Dr. Anthony Fauci’s long-anticipated Monday appearance before Congress was expected to generate fireworks. And it sure did.

From the outset, House Democrats generously praised Fauci’s public service as heroic, while skeptical House Republicans posed probing questions ranging from mask and vaccine mandates to the lack of transparency at Fauci’s agency and his initial response to the origins of the global pandemic in China. At times, partisan divisions became tense and the rhetoric red hot, while Capitol Police escorted hecklers from the hearing room.

Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases testified under oath before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, on a wide range of issues related to his role in the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amidst the heat of the hearing, there were shafts of bright light that will, in the subcommittee’s final report this year, clarify critical issues and establish the groundwork for remedial legislation. For example:

A key issue for COVID-19 oversight is whether the deadly global pandemic had its origins in nature or was the product of a genetically engineered virus that may have somehow leaked from a Chinese research laboratory.

“I have been clear from the beginning,” stated Fauci, “that the lab leak was not a conspiracy theory.” Fauci repeatedly stated that. While he personally leaned toward a natural origin of the coronavirus, he claims that he has had an open mind on the subject since the inception of the pandemic, when the first news of the novel coronavirus came out of China.

He told the subcommittee that he did not try to steer the conclusion about the COVID-19 origins and he did not edit the draft of the influential March 2020 Nature Medicine article that concluded that the novel coronavirus was not a “laboratory construct.”

Despite Fauci’s disclaimer, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pressed Fauci on the issue, noting that he and other top officials at the National Institutes of Health, including then-Director Francis Collins, seemed intent on discrediting the “lab leak” theory and promoting the soon-to-be dominant academic and media narrative that the novel coronavirus had its origins in nature.

Most of the top virologists Fauci consulted in February 2020 on the question did, indeed, initially assess that SARS Cov-2, the strange virus that causes COVID-19, was the product of lab engineering, but quickly reversed their position.

Two things remain mysterious to this day. First, how and why a group of top scientists reversed their initial assessments in a matter of........

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