Social media wasted no time in deriding prominent Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who on Friday accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of making "false" testimony to Congress this week and previously silencing opposing viewpoints during the height of the pandemic, including conspiracy theories such as the coronavirus lab-leak theory.
The letter from Jordan to Fauci, dated Friday and obtained by the New York Post, said the Biden-led White House and COVID-19 Response Team coerced major social media platforms such as Facebook into censoring the lab-leak theory.
"Consistent with the silencing of those who dared to express an opposing viewpoint, you and other bureaucrats reportedly 'sidelined' Dr. Robert Redfield, then Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because he 'had a different point of view' and believed the virus 'came from a Wuhan lab.'"
The Response Team under Fauci participated in "extensive efforts to unconstitutionally monitor and censor Americans’ speech on social media platforms," Jordan added. He asked Fauci to appear in a transcribed interview and bring relevant documents to investigators with the Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Fauci testified Monday before the House COVID subcommittee that he “kept an open mind” during the pandemic that the virus could've escaped from a laboratory mistake, and did not “push to downplay the lab leak theory."
Jordan took issue with Fauci's testimony in his letter and called the statement "false on its face," and gave Fauci until June 21 to respond with an interview date and related documents.
But social media users came to Fauci's defense on X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Wrong again Jim," wrote one user, adding that "Fauci saved lives."
"Dr. Fauci is honest. Jim Jordan is not," wrote another user, who self-identified as a retired nurse.
"Dr. Fauci saved lives while Trump got hundreds of thousands of people killed," a third user and retired veteran said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. This article was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.
“IT’S BEEN REVEALED THAT FAUCI BROUGHT COVID TO THE MONTANA ONE YEAR BEFORE COVID BROKE OUT IN THE U.S!” — ad from the Matt Rosendale for Montana campaign
A fundraising ad for U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) shows a photo of Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, behind bars, swarmed by flying bats.
Rosendale, who is eyeing a challenge to incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, maintains that a Montana biomedical research facility, Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, has a dangerous link to the pandemic. This claim is echoed in the ad:
“It’s been revealed that Fauci brought COVID to the Montana one year before COVID broke out in the U.S!,” it charges in all-caps before asking readers to “Donate today and hold the D.C. bureaucracy accountable!”
The ad, paid for by Matt Rosendale for Montana, seeks contributions through WinRed, a platform that processes donations for Republican candidates. Rosendale also shared the fundraising pitch on his X account Nov. 1, and it remained live as of early February.
Rosendale made similar accusations on social media, during a November speech on the U.S. House floor, and through his congressional office. Sometimes his comments, like those on the House floor, are milder, saying the researchers experimented on “a coronavirus” leading up to the pandemic. Other times, as in an interview with One America News Network, he linked the lab’s work to covid-19’s spread.
In that interview clip, Rosendale recounted pandemic-era shutdowns before saying, “And now we’re finding out that the National Institute of Health, Rocky Mountain Lab, down in Hamilton, Montana, had also played a role in this.”
Rosendale’s statements echo broader efforts to scrutinize how research into viruses happens in the United States and is part of a continued wave of backlash against scientists who have studied coronaviruses. Rosendale is considering seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Tester, in a toss-up race that could help determine which party controls the Senate in 2025. Political newcomer Tim Sheehy is also seeking the Republican nomination for the Senate.
Rosendale proposed amendments to a health spending bill that would ban pandemic-related pathogen research funding for Rocky Mountain Laboratories and cut the salary of one of its top researchers, virologist Vincent Munster, to $1. The House has included both amendments in the Health and Human Services budget bill that the Republican majority hopes to pass. A temporary spending bill is funding the health department until March.
We contacted Rosendale’s congressional office multiple times — with emails, a phone call, and an online request — asking what proof he had to back up his statements that the Montana lab infected bats with covid from China before the outbreak. We got no reply.
Kathy Donbeck, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Office of Communications and Government Relations, said in an email that the ad’s claims are false. Interviews with virologists and a review of the research paper published shortly before Rosendale’s assertions support that position.
Where this is coming from
Rosendale’s statements seem to stem from a Rocky Mountain Laboratories study from 2016 that looked into how a coronavirus, WIV1-CoV, acted in Egyptian fruit bats. The work, published by the journal Viruses in 2018, showed that the specific strain didn’t cause a robust infection in the bats.
