Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions during a US Senate hearing discussing the origins of Covid
Former US health chief Anthony Fauci He refused to answer questions at a US Senate hearing on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, saying he was afraid Republicans would try to use his testimony to falsely impeach him.
He invoked the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”.
Days before the trial, Republican Senator Rand Paul released Fauci’s pandemic-era diary, where he discusses the fame and origins of Covid.
Contradicting yourself under oath would be legally dangerous. Fauci noted that he has testified about Covid and its origins in many congressional hearings.
“Although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government… under the advice of my lawyers, I will exercise my right under the Fifth Amendment to the constitution to avoid answering your questions,” said Fauci, 85, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The Fifth Taking is not a confession – it is designed to protect people against coercion, error, and unfair burden-shifting to provide evidence of guilt.
Fauci, in his statement, said Paul’s “obvious passion” for prosecuting Fauci led him to refuse to answer questions.
“The only conclusion I can come to is that the only reason he called me before this committee was to get me to say something – anything – that would confirm his repeated promises to the public that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said.
Paul, who worked as an eye surgeon before joining Congress, continued to question Fauci even though he refused to answer. He repeatedly invited Fauci to “apologize” and said the committee will vote next week on the decision holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.
Republicans asked him about the evolving health guidelines, which have changed during the crisis as health officials learn more about the disease. Fauci has previously defended his policy positions.
One of Fauci’s lawyers who was sitting next to him repeatedly tried to intervene during Paul’s questioning. Paul ordered the security guard to take him out of the room.
Republicans have long accused Fauci of hiding information about the epidemic from the public, or lying about its dangers. Fauci, in previous testimony to lawmakers after he retires from government in 2022, denied any wrongdoing, calling the allegations “absurd”.
The origin of the epidemic has been the subject of intense debate in the US, including between President Donald Trump, who was in office when the start of 2020, and public health officials, including Fauci.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Trump took to social media to call Fauci “crazy”.
“I said from the beginning that the virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagrees, always trying to protect China,” said Trump.
At trial, Paul suggested that while Fauci publicly claimed that Covid originated naturally, he privately believed that the virus originated in the medical field. The senator has repeatedly promoted the lab leak theory that Covid came from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The World Health Organization in 2025 said the theory of natural origin – the virus spilled from animals to humans – was the “strongest support” from the available evidence but said that until more data emerged, the determination of origin was “inconclusive”.
Fauci’s diary entries show an openness at the beginning of the epidemic to two possible theories about the origin of Covid – including a natural origin and a lab leak – before he became more convinced that it had a natural origin.
