Dr. Anthony S. Fauci refused on Wednesday to answer questions from a Senate committee investigating the origins of Covid-19, accusing the panel’s chairman of having an “unhinged obsession with me” before invoking his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself.
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Dr. Fauci said repeatedly, as Republican members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee questioned him.
Senator Rand Paul, the panel’s chairman, pointedly warned the scientist that there would “be repercussions” for his refusal to answer questions. When a lawyer for Dr. Fauci, David Schertler, piped up to defend him, Mr. Paul ordered security to escort Mr. Schertler from the room. “He was not invited to testify,” the senator later said.
The decision not to testify marked the latest turn in the long-running battle between Dr. Fauci, who spent nearly four decades as the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Senator Paul, who accuses Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that sparked the pandemic, and then lying about it to Congress — accusations Dr. Fauci vehemently denies.
”Frankly the American people deserve an apology,” Mr. Paul said in his opening statement. “I hope to day Dr. Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China.” He accused Dr. Fauci of saying “one thing in public, and another in private” — an apparent reference to diary entries written by Dr. Fauci and released by Mr. Paul over the weekend.
In a brief opening statement, Dr. Fauci noted that he had testified before Congress more than 200 times during the 38 years he ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including during the Covid pandemic.
“Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight,” he said.
“However,” Dr. Fauci added, “given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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 that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
Dr. Fauci received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the pardon protects him only from federal prosecution for actions he took through the date it was issued, Jan. 19, 2025. He told the panel that it pained him not to answer questions, but that he was doing so on the advice of his lawyers.
At the center of Mr. Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, as Dr. Fauci believes, or in a laboratory. Mr. Paul insists that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022, funded dangerous research in China that spun out of control and essentially created the virus that led to the pandemic. Dr. Fauci says that is not true.
That research, called “gain-of-function,” involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses so that scientists can better understand how they evolve and use that information prevent future pandemics. On Tuesday, President Trump announced fresh restrictions on such work.
While Dr. Fauci’s institute did fund research at the Wuhan laboratory in China, the National Institutes of Health has repeatedly said the viruses being studied with American tax dollars were distinct from the one that caused Covid-19. But Mr. Paul asserted that the Dr. Fauci had stuck to a narrow definition of gain-of-function research that did not capture the risks of work his institute had funded in Wuhan.
“The American people weren’t asking for a semantics debate over what is gain of function,” the senator said. “They were asking for common sense over whether this research was dangerous in Wuhan.”
The top Democrat on the panel, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, accused Mr. Paul of waging a politically-motivated inquiry to “basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago.”
Dr. Fauci and Mr. Paul have been tangling with one another for years. In 2021, when the senator accused Dr. Fauci of lying while testifying before the Senate, Dr. Fauci replied, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
Mr. Schertler, Mr. Fauci’s lawyer, said in statement that he believes that exchange “triggered” the senator’s crusade against his client. But he did not deliver the statement, because Mr. Paul refused to let him speak. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, read parts of the statement into the record.
“The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful,” the statement said, “and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
Over the weekend, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s typewritten diary without saying how he got them. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he gave the documents to Mr. Paul and another Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, “so they could see the light of day.”
The diary does not add much to the scientific debate around the so-called lab leak theory. Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientific understanding of the virus evolved.
But the entries included personal observations in which Dr. Fauci marveled at his fame and his relationships with a rapidly growing list of celebrities, further inflaming a partisan political battle.
Mr. Paul has been taunting Dr. Fauci on Twitter all week, and Dr. Fauci’s conservative critics have been ridiculing him over diary entries that focus on his own fame and his relationships with celebrities.
Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist and close friend of Dr. Fauci’s, said he kept the diary to help write a memoir, which he was already drafting when the pandemic hit. It was published in 2024. Mr. Staley said the personal observations reflect Dr. Fauci being “astonished at what was happening in his life.”
On Tuesday, a group of more than 155 physicians, scientists and public health advocates, organized by AIDS activists who worked closely with Dr. Fauci in the 1990s, issued a public letter defending him and condemning what they considered the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on science and scientists.
