Dr. Anthony S. Fauci refused on Wednesday to answer questions on Covid’s origins from a Senate committee, accusing the panel’s chairman of having an “unhinged obsession with me” before invoking his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself.
It marked a startling turn in the long-running battle between Dr. Fauci, who spent nearly four decades as the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Senator Rand Paul, the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, who is investigating Dr. Fauci’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and subpoenaed him to testify.
Mr. Paul has repeatedly said he believes Dr. Fauci should be in prison, and he has referred the scientist to the Justice Department for prosecution. He accuses Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that sparked the pandemic, and then lying about it to Congress — accusations for which there is no evidence, and which Dr. Fauci vehemently denies.
In a brief opening statement, Dr. Fauci noted that he had testified before Congress more than 200 times during the 38 years he ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including during the Covid pandemic.
“Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight,” he said.
“However,” Dr. Fauci added, “given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
Dr. Fauci received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the pardon protects him only from federal prosecution for actions he took through the date it was issued, Jan. 19, 2025. He told the panel that it pained him not to answer questions, but that he was doing so on the advice of his lawyers.
At the center of Mr. Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, as Dr. Fauci believes, or in a laboratory. The Kentucky senator 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 in China that spun out of control and essentially created the virus that led to the pandemic. 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 use that information prevent future pandemics. On Tuesday, President Trump announced fresh restrictions on such work.
Dr. Fauci and Mr. Paul have been tangling with one another for years. In 2021, when the senator accused Dr. Fauci of lying while testifying before the Senate, Dr. Fauci replied, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
David Schertler, a lawyer for Dr. Fauci, said Wednesday that he believes that exchange “triggered” the senator’s crusade against his client.
“The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful,” Mr. Schertler said, “and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
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.”
The 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 scientific understanding of the virus evolved.
But the entries included personal observations in which Dr. Fauci marveled at his fame and his relationships with a rapidly growing list of celebrities, further inflaming a partisan political battle.
Mr. Paul has been taunting Dr. Fauci on Twitter all week, and Dr. Fauci’s conservative critics have been ridiculing him over diary entries that focus on his own fame and his relationships with celebrities.
Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist and close friend of Dr. Fauci’s, said he kept the diary to help write a memoir, which he was already drafting when the pandemic hit. It was published in 2024. Mr. Staley said the personal observations reflect 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 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 relentless attacks on science and scientists.
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