Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer Senate committee questions

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with his attorney, David Schertler, left, as he prepares for the start of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Dr. Anthony Fauci refused Wednesday to answer questions from a Senate committee investigating the origins of COVID-19, accusing the panel’s chair of having an “unhinged obsession with me” before invoking his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself.

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said repeatedly, as Republican members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee questioned him.

Sen. Rand Paul, the panel’s chair, pointedly warned the scientist that there would “be repercussions” for his refusal to answer questions. When a lawyer for Fauci, David Schertler, piped up to defend him, Paul ordered security to escort Schertler from the room. “He was not invited to testify,” the senator later said.

The decision not to testify marked the latest turn in the long-running battle between Fauci, who spent nearly four decades as the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Paul, who accuses Fauci of funding research in China that sparked the pandemic, and then lying about it to Congress — accusations Fauci vehemently denies.

“Frankly the American people deserve an apology,” Paul said in his opening statement. “I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China.” He accused Fauci of saying “one thing in public, and another in private” — an apparent reference to diary entries written by Fauci and released by Paul over the weekend.

In a brief opening statement, 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,” Fauci added, “given Sen. 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.’”

Fauci received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden, 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 Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, as Fauci believes, or in a laboratory. The Kentucky senator insists that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which 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. Fauci says that is not true.

That research, called “gain-of-function,” involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses so scientists can better understand how they evolve and use that information prevent future pandemics. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced fresh restrictions on such work.

While Fauci’s institute did fund research at the Wuhan laboratory in China, the National Institutes of Health has repeatedly said the viruses being studied with American tax dollars were distinct from the one that caused COVID-19. But Paul asserted that Fauci had stuck to a narrow definition of gain-of-function research that did not capture the risks of work his institute had funded in Wuhan.

“The American people weren’t asking for a semantics debate over what is gain of function,” the senator said. “They were asking for common sense over whether this research was dangerous in Wuhan.”

The top Democrat on the panel, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, accused Paul of waging a politically-motivated inquiry to “basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago.”

Fauci and Paul have been tangling with one another for years. In 2021, when the senator accused Fauci of lying while testifying before the Senate, Fauci replied, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”

Schertler said in statement that he believes that exchange “triggered” the senator’s crusade against his client. But he did not deliver the statement, because Paul refused to let him speak. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., read parts of the statement into the record.

“The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful,” the statement said, “and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”

Over the weekend, Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s typewritten diary without saying how he got them. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he gave the documents to Paul and another Republican, Sen. 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 Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientific understanding of the virus evolved.

But the entries included personal observations in which Fauci marveled at his fame and his relationships with a rapidly growing list of celebrities, further inflaming a partisan political battle.

Paul has been taunting Fauci on Twitter all week, and 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 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. Staley said the personal observations reflect 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 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.