House GOP ratchets up conflict with health agencies over COVID-19 origins investigation
Gabrielle M. Etzel
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House Republicans are demanding answers by the end of Friday from the Department of Health and Human Services regarding its lack of response to their investigation into the origins of COVID-19, threatening to begin issuing subpoenas if the Biden administration does not comply with voluntary requests.
Energy and Commerce Committee leadership sent several letters to both HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and acting Director of the National Institutes of Health Lawrence Tabak regarding the lack of response to eight committee requests for information since March 2022.
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The committee’s most urgent request regards the NIH’s oversight of research on virus mutations of SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. After waiting for three months from the original request for this research oversight information, the committee sent a request for follow-up by Aug. 31, to which the NIH has not been “responsive in a meaningful way,” the committee said.
“Over the last four months, NIH has failed, and continues to fail, to engage with the committee, and provide requested documents. NIH’s failure to provide meaningful information to these Congressional oversight requests shatters the norms of interbranch cooperation and accommodation,” Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) wrote to Tabak.
The committee is also demanding by the end of the day on Friday a response from both Tabak and Becerra regarding leadership changes at the NIH, including the appointment of the new director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Jeanne Marrazzo.
Rodgers and her colleagues characterize the lack of response as “part of a larger pattern from HHS and NIH since March 2020 to make assertions that appointments or reappointments of NIH institute and center directors have been lawful, but without producing any documents or other evidence on which to evaluate these claims.”
The NIH has until Oct. 5 to provide a response to the committee’s additional request for sequencing data from early COVID-19 cases as part of the broader investigation into the origins of the virus. This information would be critical to determining the evolutionary pattern of the virus, potentially shedding light on whether the virus spread as a result of a laboratory incident or natural zoonotic transmission.
Both the Energy and Commerce and Oversight Committees set a deadline of Sept. 21 earlier this month in a letter to Becerra demanding more information into the NIH’s grant funding to the research organization EcoHealth Alliance, which funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
EcoHealth Alliance has previously told the Washington Examiner that it had no part in coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that could have had the capacity to infect humans.
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“NIH’s disregard of this oversight request undermines the norms of interbranch cooperation and accommodation,” Rodgers and her colleagues wrote to Tabak.
Neither HHS nor the NIH responded to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.