The hearing about covid origins became a Republican pile-on, with Anthony Fauci invoking the Fifth Amendment and Democrats defending him — mostly.
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For almost three hours Wednesday, Republican senators grilled Anthony S. Fauci with dozens of questions at a hearing focused on the origins of the covid-19 pandemic and whether Fauci previously lied under oath to Congress. Again and again, the 85-year-old former government scientist gave the same response.
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said. He delivered variations of that answer more than 100 times.
Fauci was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate’s government oversight committee by its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has spent years alleging that Fauci participated in a cover-up of the possible origins of the covid-19 pandemic. Paul has also blamed Fauci for inadvertently sparking the pandemic — noting that Fauci’s agency previously funded coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak was first detected in late 2019 — and has called for him to be put in prison.
Fauci has denied the allegations in repeated appearances before Congress, most recently in a combative 2024 hearing. Infectious-disease experts have also insisted to Paul and other Republicans that while Fauci’s former agency, the National Institutes of Health, funded virus research in Wuhan, the work could not have caused the pandemic.
Fauci said Wednesday that he refused to testify because he believed Paul was seeking to wrongly trap him.
“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, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said, before announcing his plan to invoke the Fifth Amendment.
Here are five takeaways from the hearing.
1. Republicans tore into Fauci
Senate Republicans did not miss their chance to lace into Fauci. They inquired. They mocked. They goaded. At times, they flat-out insulted. Beyond asking about covid-19’s origins, senators accused Fauci of mishandling pandemic guidance and accused him of using his growing profile during the pandemic for personal benefit.
Paul, a longtime adversary of Fauci, was visibly frustrated with Fauci’s non-answers. Paul warned the former official that it was against the law to obstruct an investigation and threatened “repercussions” for Fauci’s unresponsiveness. When Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, asked to make a comment, a back-and-forth led to Paul removing the lawyer from the room.
It was the first of many tense moments.
“Nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said, leaning forward in his seat. The senator grew heated in his questioning, raising his voice and pointing with both hands as he accused Fauci of enriching himself.
A Hawley staffer propped up an image of a magazine cover for which Fauci posed in September 2020. “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” Hawley said.
Fauci leaned forward, looking down at the table in front of him, hands fidgeting in his lap, glancing up occasionally at the senators accosting him.
At one point, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) asked audience members to stand up if they had disagreed with or been harmed by policies such as mask requirements and school closures. More than a dozen stood. Moreno asked Fauci to turn around and look at them. Fauci turned to confer with his lawyers, then faced forward again.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) adopted a warmer tone toward Fauci than his colleagues did. “I know you’re invoking your Fifth Amendment right, which you have the right to be able to do constitutionally,” he said. “Thanks for coming to be a part of this.”
2. Democrats defended Fauci — mostly
Democrats portrayed Fauci as a hero and said the GOP attacks were baseless. They also criticized Republicans for attacking public health officials like Fauci while supporting the Trump administration’s cuts to public health research and funding.
Sen. Gary Peters (Michigan), the committee’s top Democrat, called Paul’s efforts biased. “One-sided investigations designed to validate predetermined conclusions do not serve the American people,” Peters said.
Fauci and other public health officials have saved lives, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut). “Today, we are demeaning and degrading their lifesaving service,” he added.
One Democrat struck a different note.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) was not going to attack Fauci, he said, but he wouldn’t defend him, either. Instead, Fetterman shared a regret: that the lab-leak theory came to be seen by some as a right-wing conspiracy theory, preventing people like himself from taking it seriously.
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“I hope … the next time our nation’s facing something like this, we are not … as I might have been, blinded by the partisan idea that maybe the truth might come from a side that’s different than you are,” Fetterman said.
3. The hearing shows how divisions have calcified
Wednesday was the latest example in a years-long trend: Congressional lawmakers have been unable to work together on a probe of the pandemic’s origins.
A House investigation of the government’s pandemic response began in early 2023 with the top Republican and Democrat pledging to work together. It descended into partisan bickering and dueling reports about what the investigation found, and whether Fauci was personally culpable.
In the Senate, a bipartisan plan to set up a commission investigating the nation’s covid response repeatedly stalled out. Democrats have accused Republicans of promoting conspiracy theories about Fauci’s role and other aspects of the response, while GOP officials say liberals and the media have not been sufficiently transparent about mistakes that government officials made.
Paul, particularly, has long vowed to hold Fauci accountable for his “crimes” — a claim that Fauci and his allies say made it impossible to cooperate with him Wednesday.
4. Paul’s threat to hold Fauci in contempt raises new legal questions
The chairman said his committee plans to hold a vote next week on whether Fauci was in contempt of Congress. But he and his colleagues acknowledged legal uncertainty about how to proceed, complicated by President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon for Fauci before Biden left office.
Lankford asked Paul if there is guidance on whether Fauci could be held in contempt for refusing to answer questions after making an opening statement. Lankford noted a 2013 episode in the House in which an IRS official made an opening statement and then invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions about whether her agency had wrongly targeted conservative groups. The GOP-led House concluded that the official had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by making an opening statement, and she was ultimately found in contempt.
“Are we dealing with the same issue here?” Lankford asked.
Paul said that was among the legal questions lawmakers would consider. He added that the courts may need to settle whether, with “a presidential pardon that offers you complete immunity, you can still claim that you need protection” in a congressional hearing.
“Dr. Fauci isn’t liable for anything as long as he tells the truth,” Paul added.
Some past congressional witnesses have also repeatedly pleaded the Fifth. Martin Shkreli, a controversial pharmaceutical investor, refused to answer questions in front of a House Oversight Committee hearing in 2016, annoying lawmakers with his smirking. While lawmakers discussed holding Shkreli in contempt of Congress, they ultimately did not.
Regina Wallace-Jones, the head of the Democratic fundraising engine ActBlue, also repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a congressional hearing last month in which Republicans pressed her on the platform’s process for vetting foreign donations.
“It is the only reasonable response to a proceeding that from the beginning has been about harassing a political opponent’s fundraising platform, not genuine oversight,” she wrote in The Washington Post.
House Republicans have threatened to hold ActBlue in contempt.
5. Evolving perceptions of Fauci
Fauci was initially seen as a unifying figure, particularly in the early days of the pandemic as Americans looked for answers — and the highly visible doctor provided them in TV interviews, podcast appearances and other forums.
About 8 in 10 Americans in April 2020 said they trusted Fauci to provide reliable information on the pandemic, including similar shares of Republicans and Democrats, according to polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health care research and polling organization. But within two years, only about 5 in 10 Americans had trust in Fauci, a decline driven by plunging GOP support: Just one-quarter of Republicans said they trusted the doctor, according to KFF.
Some of that was fueled by relentless criticism of Fauci in conservative media, which blamed him for pandemic policies that were increasingly viewed as too harsh. It was also driven by President Donald Trump, who empowered Fauci in early 2020 and followed his advice on imposing shutdowns and other measures, before distancing himself from the doctor later that year and repeatedly criticizing his guidance.
“I didn’t mind him, I didn’t find him to be bad personally, as a person,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday. “But I didn’t agree with what he was saying or what he was doing.”
Fauci has previously said that Trump soured on him as the pandemic stretched on and the 2020 presidential election drew closer, with Trump telling the scientist to be more optimistic about the virus’s risks in his media appearances.
Fauci still retains more trust than some current leaders.
Fifty-four percent of Americans in February said they were confident that Fauci had provided the public with trustworthy medical information, according to a February poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. That exceeded the level of trust in current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was at 38 percent.
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