Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment on Wednesday morning before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in which Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others questioned him about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paul has called for Fauci’s arrest over accusations that he lied to Congress about the origins of the disease and contributed to its outbreak.
On Jan. 20, 2025, Fauci received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden for any crimes he may have committed over a 10-year span.
Historically, the Supreme Court has held that individuals cannot plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about what they’ve been pardoned for.
From the stand, Fauci called Paul’s interest in him an “unhinged obsession” and said he would be pleading the Fifth on every question. “The sole reason he (Paul) 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.
Through the hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
Paul said the committee will consider what action should be taken over Fauci’s refusal to testify.
The hearing came several days after Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s private diary, which was recorded digitally on federal systems.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his staff spent about eight months searching through 11 government computer servers to find and compile the entries. The files were then handed to Paul, after he issued subpoenas to 14 federal agencies in search of the records.
Entries chronicled the daily life of the then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between December 2019 and December 2022.
The entry drawing the most attention came from Jan. 26, 2020, just two months before the U.S. began lockdowns to fight the spread of COVID-19. Fauci wrote that a wet market in Wuhan, China, was not the source of the outbreak, but the amplifier.
Paul referenced this entry as the hearing began.
“Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally, while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence the virus originated in a lab,” Paul said.
Following these opening remarks, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., accused Paul of “relitigating the past” and avoiding the nation’s more important issues.
“This hearing appears to be a culmination of months of biased and selected efforts by the majority under the guise of a ‘committee investigation’ to basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago,” Peters said.
To each question, Fauci responded, “On the advice of council, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”
Question about COVID-19 vaccines
Since the first COVID-19 vaccine was released in Dec. 2020, more than 255 million Americans have received at least one dose.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., asked Fauci whether he was “carefully monitoring the safety surveillance systems like VAERS and V-safe that were deluged with complaints.”
VAERS — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — received about 1.6 million reports worldwide of adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccines.
“Of those, 39,000 were deaths, and of those deaths, 24% occurred on the day of vaccination or within one or two days,” Johnson said.
He continued, “By the way, this is government information. When I published it and people had me on their shows, they would be censored by Facebook. They’d be de-platformed I think largely at the behest actions you took to make sure disinformation wasn’t spread.”
NIAID paid a Chinese lab more than $500K, Iowa senator says
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told Fauci that her office uncovered records from 2015-2020, which show that NIAID paid $515,418 to Harbin Veterinary Research Institute (HVRI) in Harbin, China.
One $100,000 payment came a few days after HVRI opened a high-security BSL-4 bioagent lab in 2018. HVRI was criticized for doing gain-of-function bird flu research in 2013.
Gain-of-function research is medical research that can genetically enhance the function of a virus. Broadly, it alters DNA or RNA to make organisms do things they wouldn’t previously do.
“When the COVID-19 virus broke out in Wuhan, China, you, Dr. Fauci, knew pretty much right away that NIH had funded Chinese labs, including those doing coronavirus research. There is email traffic from early January, 2020, where your staff was flagging for you that NIH funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance,” Ernst said.
Ernst asked, “Dr. Fauci, did you subaward funding to obscure NIH funding of Chinese biolabs and coronavirus research?”
Fauci declined to respond.
Senators criticize cash prizes Fauci received
In addition to the journal entries, Paul released a series of emails Fauci sent colleagues, asking them to nominate him for awards and prize money.
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Israel-based Dan David Foundation awarded Fauci $1 million for defending science, leading the effort to develop a COVID vaccine and contributing to HIV/AIDS research.
Official records do not contain a finding that Fauci violated ethics rules regarding the prizes.
“While people were dying, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying — over a million in the end — you were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said.
Fauci declined to answer.
Hawley then asked what Fauci’s chief of staff, Greg Folkers, was doing in November, 2020. “I’ll tell you what they were doing. Soliciting and gathering information for a cash award.”
His staff put up a poster board listing the eight awards Fauci pursued during the pandemic.
Committee highlights inconsistencies in COVID-19 response
During a 2024 hearing, Fauci said the six-foot social-distancing guideline “sort of just appeared” without being grounded in clinical trials.
On Wednesday, Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., referenced this admission. “That rule had real consequences,” she said. “Schools didn’t open back up, businesses didn’t open back up, churches didn’t open back up. I could go on and on.”
Moody asked if Fauci had any evidence to support the rule when he gave the advice; Fauci declined to respond.
Later in the hearing, Chairman Paul played a video compilation of Fauci’s media appearances, in which the then-NIAID head explained how the virus came from wild animals in Chinese wet markets.
“What we find is what he said in public is different from what he said in private,” Paul said. “For years and years, we got dishonesty.”
Paul then referenced the period of natural immunity, which follows individuals recovering from COVID-19.
“We could have used natural immunity as somewhat of a block or protection — imperfectly, but the only protection we had and the only thing we could have done. Instead, the nursing homes were seeded with people who had COVID,” Paul said. “The discussion of natural immunity is one where there wasn’t sufficient honesty, humility, and there wasn’t enough presentation to encourage people.”