Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who served as the federal government’s top infectious disease expert for four decades, including during the coronavirus pandemic, is set to testify involuntarily on Wednesday before a Senate panel whose chairman wants to put him in prison.
Dr. Fauci is scheduled to appear before the Homeland Security Committee under a subpoena issued by its chairman, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has accused Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that created the virus that set off the pandemic, and of lying about it to Congress — accusations that lack evidence, and which Dr. Fauci heatedly denies.
One question is whether Dr. Fauci will invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the pardon protects him only from federal prosecution for actions taken through the date it was issued, Jan. 19, 2025.
Mr. Paul, who is also a physician, has twice referred Dr. Fauci to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. A verbal misstep while answering even the most innocuous question could open Dr. Fauci to further scrutiny.
Dr. Fauci declined to comment on how he would approach the hearing. He has been combative in the past. In 2021, when Mr. Paul accused him of lying while testifying before the Senate, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” He also berated Mr. Paul for seeking campaign contributions by attacking him.
Over the weekend, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s typewritten diary, without saying how he got them. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he gave the documents to Mr. Paul and another Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, “so they could see the light of day.”
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy said that the entries “were not personal journals.”
“They were government records created on a government computer by a federal employee during one of the most consequential public health emergencies in history,” he wrote, adding that “under federal law, these documents belong to the American people.”
At the center of Mr. Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, jumping from animals to humans, as Dr. Fauci and many scientists believe, or was created in a laboratory in the Chinese city where the pandemic began. Mr. Paul insists that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022, funded dangerous research on viruses in China that spun out of control. Dr. Fauci says that is not true.
That research, called gain-of-function, involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses so that scientists can better understand how they evolve, and so that they can use that knowledge to prevent pandemics. The government places tight controls on it. On Tuesday, President Trump announced new restrictions on such work.
Mr. Fauci’s diary does not add much to the scientific debate around the so-called lab leak theory. Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved. But the entries further inflamed a polarizing political battle, and included personal observations in which he marveled at his fame and his relationships with a rapidly growing list of celebrities.
Wednesday’s hearing with Dr. Fauci promises to become a Washington circus. Mr. Paul has been taunting Dr. Fauci on social media all week, and Dr. Fauci’s conservative critics have been tearing into him over the diary entries, accusing him of being overly interested in media appearances while people were dying from Covid-19.
Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist and a close friend of Dr. Fauci’s, said Dr. Fauci kept the diary to help him write his memoir, which was already being drafted when the pandemic hit, and was published in 2024. Mr. Staley said the observations in it reflected Dr. Fauci being “astonished at what was happening in his life.”
On Tuesday, a group of more than 155 physicians, scientists and public health advocates, organized by Mr. Staley and other AIDS activists who worked closely with Dr. Fauci in the 1990s, issued a public letter defending him and condemning what they considered the Trump administration’s attacks on science.
The post Fauci and His Senate Nemesis Rand Paul to Face Off in Hearing appeared first on New York Times.
