Dr. Anthony Fauci will testify before Congress on the U.S. response to COVID-19 and the origins of the virus.
Fauci, the former White House chief medical adviser and retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will testify before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in early January, followed by a public hearing later in the year.
House Republicans want Fauci to testify on what U.S. officials knew about the origin of the coronavirus, as well as how the pandemic was handled stateside.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the GOP chairman of the committee, said it's time for Fauci "to confront the facts and address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic."
"Dr. Fauci was the face of America's public health response during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his testimony will serve as a crucial component of the Select Subcommittee's investigations into the origin of COVID-19, coercive mandates, gain-of-function type research, scientific censorship, and more," Wenstrup said in a statement.
Officials are divided as to what caused the outbreak. The Department of Energy and the FBI have said that a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China was the most likely cause. Meanwhile, four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council think the virus originated through natural transmission from an infected animal to humans -- a theory that is supported by Fauci.
Earlier this year, the Coronavirus Select Subcommittee released evidence suggesting that Fauci prompted the drafting of a scientific paper in April 2020 to disprove the lab leak theory.
The subcommittee also released emails that showed Fauci was aware of risky "gain-of-function" research occurring in Wuhan, China prior to the emergence of the pandemic, but never revealed this to the public. The research involves genetically manipulating a virus to understand its potential impact in real life situations.
In the email, Fauci wrote: "Scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan."
During an interview earlier this year, Fauci would not commit to one theory over the other, saying definitive proof lacks either way.
The Chinese government has continuously denied that COVID-19 could have come from one of its labs in Wuhan.