Former COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci confirmed during congressional testimony on Monday that he mislead the public regarding several key claims that experts say were to the detriment of public health during the pandemic.

Fauci, the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President during the height of the pandemic, testified before the House Oversight Committee investigating the origins of the pandemic. Fauci, who also formerly served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became the de facto public health spokesperson for the White House after the outbreak of the pandemic in the U.S. in February 2020 until December 2022.

During one exchange, Fauci admitted that there were no scientific studies proving that six-foot social distancing was effective at mitigating the transmission of COVID. Despite this, Fauci fully endorsed the CDC guidelines on social distancing that ultimately led to the shutdown of businesses, schools, and much of society. Social distancing “kept people from visiting hospitalized patients, holding the hands of dying loved ones, and attending funerals,” noted National Review’s Wesley J. Smith. “It increased social isolation, led to suicides, and made life miserable in myriad ways, large and small.”

Fauci also admitted during the hearing that “The National Institutes of Health gave a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded research on the surveillance on the possibility of emerging infections,” while insisting that it was not “dangerous gain-of-function research.” But experts such as Dr. Robert Malone have observed that Fauci’s characterization is “hair-splitting” and deliberately evasive in order to obscure the fact that the Wuhan research sought to make a bat virus “highly infectious to humans.”

In addition, Fauci appeared to reverse his stance on the lab leak theory being a “conspiracy theory.” “I don’t think the concept of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory,” he stated, later claiming, “I’ve kept an open mind.” But in the spring of 2020, Fauci dismissed the lab leak theory, stating on a podcast, “I’ve heard these conspiracy theories. And like all conspiracy theories, they’re just conspiracy theories.” It was later revealed through unearthed emails that Fauci orchestrated a “peer-reviewed” study that purported to show that the virus jumped from animals to humans outside of a lab.

During Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Malone, chief medical and regulatory officer for The Unity Project, observed that Fauci’s testimony appeared to be designed to deflect blame for his actions during the pandemic.

“[W]hat was clear in Dr. Fauci’s testimony was, number one, that he had been very well coached,” he contended. “This was an extremely smooth presentation. We saw an ‘aw shucks,’ down home Tony [Fauci] that I have never seen. It’s not his real personality. And we saw very skillful deflection and blaming of others in the case of these things, like the six-foot distancing, mask usage, etc. He put the blame for these policies — that were, he acknowledged, not based on science — directly on the CDC, and by inference, on [former CDC Director] Bob Redfield, who he does not get along with. The whole exercise of his presentation was fascinating to watch, from the adulation that was given by particularly the Democratic side, painting him as a hero.”

Malone, an internationally recognized physician and scientist who specializes in advanced development of medical countermeasures to infectious diseases, went on to note Fauci’s attempt to smear the Great Barrington Declaration, an alternative approach to lockdowns that was proposed by dozens of medical experts and scientists during the height of the pandemic.

“He also said that if the Great Barrington Declaration had been adopted … there would be a million more deaths. That’s completely at odds with the data,” Malone remarked. “And remember that the Great Barrington Declaration was basically a restatement of what had been U.S. government and WHO policy, up until the point when the U.S. government and WHO adopted basically the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] solution. … Again, [a] striking example of Dr. Fauci just going aggressive[ly] directly against people that were saying things that were inconvenient for him. This happened all the way through the testimony, but he did it with a smile.”