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The Former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been accused of lying to Congress in his testament during a House hearing regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Knewz.com has learned that Fauci claimed to have never used his personal email address to conduct official business at the Congressional hearing on COVID-19 in June 2024.
At the hearing, he was asked by House Representative Nicole Malliotakis, "Did you communicate with anyone relating to anything regarding NIH [National Institutes of Health] or with Dr. Morens [Fauci's former senior advisor] on a private email?"
"I do not do government business on my private email," came Fauci's reply.
However, email correspondence between the former NIAID Chief and The Washington Post journalist Yasmeen Abutaleb released by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project seems to contradict Fauci's response to Congress during the hearing.
“I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account,” Fauci wrote in an email to the journalist on October 29, 2021.
Fauci reportedly used his personal email address to talk to the journalist back in 2021 about his alleged approval of taxpayer-funded research on dogs in Tunisia, something for which he became the center of immense public rage and criticism at the time.
In the email thread between Fauci and The Washington Post journalist Abutaleb uncovered by the watchdog group, the former shared articles that tried to debunk all the allegations made against Fauci.
Notably, the journalist in question was reportedly sympathetic towards Fauci in 2021—a time when he was in the middle of significant media backlash over the beagle experiment controversy.
The personal email correspondence with The Washington Post journalist was exclusively shared by the White Coat Waste Project with the New York Post.
Anthony Bellotti, founder and president of the watchdog group, said about the latest findings of the group:
"We’ve followed the money and exposed how Fauci lied under oath about not funding gain-of-function at the Wuhan animal lab, that he lied about not bankrolling beagle torture in Tunisia, and, now, that he broke federal law by using his personal email to evade [Freedom of Information Act] requests about Beaglegate [the beagle puppy controversy] and secretly communicate with a Washington Post reporter who then published NIH disinformation to protect him and discredit us."
In 2021, the White Coat Waste Project uncovered a Fauci-approved NIAID grant to a lab in Tunisia for researching the spread of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis, a tropical disease, by experimenting on beagle puppies.
According to reports, domestic dogs are the main reservoir hosts of the disease, and female sandflies are the primary vectors.
Photos uncovered by the watchdog group in 2021 showed the puppies being locked in small cages and left overnight in the desert to attract female sandflies. One of the photos, which went viral at the time, showed two beagle pups – allegedly drugged – with their heads enclosed within mesh cages reportedly containing sandflies.
The pictures led to widespread public dissent against Fauci, notably at a time when conservatives were trying to disparage and discredit the former NIAID head.
It is worth noting that the public backlash was followed by a bipartisan letter signed by 24 members of Congress which cited the White Coat Waste Project's report and stated that lawmakers had “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.”
In October 2021, the NIAID issued a statement that said that the photos shared by the watchdog group were "drawn from a manuscript published in July 2021 in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases," and that "The manuscript mistakenly cited support from NIAID."
"NIAID did not support this specific research shown in the images of the beagles being circulated," the statement added.
"NIAID has funded a separate project involving the study of a vaccine to prevent leishmaniasis, a serious parasitic disease transmitted by sand flies that poses a threat in particular to US troops and other personnel, as well as US military dogs, in areas where the disease is endemic."
It has been reported that in his recent memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, Fauci called the allegations of funding the research that reportedly subjected beagles to torture "lies" and "lunacy" from the "far right."
However, prior to the publication of the book, Fauci said at the Congressional hearing in June 2024 on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic that he had, in fact, signed off on the beagle experiments.
"The experiments that NIH funded go through strict regulatory processes of the treatment of animals, the humane treatment of animals... I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review," Fauci said at the hearing, per reports.
Regarding the email correspondence with The Washington Post journalist, Fauci's attorney David Schertler argued that he was contacting Abutaleb regarding a "personal matter." Ergo, he was not conducting "official business" via his personal email address, Schertler said in a statement to the New York Post.
However, White Coat Waste Project founder Bellotti insisted that the email correspondence was proof that Fauci “broke federal law.”
"Fauci’s the poster child for government corruption and Congress needs to hold him accountable for his abuses, which carry criminal penalties including fines and jail time," he told the New York Post.
Notably, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had previously obtained proof that Dr. David Morens, Fauci's former senior advisor, used a private email account to evade Freedom of Information Act requests.
Some of the personal email correspondences were with Dr. Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance—the company that received half a million in NIH funding for conducting gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, starting in 2014.
It is worth noting that the Wuhan funding was also something Fauci had lied about under oath, per the White Coat Waste Project founder's allegations.