Sitting in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today, Anthony Fauci twirled his pen. He huffed and straightened his shoulders. He glanced down at a set of papers. He muted and unmuted his microphone.
But other than a brief initial statement, in which he referred to Chairman Rand Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with slandering his reputation and putting putting him in prison, the only words the former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke into the public record—as senators interrogated him about his institute’s funding choices, maligned him as an egomaniacal money-grabber, and accused him of shattering American trust in public health—were these: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
“Nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?” Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, asked him at one point. “Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?”
Fauci consulted the paper in front of him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
“What color tie are you wearing?”
Fauci consulted the paper in front of him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Senator Paul had said he called the hearing—billed simply as “Testimony of Anthony Fauci”— because “the American people deserve answers” about Fauci’s role in the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the American people got something absurd: a three-hour spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts.
That Fauci would stonewall the committee was entirely predictable. Paul has led a yearslong effort to punish him for allowing NIAID to fund research that allegedly enhanced the coronavirus’s ability to harm people, and for allegedly lying to Congress and the American people about that fact. (Some federal intelligence agencies favor the theory that the pandemic started with a virus that leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China; Fauci, in keeping with the consensus among virologists and other infectious-disease experts, has said that the preponderance of biological evidence points instead to the virus having a natural origin, likely spilling over from a wild animal into humans.) In January 2025, during the final hours of Joe Biden’s term, Fauci received a sweeping, preemptive presidential pardon for “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in” over the previous 11 years.
That pardon doesn’t cover Fauci’s actions past the end of Biden’s presidency, or protect him from prosecution over any statements he might have made today. “He could perjure himself now,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this week on Fox News. “If he lies again, he could be subject to perjury prosecution.”
But the most obvious distortions at the hearing came from the Senate panel. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, “this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth.”
Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times. When Johnson finally ended his remarks with a question—he asked whether Fauci knew about the “dozens of safety signals associated with the COVID injection”—Fauci gave only his standard 21-word response: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Paul claimed on multiple occasions that Fauci had been so dogmatic in his support for dangerous and irresponsible gain-of-function research that he’d written a 2011 op-ed for The Washington Post in support of an experiment that made avian influenza more transmissible in ferrets. According to Paul, Fauci wrote in that op-ed that “even if a scientist is bitten, even if a pandemic should occur, the knowledge is worth the risks.” Fauci did write in the Post that he thought that the benefits of that experiment likely outweighed the risk. But he did not make the preposterous argument that such research would have been worth doing even if it had kicked off a pandemic.
In the past, Fauci could easily have corrected the record and provided a nuanced description of this work. Over decades, he had built a reputation as the nation’s “nonpolitical” spokesperson for public health—the role he stepped into most publicly in early 2020, when the coronavirus was first burning across the U.S. When President Trump touted ineffective drugs as cures and insisted the coronavirus would vanish “like a miracle,” Fauci refuted those claims.
Now Fauci wasn’t talking, and no one else could speak on his behalf. Early on in the hearing, one of his lawyers, David Schertler, spoke up to defend his client against Paul, but was escorted out of the chamber by security at Paul’s request, after the senator repeatedly told him, “You are not recognized!”
Democrats, meanwhile, shied away from asking Fauci questions at all—if they had, he almost certainly would have deferred every question from them, too. Instead, they spent their time scolding Paul for convening the panel at all, thanking Fauci for his service, and criticizing the Trump administration for its attacks on science and public health. The Republicans’ most aggressive allegations went unchallenged in the room.
Fauci seemed to want to say more. At least once, he leaned behind him to consult his panel of lawyers before, once again, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights; at other times, he tensed his shoulders or sighed heavily. In a 2021 Senate hearing, Paul accused him of being responsible, by funding gain-of-function research, for the deaths of millions of people. At the time, Fauci briefly broke his composure. “You are implying that what we did resulted in the deaths of individuals,” Fauci said, pointing his finger at Paul. “I totally resent that, and if anyone is lying here, Senator, it is you.”
Faced with personal attacks this morning, he offered no response. “You’re a megalomaniac and a liar,” Hawley said. “You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime.” Paul called the hearing “the capstone to Fauci’s career,” and said he’d displayed “hubris the likes of which the world has rarely seen.” Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, told Fauci he was a “villain” who had “destroyed the federal government’s credibility when it comes to public health” because he wanted to fuel his own ego. “What would you do differently, knowing what you know today, Dr. Fauci?” Scott asked him.
Fauci consulted the paper in front of him. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”