Anthony Fauci lied to the American people to hide his involvement in dangerous gain-of-function research that may have sparked the COVID pandemic, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News Daily this week.
The Kentucky senator spoke days after the Senate held the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief in contempt of Congress. The contempt citation represents an escalation in the ongoing conflict between congressional Republicans and Fauci over his handling of the pandemic response and transparency regarding the origins of COVID-19. The rare procedural move underscores the depth of frustration among lawmakers who have spent years investigating the federal government’s pandemic response and seeking accountability from health officials.
Paul dismissed Fauci defenders who claim the senator has a personal vendetta against the federal health official. The accusation has become a common refrain from those who support Fauci’s pandemic leadership, with critics of Paul suggesting that his questioning crosses the line from legitimate oversight into personal attacks. However, the senator pushed back firmly against this characterization during his interview.
“I THINK ANTHONY FAUCI HAD A SELF-INTEREST IN TELLING US LIES BECAUSE HE WAS WORRIED THAT HE WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR FUNDING THE LAB RESEARCH THAT BECAME THE PANDEMIC.”
“I think people want to make everything personal, but when I first had Anthony Fauci before my committee, I really didn’t know who he was, didn’t have an opinion one way or another,” Paul said. The senator explained that his scrutiny of Fauci began from a position of neutrality rather than predetermined hostility, contradicting the narrative that he harbored personal animosity from the outset.
His view evolved gradually as he watched Fauci push school closures and mass cloth masking — policies that didn’t work. Paul noted that as more evidence accumulated throughout the pandemic, these interventions failed to demonstrate the effectiveness that had been promised to justify their widespread implementation and the disruption they caused to normal life.
Fauci also argued against naturally acquired immunity “as he argued that the virus, you know, came from nature and not from the lab,” Paul said. This position struck the senator as particularly problematic given the scientific consensus around natural immunity in the context of other viral infections.
The first warning sign: kids weren’t getting sick.
“The first thing that struck me, and it was being reported wildly, was kids didn’t appear to be getting sick,” Paul explained. “They weren’t sure at first whether they were getting infected at all, but kids just weren’t in the hospital, and it turns out they were getting infected and just not getting sick.” This epidemiological pattern emerged early in the pandemic and was consistent across different regions and countries, providing clear data that should have informed policy decisions.
Federal health officials knew this early on. Children should have been allowed back in school immediately. The data showing minimal risk to children was available well before many school districts made decisions to remain closed for extended periods, sometimes lasting more than a year.
“There’s no reason why a kid that’s already been infected, now has immunity, should be out of school, and really that would have been most of the kids,” Paul continued. “And the other kids weren’t going to get sick, so they should have been allowed to go back to school.” The senator emphasized that basic immunological principles should have guided these decisions rather than the blanket policies that were ultimately implemented.
Test kids before they visit grandparents if needed, Paul said. But keeping infected children — who now had immunity — out of classrooms made zero sense. Simple precautionary measures could have protected vulnerable populations without the widespread educational and developmental harm caused by prolonged school closures.
“All of these things could have been done differently in using common sense,” he said. Paul argued that practical, targeted approaches would have better served public health than the broad mandates that characterized much of the pandemic response.
But it wasn’t just a lack of common sense driving Fauci’s decisions.
Paul believes the former NIH official had to maintain the lies to cover his tracks on the virus origins. The senator suggested that Fauci’s policy positions throughout the pandemic may have been influenced by his need to deflect attention from questions about research funding and laboratory safety.
“I think it was more nefarious than just lacking common sense,” the senator said. This assertion goes beyond mere policy disagreement to suggest deliberate deception motivated by self-preservation rather than public health considerations.
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