The study did not receive widespread attention at the time. But on Oct. 30, 2023, the study was highlighted by a blog called White Coat Waste Project, which says its mission is to stop taxpayer-funded experiments on animals. Some right-wing media outlets began to connect the Montana lab with the coronavirus that causes covid.
Rosendale’s office issued an Oct. 31 news release saying the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China “shipped a strain of coronavirus” to the Hamilton lab. “Our government helped create the Wuhan flu, then shut the country down when it escaped from the lab,” Rosendale said.
It’s a different virus
Rocky Mountain Laboratories is a federally funded facility as part of NIAID, the nation’s top infectious disease research agency, which Fauci led for nearly 40 years.
According to the study and Donbeck’s email, the Montana researchers focused on a coronavirus called WIV1-CoV, not the covid-causing SARS-CoV-2. They’re different viruses.
“The genetics of the viruses are very different, and their behavior biologically is very different,” said Troy Sutton, a virologist with Pennsylvania State University who has studied the evolution of pandemic influenza viruses.
In a review of media reports on the Montana study, Health Feedback, a network of scientists that fact-checks health and medical media coverage, showed the virus’s lineage indicated that WIV1 “is not a direct ancestor or even a close relative of SARS-CoV-2.”
Additionally, the description of the coronavirus strain as being “shipped” suggests that it physically traveled across the world. That’s not what happened.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology provided the WIV1 virus’s sequence that allowed researchers to make a lab-grown copy. A separate study, published in 2013 by the journal Nature, outlines the origins of the lab-created virus.
According to the study’s methodology, the researchers used a clone of WIV1. An NIAID statement to Lee Enterprises, a media company, said the virus “was generated using common laboratory techniques, based on genetic information that was publicly shared by Chinese scientists.”
Stanley Perlman, a University of Iowa professor who studies coronaviruses and serves on the federal advisory committee that reviews vaccines, said Rosendale’s claim is off-base.
He said Rosendale’s focus on where the lab got its materials is irrelevant and serves “only to make people wary and scared.”
Rosendale’s efforts to prohibit particular research at Rocky Mountain Laboratories appear ill-informed, too. Rosendale targeted banning gain-of-function research, which involves altering a pathogen to study its spread. In her email, NIAID’s Donbeck said the Rocky Mountain Laboratories study didn’t involve gain-of-function research.
This type of research has long been controversial, and people who study viruses have said the definition of “gain of function” is problematic and insufficient to show when research, or even work to create vaccines, could cross into that type of research.
But both Sutton and Perlman said that, any way you look at it, the Rocky Mountain Laboratories study published in 2018 didn’t change the virus. It put a virus in bats and showed it didn’t grow.
And it had no effect on the covid outbreak a year later, first detected in Washington state.
Our ruling
Rosendale’s ad said, “It’s been revealed that Fauci brought COVID to the Montana one year before COVID broke out in the U.S!” The campaign ad and Rosendale’s similar statements refer to research at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories involving WIV1, a coronavirus that researchers say is not even distantly close in genetic structure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused covid-19.
Rosendale’s claim is wrong about when the scientists began their work, what they were studying, and where they got the materials. The researchers began their work in 2016 and, although they were studying a coronavirus, it wasn’t the virus that causes covid. The Montana scientists used a lab-grown clone of WIV1 for their research. The first laboratory-confirmed case of covid was not detected in the U.S. until Jan. 20, 2020. Rosendale’s ad is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
AFP - There is no evidence that the deadly H7N9 bird flu has yet spread between humans in China but health authorities must be ready for the virus to mutate at any time, a top US virologist has warned.
Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said officials in China had studied more than 1,000 close contacts of confirmed cases and not found any evidence of human-to-human transmission.
"That is powerful evidence because if you had a thousand contacts with someone with the flu you would be pretty sure some of them would have been infected," Fauci said in an interview with AFP.
Nevertheless, Fauci cautioned that authorities needed to be ready for the possibility of the virus mutating and spreading between humans.
"It's unpredictable as are all the influenza. One of the things we need to be concerned about is this might gain the capability of going human-to-human which up to this point has not happened and is somewhat encouraging news," Fauci said.
"But we still need to be very prepared for the eventuality of that happening."
Researchers are already developing a diagnostic test to identify H7N9, along with a vaccine, with clinical trials due in July or August.
"Work is under way on making a diagnostic test to be able to pick it up quickly," Fauci said.
