As the pandemic raged U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, syringe in hand, doled out hundreds of vaccines.
It was March 2021, months after the first COVID-19 vaccines were released. Wenstrup, a podiatrist by trade, assisted staff at a Cincinnati-area clinic and expressed concerns people were not getting inoculated due to unfounded claims about the vaccine.
Two years later, Wenstrup chairs a committee questioning the effect of the vaccine and the government’s response to the pandemic.
Depending on whom you ask, the special congressional committee investigating COVID led by Wenstrup is either a “comprehensive two-year review” of the pandemic or a “shameful episode in U.S. politics.”
One thing is clear, the COVID-19 virus isn’t going away, either as a disease or a political issue.
Wenstrup: ‘This is not an attack on science’
Wenstrup and the 15 other members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have met for the past nine months, ostensibly to look into the pandemic’s origins and government response. The committee has nine Republicans and seven Democrats. Among the Republicans: Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an anti-vaccine lawmaker who has been suspended on social media for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Wenstrup did not respond to multiple messages from The Enquirer requesting an interview.
Wenstrup has described the committee’s work as an examination of science and the government’s response. One of the objectives, Wenstrup and other Republicans have stated, is to look at the origins of the pandemic and whether government officials “tipped the scales” away from the theory COVID leaked from a lab.
“This is not an attack on science,” Wenstrup said during a July 11 hearing of the committee on the origins of COVID. “It is not an attack on peer review. And it is not an attack on an individual.”
Not everyone would describe the work of the committee as an investigation. A “political stunt” and “shameful episode in U.S. politics” is how Edward Holmes, a professor of virology at the University of Sydney in Australia, described the subcommittee in an email to The Enquirer. Holmes co-authored a paper asserting COVID’s origins as natural, a paper that Republicans on the committee have attacked as part of a government “cover-up” that COVID could have leaked from a lab.
“It’s not there to objectively investigate what happened,” Holmes said. Holmes stands by the paper’s assertion that COVID-19 did not originate in a laboratory. “It’s there to endorse a particular political stance. It’s about as far from science as you can possibly imagine. Embarrassing for U.S. politics.”
What is the subcommittee?
House Democrats created the subcommittee in April 2020 to investigate the preparedness of President Donald Trump’s administration for the pandemic and to “root out waste, fraud and abuse” then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said at the time. Republicans accused Democrats of using the committee as a weapon against the Trump administration.
The final report of the Democrat-controlled committee, released in December 2022, criticized the Trump administration’s “failed stewardship over the pandemic response and persistent pattern of political interference.”
House Republicans led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy revamped the committee weeks after taking control of the U.S. House in January. A press release from Wenstrup’s office in January described the mission of the committee as “a comprehensive, two-year review of the nation’s response to COVID-19,” including an investigation into the origins of COVID and the impact of government mandates.
At the same time, GOP lawmakers created the equally politically charged Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The committees formed, as some political publications described it at the time, to counter years of Democratic-led investigations against Republicans.
Who is Brad Wenstrup?
Wenstrup’s interest in COVID’s origins isn’t new.
As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, he raised questions about the government downplaying the theories that COVID leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Republicans on the intelligence committee released a minority report in December 2022 in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the explanation the virus came from animals sold at a market in Wuhan.
“It’s more of a list of concerns than anything,” Wenstrup told The Enquirer in January, weeks before becoming chairman of the coronavirus subcommittee. “We have no smoking gun, but we are concerned as to why certain things have been ignored by the intelligence community or not answering the questions we asked.”
Why was he chosen to lead the COVID committee?
Wenstrup is a physician and co-chairs the GOP Doctors Caucus. McCarthy had said that expertise, along with Wenstrup’s work as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, led to tapping him to lead the pandemic investigation.
“He will work to get answers on the rise and evolution of COVID and its variants and the roles of our federal government and (China’s Communist Party),” McCarthy said in a statement released at the time of Wenstrup’s appointment.
Who does Wenstrup represent?
Wenstrup has represented the 2nd District in Congress since 2013. Until 2022, his district covered eastern portions of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, including where he lived in Cincinnati’s Columbia Tusculum neighborhood. The district now includes Clermont County to the east, extending to parts or all of 16 southern Ohio counties. Wenstrup now lists his residence as Hillsboro, in Highland County, where he owns a farm.
What is Wenstrup’s stance on vaccines?
Wenstrup cheered the COVID vaccines soon after the first ones came out in December 2020.
But like many other Republicans he criticized vaccine mandates and mask requirements imposed by the Biden administration. Wenstrup in November 2021 introduced the “Stop Vaccine Mandates Act,” which would have rescinded the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for the federal workforce. The act never passed out of committee.
