WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, a key figure in orchestrating America’s COVID-19 battle, is once again preparing to confront a Republican senator investigating the virus’s origins.
Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky has issued a subpoena demanding Fauci’s presence at a Senate committee meeting this Wednesday. Paul has long accused the retired infectious disease specialist of deceitful conduct during the pandemic, accusations Fauci dismisses as “absurd.”
In anticipation of the hearing, Paul divulged a substantial collection of over a thousand pages from Fauci’s personal pandemic-era journal. He highlighted entries that questioned the initial stages of tracing the virus’s origin, suggesting on the social platform X that Fauci’s private thoughts contradicted his public statements.
Some of these diary notes reveal the confusion during the pandemic’s onset as researchers worldwide hurried to decode the virus and devise containment strategies before vaccines became available. These entries echo content in Fauci’s upcoming 2024 memoir and interviews from that chaotic period.
Nevertheless, these pages are poised to stoke the political firestorm that, despite the pandemic’s passage, persists against Fauci. He is frequently blamed for instigating mask mandates and other measures viewed by critics as assaults on personal freedom amidst the pandemic’s deadly toll.
In an earlier letter to Paul, Fauci’s attorneys called his allegations “absolutely baseless” and part of an “obsessive and groundless vendetta.”
Scientists scrambled to Fauci’s defense ahead of the unusual hearing – the second time the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has been back before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving the government in 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, he talked the nation through numerous outbreaks over decades, including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.
In a public letter, more than 150 infectious disease experts and other scientists wrote that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and that they are “urging our elected representatives in Congress stop these witch-hunts.”
The expected crux of Wednesday’s hearing: whether NIH-funded research in China may have played any role in how the pandemic started.
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 did not find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories, but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people.
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded “gain of function” research – the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact – at a lab in Wuhan.
NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. But the definition of “gain of function” covers both general research and especially risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci has previously stressed he was using the risky experiment definition and that “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.
The Trump administration last year paused some federally funded gain-of-function research and on Tuesday announced new rules to tighten oversight.
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