Fauci invokes fifth amendment during Senate COVID-19 hearing

WASHINGTON (AP):

Dr Anthony Fauci yesterday 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 yesterday’s hearing.

The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Senator 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 polarising 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.

In the combative hearing, Paul and other Republicans accused Fauci of lying in earlier testimony about the origins of the coronavirus, 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.

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 [National Institutes of Health] ,” 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 one heated moment of the hearing, Paul ejected Fauci attorney David Schertler from the room after he tried to speak without being recognised. 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”.

DEMOCRATS PRAISE FAUCI

“This hearing is designed to entrap you,” said Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

Paul has long argued Fauci should be criminally investigated, based on his belief that the scientist was dishonest in previous testimony to Congress.

The senator announced late in the hearing that the committee would 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.

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.

Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump wrote on social media that he stopped relying on Fauci over the course of the pandemic because he felt the scientist made bad decisions on masks, shutdowns and other issues.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before entering public office, said on social media that his department found the diary entries in government property and gave them to the committee.

EXPERTS DEFEND FAUCI

Scientists also scrambled to Fauci’s defence 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 our elected representatives in Congress 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 information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 did not find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.