Key congressman blasts HHS for lack of cooperation on Covid-19

The Health and Human Services Department’s lack of cooperation with a congressional committee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic is “unacceptable” and could prompt the committee to force people to testify, the panel’s chairman said in a letter to the agency Friday.

The letter, shared exclusively with STAT, comes roughly two weeks after a top HHS official testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Republicans including Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) were vocally frustrated with HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Melanie Egorin’s responses to questions about Covid-19’s origins, shutdown policies, and federal messaging about vaccines.

While HHS has shared thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the coronavirus response with the panel, Republicans argue they are heavily redacted and offer no clear answers on these policies or the virus’ origin. They also accused HHS officials of “dragging their feet” on responding to at least a dozen inquiries.

“We know, for a fact, that the Department is currently withholding critical documents. The Department’s failure to provide the requested documents is unacceptable,” Wenstrup wrote Friday.

Egorin said repeatedly during the hearing that the agency has “produced documents that have been ongoing and responsive to your request.”

If this next round of questions does not satisfy GOP committee leaders, Wenstrup warned that they will “evaluate the use of the compulsory process to obtain the testimony of Department employees who know the answers to these questions.”

The chairman then listed 12 separate times the committee asked for more information from HHS, spanning from February to November last year. For each, he requested more details about how HHS handled relevant staff interviews and email and document searches before handing over the redacted content to the committee.

The agency has been “exceptionally responsive to the Subcommittee’s wide-ranging inquiries regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic” and “has worked diligently throughout the past year” to provide documents, a spokesperson said. “Unfortunately, the politicization of the oversight process doesn’t get us anywhere closer to determining the origins of the pandemic.”

Besides Egorin’s testimony, the committee has heard from nearly a dozen current and former health officials including retired infectious disease official Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, both of whom voluntarily testified in lengthy closed-door sessions.

Democrats have lamented that these briefings have not produced new information about the virus or shutdown policies, and instead are further politicizing the pandemic amid national divides over public health information.

The committee’s most recent hearing focused on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and the government’s messaging about their benefits.

“Conspiratorial accusations manufacture distrust; fear mongering manufactures distrust. And with increased distrust, you increase vaccine hesitancy,” said ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) on Thursday. “How does this help us prevent or better prepare for the next pandemic? It doesn’t, it makes it worse, puts peoples’ lives at risk, and actually harms the American people.”