Ranking Member Ruiz’s Opening Statement at Select Subcommittee Hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci

Washington, D.C. (June 3, 2024)—Below is Ranking Member Raul Ruiz’s, M.D. opening statement, as prepared for delivery, at today’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
 

Opening Statement
Ranking Member Raul Ruiz, M.D.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Hearing on “A Hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci”
June 3, 2024

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

When I was named Ranking Member of the Select Subcommittee last February, I made a commitment to follow the facts in objectively analyzing the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I made a promise to keep an open mind about how the pandemic started because understanding whether the novel coronavirus emerged from a lab or from nature is essential to better preventing and preparing for future public health threats and to better protecting the American people.

And as the origins of the novel coronavirus remain inconclusive, I stand by these commitments to this day. 

But nearly a year and a half into House Republicans’ extreme and chaotic Majority, I believe we need to take stock of what the Select Subcommittee has accomplished and whether it has meaningfully improved our preparedness for the next public health threat to reach our shores.

Under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins, House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how COVID-19 came to be—and instead weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain.

They have done so with one particular public health official in mind:  Dr. Anthony Fauci.

And they have done so in an effort to deflect blame and anguish for the damage the pandemic inflicted on our society away from the former President—whose stumbling pandemic response by some estimates led to 400,000 unnecessary COVID-19 deaths—and onto Dr. Fauci, who worked tirelessly to stem the crisis.

Over the past fifteen months, the Select Subcommittee has pored over more than 425,000 pages of documents provided to us by government agencies, universities, and private citizens.

We have conducted more than one hundred hours of closed-door interviews with twenty current and former federal officials and scientists.

And what we have found is the following: 

• Dr. Fauci did not fund research through the EcoHealth Alliance grant that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
   
• Dr. Fauci did not lie about gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.
   
•  And Dr. Fauci did not orchestrate a campaign to suppress the lab leak theory. 

After fifteen months, the Select Subcommittee still does not possess a shred of evidence to substantiate these extreme allegations that Republicans have levied against Dr. Fauci for nearly four years.

Now, I want to make something very clear. 

In the past month, the Select Subcommittee has held hearings where we have examined very serious issues of misconduct. 

In following the facts, Select Subcommittee Democrats uncovered troubling misconduct by Dr. Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, including potential efforts to mislead the federal government about the nature of its work through the evasion of reporting and transparency requirements.

And less than two weeks ago, we heard from Dr. David Morens about his flagrant violation of the Freedom of Information Act’s transparency requirements and the potential destruction of federal records.

Both Dr. Daszak and Dr. Morens deserve to be held accountable for betraying the public’s trust.

To hold them accountable is not anti-science—it is in defense of our federal scientific and research institutions’ decades-long legacy of advancing the scientific enterprise to safeguard human health. 

But baselessly suggesting without evidence that these discrete instances of misconduct are equivalent to our nation’s scientists and public health officials causing the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than one million Americans and inflicted an immeasurable toll on our society, is also a betrayal of the public’s trust—which each of us are stewards of as elected Members of this body.

Today’s hearing comes at a pivotal moment for our nation’s public health. 

With the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us thanks to the Biden Administration’s leadership, we are now faced with a crisis of declining confidence in the very science and public health interventions that lifted our society from one of the most challenging periods in our nation’s history. 

And as we look to the future, we find ourselves at a fork in the road.

We can go down the path of fueling mistrust in the interventions that saved us—like vaccines, masking, and social distancing—and the public health officials, like Dr. Fauci, who worked tirelessly and with extremely limited and evolving information about a novel virus to save lives during the one of the greatest crises of our time.

Or we can work constructively on the forward-looking policies and solutions that we know are necessary to prevent and better prepare us for the public health threats that are yet to come. 

Since my first day as Ranking Member, I set out to take the latter path—the path of putting people over politics and prioritizing solutions to better prepare us for the next pandemic.

And it has been my hope that Republicans would join Democrats in the forward-looking work that will better protect our constituents. 

Strengthening oversight of potentially risky research domestically and abroad is an essential part of this conversation, and so is closing pathways for zoonotic transfers of viruses in nature and investing in our public health infrastructure to ensure that when future viruses hit our shores, we are ready.

When Democrats were in the Majority, we made important strides in these objectives by passing the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023—which:

• Strengthened protections against undue influence in our biomedical research,
   
• Improved training and transparency for the handling of select agents,
   
• Paved the way for the interagency collaboration to fortify zoonotic disease prevention,
   
• Invested in our infectious disease workforce, and
   
• Enhanced our supply chain preparedness and ability to rapidly develop and deploy medical countermeasures.

And ahead of today’s hearing, more than 90 health and medical organizations—including the American Public Health Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials—wrote to the Select Subcommittee urging us to “stand against efforts to weaken the ability of the nation’s public health agencies to protect the nation’s health” and to take additional action to fortify of nation’s public health workforce and infrastructure.

I seek unanimous consent to enter this letter into the hearing record.

As we sit here today, I have not lost hope that in the remaining months of the Select Subcommittee, we can work together to build on this legacy—and make objectively examining the origins of the novel coronavirus a part of this forward-looking work.

I stand by the commitments I mentioned earlier—to take a serious, balanced look at all possibilities for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And I stand ready to work with every member of this Select Subcommittee on this critically important mission so that we can save future lives.

Thank you, and I yield back.