Wenstrup has said he’s not anti-vaccine. In a July 27 hearing, he said he still believes the vaccine “perhaps saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” He also acknowledged he administered hundreds of COVID-19 vaccines in the early months of 2021.
Rather, Wenstrup said, his beef is with the federal government vaccine mandate and mask mandates Wenstrup and the other Republicans claim they discouraged, rather than encouraged compliance.
“I received the vaccine myself,” Wenstrup said. “Unfortunately, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine will be forever tarnished by the administration’s decision to remove the doctor from the doctor-patient or patient-doctor relationship and force COVID vaccines on everyday Americans.”
What has the committee done?
The committee is not shy about seeking attention. It has titled its hearings, “Like Fire Through Dry Grass: Nursing Home Mortality & COVID-19 Policies,” “Because I Said So: Examining the Science and Impact of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates,” and “Oh Doctor, Where Art Thou? Pandemic Erosion of the Doctor-Patient Relationship.”
The Republican-led committee has called scientists and government officials to testify the government downplayed the theory COVID leaked from a Chinese virology lab. The experts called by the Republican lawmakers also asserted government mandates discouraged people from taking the vaccine and wearing masks. Democrats have called witnesses to refute these assertions.
The committee hasn’t uncovered definitive evidence on the origins of the pandemic. But some of the witnesses have testified that the possibility of a lab leak needs to be investigated.
The committee has also sent open records requests and letters of inquiry to the CIA, FBI, the National Institutes of Health and others related to the federal government’s research into COVID.
What was the effect of federal mandates?
One of the main targets of the committee is the mandates the Biden administration put in place for vaccines and masks.
More than 100 million people at one time were covered by the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates unveiled Sept. 9, 2021.
The scientific community is still assessing how effective these mandates were.
Studies, like one published in August 2022 in the medical journal The Lancet, found the mandates increased vaccinations but were hampered by legal, political and logistical challenges.
Republicans on the committee called Kevin Bardosh, an assistant professor from the University of Washington. Bardosh authored a paper arguing the mandates did more harm than good by sowing distrust in government. The study concluded requiring vaccinations had the biggest impact for those under 30 and least at risk for COVID-19 complications.
What role does politics play in vaccine skepticism?
Evidence shows vaccine skepticism stems from politics. The more Republican a state, the more people avoided the vaccine. This includes one study released in July from Yale Researchers that shows a higher excess death rate among Republicans in Ohio and Florida once vaccines became available.
A Morning Consult poll of 350,000 people from December 2022 to March 2023 showed the top 10 states with the highest percentage of people unwilling to get the vaccine, each more than 30% of the respondents, all voted Republican in the presidential election. The top 10 states with the lowest percentage of vaccine refusers were Democratic-leaning states.
“There are polls that are showing the higher hesitancy rate are within the white American Republican male population versus any other group,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat and physician from California, in a July 27 hearing on the vaccine mandates. Ruiz is the ranking Democrat on the committee.
“So the extreme messaging and manufacturing distrust has a higher deleterious effect for those who hear it.”
Wenstrup has questioned the long-term effects of the vaccine.
“Do we know 10 years from now what this vaccine’s going to do?” Wenstrup said in a hearing of the committee in July. “No. And frankly, I don’t want to wait to deal with something like Agent Orange 30 years later.”
Is the vaccine deadly?
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, as one of the members of the committee, has used the platform to spout debunked statistics she alleges show high mortality and injury rates from the vaccine. She has cited U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which collects anecdotal reports that anyone can enter. USA TODAY has repeatedly debunked claims based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data.
In one memorable exchange in June, Greene grilled then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky on the data. Walensky responded by saying the VAERS data included any adverse event after a vaccine, regardless of whether it was connected to the vaccine.
“Remember we gave 676 million doses of the vaccine,” Walensky said in the June hearing. “Any adverse event, if you got hit by a truck after you got a vaccine, that was reported.”
She offered to educate Greene’s staff on the data.
“I don’t want my staff educated,” Greene said. “You should educate the American people about what you’ve done of 1.5 million reports because they feel like you’ve done nothing.”
What are the vaccine effects?
Through May 2023, nine deaths had been linked to COVID-19 vaccines, all from rare blood clots associated with a vaccine no longer available in the U.S.
Those in the medical community maintain the vaccine is safe. The CDC recommends everyone six years and older get the updated COVID vaccine for the fall as the best way to prevent hospitalization and death.
Vaccines in some form have been around for more than 200 years. Historically, adverse reactions to any vaccine are seen within the first two months, said Dr. Helen Koselka, an internist and chief medical director of TriHealth, in an interview with The Enquirer.
“So as you look at what we’ve seen, over the last three years, there’s been literally hundreds of millions of people that have gotten this vaccine, actually, probably billions around the world,” Koselka told The Enquirer. “It sounds like that we’re not really seeing long-term effects.”
