Leaders of the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledge they have a problem communicating with the American people about COVID-19 and the risk level of the SARS-CoV virus -2 and its treatments.

Members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic told agency leaders during its final hearing Thursday that they also have a communication problem with Congress and that they need to provide clear and specific answers to lawmakers’ questions, from the accountability of bad actors to their plans for nuanced analyzes of risks and benefits in layman’s terms then that vaccine hesitancy is skyrocketing.

Republicans laughed in disbelief when Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak claimed he couldn’t even tell them whether the NIH had begun its investigation into David Morens for his repeated written confessions of circumvention the Freedom of Information Act to hide his discussions with outside scientists about U.S. funding of the Chinese laboratory from which COVID may have escaped.

Morens, senior science advisor to former National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, was removed from his position and placed on administrative leave after the subcommittee revealed his communications, Speaker Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said in January.

CDC Office of Preparedness and Response Director Henry Walke’s rote paeans to the safety, effectiveness and rigorous review of COVID vaccines have drawn bipartisan rebukes.

“Please don’t do this,” Walke interrupted Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa and the state’s former public health director. “I ask you how is the CDC going to overcome the growing vaccine hesitancy,” compounded by its “strong guidance” in favor of universal vaccination and lack of detail on adverse effects such as high risks of myocarditis in young men.

Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said Wilke did not answer his question about how the CDC would “evolve…your presentation of evidence” in response to “things that arise” after vaccine approval , linked to “special groups”. or special circumstances. Wilke had blamed misinformation for the “plateau” in COVID death rates after a “magnificent” decline that he attributed to vaccination.

Only 15.3% of the eight million health care workers in more than 4,100 “acute care hospitals” and 10.5% of nursing home staff have received the 2023-2024 COVID vaccine, according to the CDC. Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report as of October 31. The agency also recently warned users about this season the flu vaccine will probably be worse to prevent hospitalizations than in previous years.

Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role in Donald Trump’s second administration panicked Rep. Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, hours before the GOP president-elect says he will nominate Democratic scion become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Children’s Health Defense founder and environmental lawyer “has no scientific or medical qualifications” and has made “outrageous comments,” such as attributing autism to vaccines, Garcia said, calling him “vaccine denier”. (RFK Jr. recently said he’s not ‘anti-vaccine’ and promised to focus on informed consent for vaccines rather than eliminating them.)

Chairman Wenstrup and California Rep. Raul Ruiz, the committee’s top Democrat, gave diametrically opposed assessments of the subcommittee’s work, which will conclude with a final report and recommendations in “the coming weeks,” Wenstrup said .

Lawmakers revealed “inconsistent and conflicting guidance” from the CDC on reopening schools, even after children’s low risk was clear, and the NIH’s “gross lack of oversight of federal grants” at the time. Wuhan Institute of Virology, suspected of lab leak, via EcoHealth Alliance,” Wenstrup says.

Federal officials also ignored clinical trials to falsely claim that COVID vaccines would put the virus in a “dead end,” he said.

Because the NIAID “encroached on the CDC’s turf in advising on matters related to containing the spread, thereby creating confusion among the American people,” Wenstrup, now retired, called on Congress to create a “dedicated authority” to limit agencies to “their statutory areas of responsibility and subjects”. subject matter expertise” and increase transparency.

Ruiz reiterated his long-standing claim that the GOP-led subcommittee “did not shed light on the origins” of COVID and found no evidence to support “extreme and baseless claims,” revealing only “discreet issues of misconduct” such as Morens’ FOIA splurges to help his friend, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.

California Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, like many doctors on the panel, said lawmakers should accept both lab leaks and natural origin as “plausible theories” for COVID, admitting that research into Courses should have informed policy decisions such as school closures, and persistent studies. mysteries such as why COVID did not “cross” California, Japan or India as feared.

Congress cannot prepare for the next pandemic — the stated goal of Thursday’s hearing — without making new progress on the origins, Miller-Meeks said.

The media described this investigation as a “witch hunt” when she joined Congress in 2020, applied “demeaning terms” to people “simply for questioning whether new vaccines that had not been approved by the FDA suited them, and CDC messages discouraged patients from asking. their doctors ask questions, Miller-Meeks said.

Walke insisted that “vaccines are incredibly effective and the best defense” against COVID, but admitted that providers can “interpret” the CDC guidelines for their patients.

Hilary Marston, the FDA’s chief medical officer, told Mfume that agencies need to “show our work and explain our work,” such as finding safety signals in the vaccine adverse event reporting system, and providing ” digestible information” for clinicians to pass on to their patients rather than simply publishing the results to a professional audience.

She told Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., that “repeated studies” show that COVID boosters are “important and save lives,” citing a Danish study that found that people vaccinated against the XBB variant had a hospitalization rate four times higher than that of unvaccinated people. boosted people. Marston did not name the study or mention it in his prepared testimony.

Marston claimed, again without evidence, that 3.2 million more people would have died without Covid vaccines, and frustrated Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa., by comparing their risk of adverse events to the risk to drink too much water.

“We’re not talking about water and its toxicity,” Joyce retorted. “We’re talking about misinformation” – former CDC director Rochelle Walensky initially claimed that vaccinated people couldn’t get sick or transmit the virus.

Joyce pressed Walke to clarify how often his CDC and Marston’s FDA meet and share data to ensure the guidelines are consistent with the evidence, with Walke ultimately saying they meet weekly and “different levels” meet. met face to face “regularly”.

Tabak’s attempts to ward off GOP questions about Morens provided comic relief to the hearing.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., showed NIH official Morens’ own emails — sharing draft documents with EcoHealth, helping the nonprofit respond to requests of Congress and stating that he “deleted everything” about EcoHealth in his government email – and asked if they showed violations of NIH policy and lying to Congress, a crime.

When Tabak asked if Morens had “successfully deleted” the emails – which shouldn’t be possible for a “senior employee” – Comer laughed and retorted “he thought he deleted them!” Tabak refused to commit to firing Morens, reiterating “we follow all our procedures to the letter.”

Arizona Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko, who like Wenstrup is retiring from Congress, had a hard time understanding Tabak about what the NIH was actually doing with Morens.

“What is the process? ” she asked, prompting Tabak to describe a “hypothesis” in which an accused employee would be allowed to present his or her side and appeal a decision made against him to a second manager. He declined to say whether that process had even begun, prompting Lesko to predict that the incoming Trump administration would facilitate such layoffs.

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, marveled at witnesses calling for more funding and legal authorities to deal with the next pandemic while avoiding responsibility for decisions such as indirect funding of the Wuhan lab.

He noted Fauci told the subcommittee he had not read he approved grants, but trusted the judgment of the committees that recommended approval, but those committees voted on “block grants” for many projects. “These supposed multiple levels of accountability morph into multiple levels of plausible deniability,” Cloud said.