Fauci Faces Senate Showdown — Rand Paul Vows Accountability

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Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday in what Republicans called a reckoning over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown policies that followed.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the committee, subpoenaed Fauci last month after the former NIAID director refused to testify voluntarily.

The hearing comes after Paul released thousands of pages of documents linking Fauci to an alleged cover-up of the virus’s origins — including more than 1,500 pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries documenting his role in pandemic policy for over 20 years.

“Americans are still reaping the consequences of Dr. Fauci’s actions. Biden’s pardon doesn’t cover Dr. Fauci’s testimony this week and if he continues to lie, he must be held accountable.” — Rep. James Comer (R-KY)

Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and became the public face of the federal government’s COVID-19 response as part of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

The diary entries, stored on Department of Health and Human Services servers and handed over by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reveal Fauci’s private doubts in the early stages of the pandemic that the virus could have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China — contradicting his public statements at the time.

Former President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci before leaving office, absolving him for unspecified crimes between 2014 and January 2025.

But House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said Tuesday the pardon will not protect Fauci if he lies under oath to Congress during the hearing.

Paul and Fauci have repeatedly clashed during hearings related to COVID-19 policy since the senator first pushed Fauci on whether the virus could have been generated in a lab.

The pair famously sparred over the technical definition of “gain-of-function” research — genetically engineering a pathogen to make it cause different symptoms or to make it more easily transmissible.

Fauci told Congress multiple times in 2020 and 2021 that the NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research, but he was using the narrow technical definition — experiments performed on pathogens already “likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations.”

Paul was asking more broadly about genetic engineering of viruses, regardless of whether they were already circulating among humans.

Documents released by Paul suggest U.S. scientists collaborated with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a funding proposal to the Defense Department for gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses that could have created a virus similar to SARS-CoV-2.

The Pentagon did not fund the study, but multiple intelligence and public health officials say it’s possible the Chinese scientists conducted the experiment alone.

Paul has referred Fauci to the Justice Department for criminal investigation multiple times under both the Biden administration and the second Trump administration.

Republicans are expected to press Fauci on his ties to the intelligence community and how those connections allegedly helped him shield his agency from liability in funding gain-of-function research that could have caused the pandemic.

Documents released earlier this summer by Paul and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed Fauci steered intelligence officials to a select group of NIAID grantees who agreed with him that the virus was caused by an animal-to-human infection incident rather than a lab leak.

Fauci was involved with commissioning and drafting the “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” paper, which dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and quickly became one of the most-cited papers in scientific history.

Fauci later referenced the paper as proof the pandemic was of zoonotic origin and recommended intelligence community officials speak with the authors to put together their agencies’ reports on the virus.

In July 2021, intelligence community personnel debated via email the degree to which they should listen to Fauci’s advice, considering his prominence on the White House pandemic task force.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has spent years investigating the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, is expected to ask Fauci about his role in encouraging states to adopt strict vaccine mandates during the height of the pandemic.

Johnson said Fauci’s role in pushing COVID-19 vaccines is just as worthy of congressional scrutiny as the gain-of-function research inquiry.

Kennedy said Monday that Fauci lied about almost all of the public health guidance that led to the closing of schools and businesses in 2020 and 2021.

“He lied about masks. He lied about social distancing. He lied about the transmission. He lied about natural immunity, he lied about the capacity of the vaccine to prevent infection.” — HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The diary entries also served as Fauci’s personal press archive, with hundreds of entries listing his interviews, flattering articles, and celebrity encounters.

Fauci described his meteoric rise to fame as “explosive and really unimaginable,” calling himself an “international celebrity.”

On April 1, 2020, Fauci recorded that there had been 3,700 COVID-19 deaths so far in the U.S. alongside an entry about the “continued crazy stuff” the public had done to venerate him.

“Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; videos games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on,” Fauci wrote.

Elsewhere in the document, Fauci documented his deteriorating relationship with President Trump as the then-president grew weary of strict lockdown measures and testing protocols.

By June 2020, Fauci saw ex-White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin as his primary ally in the White House to continue landing press interviews, contradicting the wishes of then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

“Kayleigh McEnany essentially saying that I will not be out in the press,” Fauci wrote. “Alyssa Farah is the one hope in Comms since she clearly wants me out there.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, was not present earlier this summer when a career CIA operations officer testified as a whistleblower before the Senate committee regarding Fauci’s involvement with the intelligence community report on the virus’s origins.

Peters later said Democrats were intentionally excluded from all dealings with the CIA witness and chided Paul for scheduling a closed-door interview with Fauci last month with only Republican members and staff.

But Peters has supported Paul’s efforts to increase oversight of potentially dangerous life science research and co-sponsored Paul’s Risky Research Review Act, which would create an independent review board outside of the National Institutes of Health to weigh the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research projects.

The hearing marks the latest accountability effort by congressional Republicans to uncover the origins of the pandemic that claimed 1 million American lives.

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