Dr. Anthony Fauci is facing heated questioning from Republican lawmakers about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The top U.S. infectious disease expert until 2022, Fauci was grilled by the House panel behind closed doors in January. On Monday, they’re questioning him again, in public and on camera. The Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong. The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory. A U.S. intelligence analysis says there’s insufficient evidence to prove either way -- and a recent Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts to trace the source of the virus in the first weeks of the outbreak. Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people. Fauci became a household name in the pandemic – first under President Donald Trump and later as a chief adviser to President Joe Biden -- trying to explain the latest public health advice to a frightened public even as scientists were struggling to learn about the new virus. Research from the agency he led for 38 years, NIH’s National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led to vaccines that allowed a return to normalcy.