Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment at Rand Paul's Senate COVID hearing

Washington,UPDATED: Jul 29, 2026 19:56 IST

Dr Anthony Fauci on Wednesday invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions at a Republican-led Senate committee hearing on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The move added fresh tension to a long-running clash between the now-retired infectious disease expert and Republican lawmakers over the pandemic response and claims that he lied about the origins of COVID-19, which he denies.

Fauci had been subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has repeatedly pushed for him to appear before Congress. By invoking the Fifth, Fauci avoided answering questions that could have exposed him to allegations of lying at the hearing, even though he has received a presidential pardon from Democrat Joe Biden. Critics have still argued that he could face charges if he commits perjury under oath, while Paul said he could also face repercussions for refusing to testify, including a possible contempt of Congress citation for consideration by the Justice Department.

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 prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars'," Fauci said. He added that while it pains him to do so, he was following his attorney's advice by taking the Fifth.

Paul used his opening statement to argue that Fauci helped produce the COVID-19 pandemic by approving funding for research on virus mutations and then covering up his role. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee's ranking member, said the hearing was a partisan exercise that looked backward instead of focusing on current national security challenges.

Before the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary from the pandemic years. Referring to notes on early efforts to understand how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on X that what Fauci "wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories". Some of the entries, including Fauci's uncertainty in the earliest days of the pandemic as scientists raced to understand the new virus and contain it before vaccines could be developed, had already been reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.

The diary entries 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. Ahead of the hearing, President Donald Trump wrote on social media that he stopped relying on Fauci during the pandemic because he believed Fauci made bad decisions on masks, shutdowns and other issues. Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, said Paul's accusations are "false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable".

Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said on Monday that his department gave the diary entries, which were created on a government computer, to the committee. In an interview on Fox News Channel, he said he believed Fauci might lie before the committee, leaving himself open to a perjury prosecution. Paul later told Fauci that refusing to testify could amount to obstructing a congressional investigation.

Scientists moved to defend Fauci ahead of the hearing, the second time he has appeared before Congress on pandemic origins since leaving government in 2022. Fauci helped lead the United States' COVID-19 response and has advised seven presidents through outbreaks including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks. In a public letter, more than 150 infectious disease experts and other scientists said that "no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges" and urged elected representatives in Congress to "stop these witch-hunts".

A central issue at the hearing was whether Institutes of Health-funded research in China may have played a role in the start of the pandemic, which the World Health Organisation declared in March 2020. Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and passed from animals to people, becoming known when it spread at a wildlife market in Wuhan. Paul backs the theory that it may have leaked from a laboratory, but a Republican-led subcommittee that examined the issue in 2024 did not find evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

Fauci has long said he was open to both theories but that more evidence supports a natural origin, as with other deadly viruses such as SARS and MERS. Republicans have also accused him of lying about whether his agency funded gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan. The NIH had for years awarded grants to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the money to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. Fauci has previously said he was using the definition of especially risky experiments and that "it would be molecularly impossible" for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.

Trump last year paused some federally funded gain-of-function research, and his administration on Tuesday announced new rules to tighten oversight. Wednesday's hearing brought together the central disputes over the pandemic's origins, Fauci's public role and the long-running political battle over his testimony, ending with his refusal to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment.

With PTI Inputs

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