Did Fauci and the scientists suppress the lab leak theory?
The Republicans on the committee have focused a lot of their questions and accusations against the nation’s former leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the scientists around him.
They’ve accused them of suppressing evidence COVID-19 was engineered and leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan. Republicans on the committee have presented a series of emails between Fauci and other scientists to suggest Fauci pressured the conclusions of a report, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” released in March 2020, to push the theory COVID came from animals sold at a market in Wuhan.
The report concluded they didn’t believe a lab leak was plausible but acknowledged “it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.”
“We are curious as to why certain scientists that work for the government, paid by taxpayer dollars are going with one narrative when there’s all this other information that might suggest a lab leak,” Wenstrup told Fox News in June.
A grant in 2014 from the National Institutes of Health, which Fauci worked for as a physician, may have provided a motive to downplay the lab leak theory, the Republicans have contended. The $3.4 million grant went to U.S.-based pandemic prevention research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Virology Institute to study bat coronaviruses. The grant continued under the Trump administration until it was rescinded in 2020.
Fauci and the scientists involved in the “Proximal Origin” paper have maintained they based their conclusions on evolving evidence. Fauci went on Fox News in March to refute testimony from a March 8 hearing of the coronavirus committee.
At that March hearing, Robert Redfield, the former Centers for Disease Control director during the Trump administration, claimed he was left off a conference call with Fauci and other scientists in February 2020 to discuss the origins of COVID. Redfield has supported the theory COVID-19 originated in a lab.
Fauci told Fox News in March that he never pressured anyone.
“I wasn’t totally leaning one way or another,” Fauci told Fox News in March. He said he had nothing to do with deciding who was on the phone call, which included experts who believed in a lab leak theory. “I’ve always kept an open mind.”
The Republicans outlined their accusations in a report released in July, “Proximal Origins of a Cover-Up.”
Democrats on the committee countered that with a report titled “They Played No Role,” arguing government officials did not suppress the leak and had little input in the drafting of the report.
The scientists involved in writing the paper have denied Fauci coerced a conclusion from the paper. Two testified before the committee: Kristian G. Andersen, of Scripps Research, and Robert F. Garry Jr., of Tulane University School of Medicine.
“Specifically, I remember him saying that if you think it came from a lab, you should write this up as a peer-reviewed paper, so it can be judged by the peer community,” Andersen said in his interview before the committee.
Andersen and other scientists who co-authored the paper on COVID’s origins have said all evidence still points to a natural origin for COVID but that they are open to any new evidence that points to the contrary.
“That’s how to do science,” Holmes, one of the paper’s co-authors, wrote in the email to The Enquirer. “If the scientific evidence changes then I would also change my opinion.”
Where did COVID come from?
There isn’t a consensus on the origins of COVID. The theory that the virus was engineered in the lab was once dismissed by the scientific establishment as a conspiracy theory but has now gained traction among some. Others maintain the theory COVID came from bats or other animals.
A report from the National Intelligence Council in June showed how conflicted the United States government is on the origins of the pandemic. The National Intelligence Council and four other intelligence agencies, which the report didn’t name, concluded COVID jumped from an infected animal to humans.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s intelligence division and the FBI believe the lab leak is the most likely.
The CIA has been unable to determine a source of COVID, the intelligence council report stated, “as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”
Who has testified?
A March hearing of the coronavirus subcommittee got off to a rocky start thanks to the guest list. Democrats on the committee decried the Republicans for inviting author Nicholas Wade to testify. They pointed out Wade’s controversial 2014 book on race and genetics, “A Troublesome Inheritance,” was praised by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
In the book, Wade suggested genetic differences may explain why some societies advance and others do not, why Black people are allegedly more violent than whites, and why the Chinese may be good at business, according to Science.org.
“I’m not a racist,” Wade said at the hearing, saying he didn’t write the book for Duke. “I don’t have anything in common with the views of white supremacists.”
“They love you, though,” Democratic committee member and U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, from Maryland, responded.
Others who have testified:
Who is on the committee?
The committee has nine Republicans and seven Democrats.
Republican members: Reps. Brad Wenstrup, chairman, R-Ohio; Nicole Malliotakis, R-New York; Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa; Debbie Lesko, R-Arizona; Michael Cloud, R-Texas; John Joyce, R-Pennsylvania; Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia; Ronny Jackson, R-Texas; Rich McCormick, R-Georgia.
Democratic members: Reps. Raul Ruiz, ranking Democrat, D-California; Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan; Kweisi Mfume, D-Maryland; Deborah Ross, D-North Carolina; Robert Garcia, D-California; Ami Bera, D-California; Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii.