Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision, at least for now, shielded Fauci from answering questions that could expose him to accusations of lying under oath. Though he received a pardon in early 2025 from Democratic President Joe Biden, some Republicans pursuing a yearslong campaign for his arrest had suggested he could still face charges for any perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing.
The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had an antagonistic relationship with Fauci.
In response to angry, sometimes mocking, questions from Republican senators, Fauci declined to answer more than 100 times, injecting new drama into partisan divides that have festered for years about the origins and handling of the pandemic. Fauci himself has become a polarizing figure, even receiving death threats that prompted him to seek security.
In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote,” Fauci said, adding that while it pained him to do so, he was following his attorney’s advice by taking the Fifth.
Paul, who has long argued that Fauci should be criminally investigated, based on his belief that the scientist was dishonest in previous testimony to Congress, announced that the committee will vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt for declining to answer questions.
He did not say whether he would push for a criminal contempt referral to federal prosecutors or another charge. He also raised questions about whether Fauci’s pardon affects his eligibility for Fifth Amendment protections.
Republicans accuse Fauci of lying while Democrats say he didn't deserve that
In the combative hearing, Paul and other Republicans accused Fauci of lying in earlier testimony about the coronavirus’s origins, something the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has forcefully denied. Democrats called the hearing a politically motivated attempt at entrapping Fauci and praised the scientist for his work during the pandemic.
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With Fauci declining to answer questions throughout, Paul dominated the approximately three-hour hearing, listing a litany of accusations and detailed questions.
“Today will be the capstone to Anthony Fauci’s 40 years of abuse of power at NIH,” Paul said. “History will judge, but the facts as we now know them paint a sordid tale of dishonesty, misjudgment and ultimately the hubris, the likes of which the world has never seen.”
In a heated moment during the hearing, Paul ejected Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, from the room after he tried to speak without being recognized. In a statement, Schertler said the removal was “outrageous and demonstrates the completely biased and baseless nature of this proceeding.” In another statement, he called Paul’s accusations about Fauci “false and disgraceful.”
Democratic senators praised Fauci and said he didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting.
“This hearing is designed to entrap you,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.
Paul released some of Fauci's diary
Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul said on social media that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Some of the diary entries – including Fauci’s uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus and how best to curb it before vaccines could be created – already were reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.
But they have nonetheless drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for mask mandates, school closures and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday wrote on social media that he stopped relying on Fauci over the course of the pandemic because he felt the scientist made bad decisions about masks, shutdowns, and other issues. He later told reporters he watched the entire hearing.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist before entering public office, said on social media that his department had found the diary entries on government property and had given them to the committee.
Dozens of disease experts defend Fauci
Scientists also scrambled to Fauci’s defense ahead of the unusual hearing — the second time he has been back before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving the government in 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, he talked the nation through numerous outbreaks over decades, including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.
In a public letter, more than 150 infectious-disease experts and other scientists wrote that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and that they are urging elected officials to “stop these witch-hunts.”
Among topics discussed at Wednesday’s hearing was whether NIH-funded research in China may have played a role in how the pandemic started.
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific evidence supporting the theory that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins.
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded what’s known as gain-of-function research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — at a lab in Wuhan.
The NIH, for years, gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. But the definition of gain-of-function covers both general research and especially risky experiments that enhance the ability of potential pandemic viruses to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci has previously stressed he was using the risky experiment definition and that “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.
Trump, a Republican, paused some federally funded gain-of-function research last year, and on Tuesday his administration announced new rules to tighten oversight.
Wow, here’s an actual witch hunt, ‘please forget about Epstein”, ‘only criminals take the 5th” (like Trump over 400 times), the US Response to COVID was a gong show causing countless deaths but let’s make this all about China. Lock up the 85 year old scientist to make other doctors afraid to question the gov’t
Fauxci invoked the 5th amendment 70 times including for the question “what color is your tie”.
The 5th amendment does not cover people who have been pardoned so Congress is going to vote on contempt charges.
His 6 pack of lawyer’s looked scared and one was ejected for being a mouthpiece.
@A commenter – after reading your comment, I laughed for 30 minutes but now I’m worried. If there’s one of you, there must be more.
Gotta hand it to all those who did their own research and predicted that everyone who got the Covid vaccine would die a miserable death within 5 years, as we now know occurred.
Death penalty, he was complicit with china
The USA should have nuked Wuhan from the get go to contain the bioweapon
Would you like some tasty bat soup?
Bioweapons, gotta luv them
Chinaflu killed 30 plus million people
Chinaflu killed 30 million people, bioweapons, play with fire get burnt
Chinaflu killed 20 to 30 million people, bioweapons gotta love them
why are all the so called vaccines causing autism and mind control then?
It was all a scam to justify the mail-in ballots which were used to defraud the US 2020 presidential election for Biden. Among the biggest drivers was the ability to instigate the Ukraine conflict, for profit.
There never was any evidence that the virus even exists. The PCR tests were done with excessive cycle counts to ensure false positives. A researcher at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg testified in court that 25 cycles or more meant a false positive (unviable virus fragments) 100% of the time.
The odds of a naturally occurring virus starting a pandemic within a few kilometers of a bio-lab that is experimenting with the exact same virus is about one in a trillion.
This article is ridiculously biased!
Even for global news standards this is rough
Twitter told me covid was fake. Fauci guilty
‘member when the NIH funding Ecohealth Alliance in Wuhan was a “conspiracy theory”?
I ‘member.
Time for a full worldwide exposure of this.
These decisions were based on bad ideas, bad data, and most of all, ill intent.
After the first 3 months, the entire world (at least the ones capable of independent thought) knew this was just a flu.
This carried on for YEARS because there was money to be made and government knew this was a way to further exercise control over people for the sake of control.
Canada will never do this of course. We are too afraid to come to terms with the fact that the experts make things up on the fly, and the governement has no good intention in the vast majority of legislation.
The hero goes to jail while the villain goes free. It’s the death of science.
If you read the diary you can see he either lied to Congress or he lied to his diary about both the origins and the expected death rate.
His auto-pen pardon will not stop him from being sued by the states who followed his advice during the pandemic.
Wuhan lab responsible for 20-30 million deaths
Taking the Fifth gives the impression that he was guilty of something. Also being pardoned by Bindin gives the impression that somethings are not right and they are trying to hide it. The biggest plus coming out of this pandemic is experts will never be believed the same again and hopefully will not be able to control the public because they have no trust anymore in these so called experts
Just another example of why we cannot trust all the “experts”
No one will ever be held accountable for what happened in dealing with COVID. There is just too much that is hidden. Too many big names will have to answer for their decisions. Too much money involved.
Economies were destroyed over a flu…my livelihood came to a screeching halt for several years and never really fully recovered…at least we history buffs got to experience what it must have been like living in Germany in the 1930’s…
Great propaganda Global. Why is it always red against blue and never the search for truth and justice for all? Global news sucks
It’s amazing how one day it just went away and that while it was on there were no flu statistics being taken because that’s all it was the flu
Basically Fauci lied, and that’s to be expected from a Democrat just like we expect and have witnessed lies from the Liberals here in Canada.
The school closures were ridiculous. We knew very early on that the virus was dangerous to older people with 1 or more co morbidities. School aged people got sick. Old people died. The school closure policy was an over reaction from a public that had been intentionally filled with fear by a gov mislead by experts with an agenda.
Guilty