channel at niaid. >> he also said in another email there is no worry about freedom of information act. i can send stuff to tony on his private email. did you communicate with anyone relating to anything regarding nih or with dr. morens on a private email? >> i don't do government business on my private email. >> how do you communicate with dr. morens via private email even if it was not necessarily your definition of government -- >> as i mentioned in my opening statement, one of his functions is to write chapters, medical scientific chapters with me. it is conceivable i communicated with him on my private email when we were writing a chapter. that was not official business. >> what about peter daszak? >> no. >> today you testified you did not suppress the lab leak theory but in the past you have said it is a distortion of reality. you said i've heard this conspiracy theories and like all conspiracy theories they are just conspiracy theories. that's what you told the american people. what science were you following then? >> i have also been very, very clear and said multiple times that i don't think the concept of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory. what is conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject like it was a lab leak and i was parachuted into the c.i.a. like jason bourn and told the c.i.a. they shouldn't be talking about a lab leak. that's the conspiracy. >> how much have you earned from pharmaceutical companies since the pandemic began in 2021. >> 0. >> nih scientists made 10 million in royalties from drug makers. you are saying you did not receive any of the $710 million? >> on covid i received i think $122 for a monoclonal antibody i made 27 years ago. >> in general how much have you received not related to covid, just in general how much you received in royalties between 2021 and 2023? >> i think none. >> okay. somebody received the 710 million. >> somebody did but not me. >> you didn't receive any royalties. >> i received no royalties associated with covid. i'm on the record and i want to make sure this is clear that i have developed a monoclonal antibody 25 years ago that is used as a diagnostic that has nothing to do with covid and i receive an average of $120 a year from that patent. >> the bottom line scientists at nih did receive $710 million in royalties. don't you think that any of the royalties should be going back to the tax pairers and not the scientists. >> if you want to change the patent laws, go ahead. that's not for me to say. >> i want to say we know billions of dollars have been funding animal experiments here and in foreign lands. i'm troubled by the cruel, horrific animal research done on u.s. land and in foreign laboratories of taxpayers footing the bill for billions of dollars. these beagle puppies that have their throats slit, being injected with ticks, murdered after a few months. piglets, rabbits, you name it. fda say we no longer need to test human medications on animals. there are other ways to achieve this. can you comment on that if it is time for the united states of america to move on from the cruel animal and horrific costly tests? >> i'm puzzled what that's thaw has to do with the origins covid. >> i have a question about it. it has to do in general with the amount of waste of tax dollars that nih is using. >> well, the animal experiments that are conducted by and funded by nih go through strict regulations of the proper use of animals in research. i am not, with all due respect not trying to be -- i'm not sure what you are talkin