"We have already started on an early development of a vaccine as we did with H5N1 years ago... Hopefully, we will never have to use it."
More than 110 people in mainland China have been confirmed to be infected with H7N9, with 23 deaths, since Beijing announced on March 31 that the virus had been found in humans.
Most of the cases have been located in eastern China, although Taiwan has reported one case. Another case has been found in southern China, while Chinese officials confirmed a further outbreak in the central province of Hunan.
Chinese authorities have identified poultry as the source of the virus and have confirmed that patients became sick from contact with infected live fowl.
A visiting team from the World Health Organization, which wrapped up a week-long visit to China on Wednesday, said there had been no human-to-human transmission but warned H7N9 was "one of the most lethal" influenza viruses ever seen.
Fauci praised Beijing for its handling of the current crisis, contrasting it to the response of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2002-2003, when China stood accused of covering-up the scale of the crisis.
"It was not the case with SARS in 2003 but the transparency has been excellent," Fauci said. "I am quite satisfied with the Chinese response."
Fauci likened the current H7N9 strain of bird flu "in some respects" to the H5N1 bird flu strain of several years ago.
"The similarities are that it is fundamentally a chicken or bird flu that jumps from chicken to humans and is quite severe when it infects humans," he said.
However, Fauci added: "The difference between H7N9 and H5N1, is that H5N1 kills chickens very rapidly so it is easy to identify where the infected flocks of chickens are. H7N9 doesn't make the chicken sick, so it has been difficult to pinpoint where the infected chickens are."
There have been 566 confirmed cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which killed 332 people in the world -- a mortality rate of 58 percent, compared to 20 percent for the H7N9 bird flu strain.
The H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic o 2009, which appeared in Mexico at the same time of year as the H7N9, eventually infected 60 million people throughout the world and killed more than 12,000.
The 1918 Spanish flu, which has been called one of the deadliest plagues in human history, had a mortality rate of only two percent.
Leading US health official Anthony Fauci on Wednesday rejected claims that the United States is censoring science by seeking to limit potentially dangerous bird flu information in major journals.
The controversy arose when two separate research teams -- one in the Netherlands and the other in the United States -- separately found ways to alter the H5N1 avian influenza so it could pass easily between mammals.
Until now, bird flu has been rare in humans, but particularly fatal in those who do get sick. H5N1 first infected humans in 1997 and has killed more than one in every two people that it infected, for a total of 350 deaths.
Based on fears that a deadly global pandemic could result if the mutant flu escaped a lab or if a terror group were to find out how to make it, a US advisory panel on Tuesday urged scientific journals to hold back key details.
The data "clearly has public health benefit but it has the potential to be used in nefarious ways by some people," said Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), made up of 23 non-governmental experts, voted unanimously that studies should be published in the journals Science and Nature, but with limited information.
Fauci said that any "legitimate" researchers would be able to seek the full details for their own study.
"If their credentials are appropriate they will have access to that information. So it's not like classified information," he told AFP.
"It's only for those people who have a need to know and have a legitimate purpose for it, as opposed to just throwing it out there so that anybody can do whatever they want," he added.
"It's absolutely not censorship because if you are a scientist and you have the need to know... you will definitely get that information."
The two research teams were funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, and are in the process of working out changes to their manuscripts with the journals Nature and Science.
Fauci also said that fears of what the mutant virus might do have been overblown. For instance, just because it could be passed easily between ferrets does not necessarily mean it could be as easily transmitted between humans.
"There is a little bit of an overreaction," he said, calling reports of a "monster virus" a "bit dramatic."
The real concern is that H5N1 might mutate in nature and become an influenza that humans could catch and transmit easily, so knowing what those flu features might look like is an important research and surveillance tool, he said.
"We could give that information to the people who are out of the field doing the surveillance, the health officials in Vietnam, Indonesia or China... so they will have a better chance of recognizing as the virus starts to evolve," he said.
"So the scientific question is very legitimate."
Fauci said the NSABB's request for redaction was the first time the advisory committee had made such an appeal, and acknowledged that it was not popular in all corners of the science world.
"There are many scientists who don't agree with the committee. So we need to re-look at what the rational for that decision was, so we can all get together in an open and a transparent way, come up with some more concrete guidelines of what needs to be looked in these cases," he said.
"That is going to trigger some interesting dialogue, I believe."
