Fauci invokes Fifth at Senate hearing as Covid origins row flares again

Washington,UPDATED: Jul 29, 2026 18:46 IST

Dr Anthony Fauci on Wednesday invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from senators at a Republican-led committee hearing in the US on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The move adds fresh tension to his long-running clash with Republican lawmakers, especially Senator Rand Paul, over the pandemic response and claims that Fauci lied about the origins of the virus, which he has denied.

Fauci, who helped lead the US response to COVID-19, had been subpoenaed to appear before the panel after Paul pressed for him to testify again under oath. His decision not to answer questions for now shields him from immediate calls for prosecution if he were found to have lied at the hearing, but it is also likely to deepen the partisan divide over the origins of the pandemic, which the World Health Organization declared in March 2020.

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, although it pained him to do so, he was following his lawyer's advice in taking the Fifth.

Before the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages from 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 early days of the outbreak as scientists tried to understand the virus and contain it before vaccines were developed, had already appeared in a 2024 memoir and in interviews from that period.

Still, the diary entries have drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for mask mandates, school closures and other restrictions that they say infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying. In a statement, Fauci's lawyer 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 had given the diary entries, created on a government computer, to the committee. He later told Fox News that he believed Fauci might lie before the panel, exposing himself to perjury charges despite a pre-emptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden.

Scientists moved quickly to defend Fauci ahead of the hearing, his second appearance before Congress on pandemic origins since leaving government in 2022. Fauci became widely known to the American public during COVID-19, but over the decades he also advised seven presidents and spoke to the country during 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 research funded by the Institutes of Health in China may have played a role in the start of the pandemic. Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged naturally and passed from animals to humans, becoming known after spreading at a wildlife market in Wuhan. The report said there is no new scientific information backing the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory, a view backed by Paul. 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 seen in other deadly viruses such as SARS and MERS. Republicans have also accused him of lying about whether his agency funded so-called gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan. The NIH had for years given grants to the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the money to work with a Chinese lab studying bat coronaviruses. Fauci has said he was using the narrower definition that covers especially risky experiments designed to make potential pandemic viruses spread more easily or cause severe disease in humans, and argued that it would be "molecularly impossible" for those bat virus experiments to have produced the pandemic virus.

Last year, President Donald Trump paused some federally funded gain-of-function research, and on Tuesday his administration announced tighter oversight rules. Fauci's refusal to answer questions, Paul's latest accusations and the renewed battle over the pandemic's origins have again brought one of the most divisive chapters of the COVID-19 era back into the spotlight.

With PTI Inputs

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