Fauci Refused to Explain Rationale for Covid Social-Distancing Guidelines during Congressional Testimony, GOP Lawmaker Claims

While testifying before the House on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to explain the rationale for social-distancing guidelines that he and other federal health officials heavily promoted during the Covid-19 pandemic, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) revealed after the closed-door hearing.

“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident,” including how the six-foot social-distancing recommendation came to be, the House Coronavirus Select Subcommittee chairman said in a statement Wednesday morning. “The social distancing recommendations forced on Americans ‘sort of just appeared’ and were likely not based on scientific data.”

Further probing the issue, Republican members of the committee asked why social distancing was not established as three, four, or five feet. Fauci did not provide a clear answer to that question, a spokeswoman for the chairman told National Review.

In late November, Wenstrup announced that Fauci had agreed to testify before his subcommittee in a private setting over the course of two days. Before retiring at the end of 2022, Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor under the Trump and Biden administrations.

During the last seven hours of the transcribed interview on Tuesday, Fauci testified that the lab-leak hypothesis, which he tried to disprove with the March 2020 “Proximal Origin” scientific paper, was not a conspiracy theory after all. While conceding the possibility that the coronavirus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, he did appear to play semantics with the definition of a “lab leak” to defend the biased conclusions of Nature Medicine’s “Proximal Origin” publication.

The retired public health official also claimed that the country’s Covid vaccine mandates could inadvertently increase vaccine hesitancy in the future, a consequence he had not brought up in the past. In fact, he spoke out in support of strict vaccine mandates at the time, saying “when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.”

Regarding vaccine mandates, Fauci told Congress he advised American universities to impose such restrictions on their students when he was approached by higher-education institutions.

Additionally, he denied a whistleblower’s allegations that he visited the CIA without any record of his entry during the pandemic or influenced the agency’s investigation into the origins of Covid.

It was also revealed that Fauci agreed with former president Donald Trump’s travel ban on China, despite initially opposing it, and supported the sweeping travel restrictions on European nations at the onset of the pandemic.

“Dr. Fauci’s transcribed interview revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority,” Wenstrup said. “It is clear that dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely. Should a future pandemic arise, America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data.”

In the first round of questioning on Monday, Wenstrup and the committee learned that Fauci “did not recall” important information or conversations pertaining to the origins of Covid-19 and the U.S. pandemic response he presided over. Fauci claimed he did not remember much about those key details over 100 times, according to the House coronavirus panel.

“While we remain frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s inability to recollect COVID-19 information that is important for our investigation, others we have spoken to do recall the facts,” Wenstrup added, noting he looks forward to seeing Fauci at a public hearing later this year. “There are many opportunities to do better in the future.”

The public hearing, which Fauci had agreed upon in November, has no scheduled date yet.