Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions from a U.S. Senate committee related to his involvement in research at a Chinese lab and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing a constitutional right to remain silent as Republicans accused him of hiding the truth.
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci was one of the most senior leaders of the U.S. pandemic response. He also oversaw the issuance of research grants, including money directed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the Chinese city where the spread of the new coronavirus was first detected.
Over the course of his 54 years at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Fauci testified before congressional committees more than 200 times. But on Wednesday, he declined to answer any questions – even about the colour of his tie – instead citing the Fifth Amendment, which provides a right for people not to be compelled to self-incriminate.
In a brief opening statement, Dr. Fauci lashed out at Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, for his “unhinged obsession with me.”
“The sole reasons 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,’” he said.
Before leaving office last year, U.S. president Joe Biden issued Dr. Fauci a pre-emptive pardon for the work he had done. At the time, Mr. Biden said the pardon was to shield against “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” in the future.
Nonetheless, the pandemic remains a potent political subject and Mr. Paul has used the powers of his committee chairmanship to make public internal government documents related to the pandemic – even, last week, Dr. Fauci’s personal diary – while issuing a subpoena for the octogenarian former public servant to appear before his committee.
Dr. Fauci, however, provided no answer to dozens of questions, responding instead with the same 21-word statement invoking the Fifth Amendment.
When a lawyer for Dr. Fauci sought to speak on his client’s behalf, Mr. Paul ordered his removal, warning Dr. Fauci that it is illegal to obstruct a congressional investigation, and “there will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.” He promised a vote next week on whether Dr. Fauci should be held in contempt.
For years, scientists, skeptics, the intelligence community and others have questioned whether work done at the Wuhan institute created the COVID-19 virus. No definitive proof of a lab error has emerged, but neither have researchers proved the pathway for a natural origin, a scenario that the World Health Organization says is the most likely cause of the pandemic. Dr. Fauci has aligned himself with that view, without ruling out the possibility of a lab leak.
Mr. Paul accused Dr. Fauci of long-standing support for gain-of-function research, in which scientists use laboratory techniques to make animal viruses infectious to humans. Documents made public in recent years have shown that, after the pandemic began its deadly spread around the world, Dr. Fauci and other researchers sought privately to determine whether a lab leak could have caused the pandemic – at a time when they publicly played down that possibility, including in an influential early 2020 article published in Nature.
“You did not tell American people the full story,” Mr. Paul said.
He juxtaposed Dr. Fauci’s private thoughts with his public statements. On Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary that a wet market in Wuhan “was not the source, it was the amplifier,” of the infection. In numerous interviews and statements around that time, however, Dr. Fauci pointed to the role of Chinese wet markets in the pandemic, with animals brought in from the wild providing “ample opportunity for a virus to jump” to humans.
In his diary writing, Dr. Fauci was nonetheless consistent in his belief that “somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”
But Mr. Paul accused him of deliberately dissembling in public.
The possibility of a lab leak “was completely discounted, because I think you were worried that if it was seen that you funded dangerous research that started the pandemic, you would get blamed,” Mr. Paul said.
He sought to damn Dr. Fauci with questions: “Did his actions lead to the largest man-made plague in human history? Are the millions dead the result of his experiments or experiments that he approved that increased the pathogenicity of deadly viruses?”
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Dr. Fauci has strongly denied supporting gain-of-function research in China – “if anybody is lying here, senator, it is you,” he told Mr. Paul five years ago.
Democrats called the Wednesday Senate hearing a “show trial.” They questioned the value of once again interrogating a subject that has already been the subject of nearly a dozen congressional reports alongside enormous investigative efforts by scientists and intelligence agencies alike.
Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, accused Republicans of attempting to trap Dr. Fauci into criminal wrongdoing, warning of a return to dark days in American history.
“Under Senator Joe McCarthy, it became standard operating procedure to seek that kind of prosecutorial objective. We should not be part of a re-run of that kind of effort,” he said.
Republicans, he told Dr. Fauci, “are eager to rebrand you as a villain in order to distract from their own failure to protect Americans from soaring health care costs.”
For Republicans, however, Dr. Fauci remains a singularly toxic figure, responsible not merely for pandemic confusion – and, perhaps, the pandemic itself – but for poisoning American society.
“We have entire generations of Americans who, rightfully so, do not trust our institutions to keep people safe – because of you,” said Rick Scott, a Florida Republican.
Others called Dr. Fauci a megalomaniac, a liar, someone who has “done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime,” according to Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri.
Dr. Fauci’s silence in response to questions, he added, “is admission.”