Congressmen: This Covid hearing ‘could have been an email’

WASHINGTON — House Republicans have repeatedly accused Biden health officials of withholding and censoring documents related to pandemic policies and the origins of Covid-19. They did not get the answers they were looking for at a two-hour hearing Wednesday.

“It could have been done by email. It could have, but it wasn’t,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said at the end of the meeting, echoing an earlier comment from Democrat Robert Garcia of California.

While the two seemingly agreed that the hearing was unproductive, they differed on the reasons.

This was the latest in a series of hearings in which committee Republicans under Wenstrup’s leadership have called former and current health officials for testimonies and closed-door briefings, including retired infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, who was grilled over two full days. They have also requested thousands of pages of internal documents and correspondences between top Health and Human Services officials pertaining to the origins of the virus and research funded abroad. But they say Biden officials have not been cooperative enough.

“I’m not doing this to embarrass any individual or to put threats on any individual. But I want to know the process that took place within our government agencies,” Wenstrup said.

Democrats, meanwhile, argue that those thousands of documents and hours of grilling Fauci and retired National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have produced no new information and that the committee should focus on other areas — like preparing for a future pandemic.

The witness on Wednesday, HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Melanie Egorin, told Wenstrup, “We’ve produced documents that have been ongoing and responsive to your request.” Egorin, a former House Ways and Means and Government Accountability Office staffer, repeated a version of that several times as GOP lawmakers charged that HHS has withheld key information.

Several Republicans argued that while HHS has shared documents, officials were “dragging their feet” on requests and censoring too much.

The committee leadership has persistently demanded explanations of federal funding of infectious disease work in foreign labs such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where EcoHealth Alliance studied coronavirus transmission before the Trump administration axed its funding in 2020. There are unproven claims that the virus leaked from the lab rather than spreading from animals to humans in a food market.

Fauci spent hours answering questions about EcoHealth and federal oversight of foreign labs, lawmakers told STAT in the hallway during his closed-door briefing. But frustration continues to mount on both sides.

Wenstrup said Wednesday that the agency had blocked staff from testifying on the EcoHealth grant and its reinstatement, leading Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) to push back.

“We’ve heard nearly 80 hours of voluntary testimony from 11 current or former HHS officials. … We’ve interviewed the program officer responsible for overseeing the grant, interviewed the two senior level officials responsible for reinstating the grant, and we were briefed by two senior level officials about the grants reinstatement,” she said.

“I gotta say to you, I love my colleagues and I want to work with my colleagues. But I’m just disappointed that we’re even having this hearing today.”