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Dr. Fauci is testifying for a House panel investigating Covid’s origins. The panel found emails suggesting his aides were skirting public records laws.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on Covid, on Monday forcefully denied Republican allegations that he sought to cover up the possibility that the pandemic originated in a laboratory, calling the accusation “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”
In a tense appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Fauci read out an email from February 2020 in which he encouraged a scientist worried about the possibility of a lab leak to report his concerns to the F.B.I.
“It is inconceivable that anyone who reads this email could conclude that I was trying to cover up the possibility of a laboratory leak,” Dr. Fauci testified.
Republicans on the panel have spent 15 months rooting through emails, Slack messages and research proposals for evidence against Dr. Fauci. In half a million pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed-door testimony, the panel has so far found nothing linking the 83-year-old immunologist to the beginnings of the Covid outbreak in China.
But the panel has turned up emails suggesting that Dr. Fauci’s former aides were trying to evade public records laws at the medical research agency he ran for 38 years until his retirement in December 2022.
Some of those emails paint Dr. Fauci as being preoccupied with his public image; one April 2021 message from an aide said that while Dr. Fauci “prides himself on being like teflon,” he appeared to be “getting worried about the brown stuff hitting the fan” over questions about research funded by his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.