THE WASHINGTON POST: Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment in hearing before Rand Paul and Senate GOP

Anthony S. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing Wednesday where Republicans plan to press the retired government scientist on whether he was sufficiently truthful in past testimony about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s pandemic response and frequently appeared before Congress during his 54-year government career, said that it “pains me” to now invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination. But he alleged that Republican Senator Rand Paul, a longtime adversary who convened Wednesday’s hearing, was wrongly seeking to trap him in a misstep that could lead to perjury charges.

“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Dr Fauci said.

He declined to answer questions from Senator Paul, who began the hearing by asking Dr Fauci about the pandemic response and whether there was a folder in front of him on the table.

In a separate statement shared with The Post, Dr Fauci’s lawyer alleged that Senator Paul was fixated on Dr Fauci after their clashes at the height of the pandemic - referring to a 2021 incident when the two men traded accusations of lying - and that the senator’s sole purpose for the hearing was to punish Dr Fauci and see him in prison.

“The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable,” David Schertler, Dr Fauci’s lawyer, said in a statement.

Senator Paul has repeatedly alleged that Dr Fauci, a longtime leader at the National Institutes of Health, was involved in covering up the possibility that the COVID outbreak began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and that Dr Fauci lied in past hearings about the NIH’s role funding coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic began. He has repeatedly blamed Dr Fauci for millions of deaths related to the outbreak and said that the infectious-disease expert should be imprisoned.

“Fauci and his team destroyed public trust in the (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) and our public health institutions,” Senator Paul wrote on social media on Tuesday. “Accountability is long overdue.”

Ahead of the hearing, Senator Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Dr Fauci’s personal records, including a diary that contained his unvarnished thoughts on President Donald Trump and other officials, saying that Dr Fauci’s private comments conflicted with his public statements and testimony.

The 85-year-old Dr Fauci, who last faced the Senate in September 2022 and retired from government later that year, has persistently denied Senator Paul’s allegations and on Wednesday said that Senator Paul’s decision to release his personal diary was “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me” before the hearing. He also said that he has already spent days “answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this Hearing,” referring to past appearances before Congress.

“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 said.

Dr Fauci was pre-emptively pardoned by President Joe Biden before he left office, with Mr Biden saying that Dr Fauci and other officials receiving preemptive pardons had not committed wrongdoing but were at risk from the incoming Trump administration. Ahead of the hearing, Senator Paul and other Republicans had said if Dr Fauci lied to the Senate on Wednesday, it would fall outside the protections conveyed by Mr Biden’s pardon.

Senator Paul, who chairs the Senate government oversight committee holding Wednesday’s hearing, has insisted that scrutiny on Dr Fauci is necessary.

Ahead of the hearing, Dr Fauci’s allies dismissed Senator Paul’s investigation as baseless, pointing to examples of Dr Fauci publicly acknowledging the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, beginning in early 2020.

“No credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges,” more than 150 scientists, physicians and other Fauci supporters wrote in an open letter released Tuesday. “These conspiracy theories have led to a five-year period of harassment and threats of violence directed at Dr. Fauci and his family.”

Infectious-disease experts have also insisted to Senator Paul and other Republicans that while the NIH funded virus research in Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak was first detected in 2019, the work could not have sparked the pandemic.

But Senator Paul and his allies appear to be winning the battle for public opinion.

Fifty-seven per cent of respondents to a May 2025 Economist/YouGov poll said it was probably or definitely true that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory, while 17 per cent said that was probably or definitely false. Another 25 percent were unsure.

Mr Trump and his White House have embraced the idea too, creating a website that calls a lab leak the “true” origin of the pandemic, without sharing any definitive proof.