WASHINGTON — More than six years after COVID-19 upended the world, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill—but this time, he had little to say.
The former White House medical adviser invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times during a tense Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday, refusing to answer nearly every question from lawmakers investigating the federal government’s pandemic response.
The hearing, led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), marked the latest chapter in the senator’s yearslong effort to examine the origins of COVID-19 and U.S.-backed research connected to Wuhan, China.
“A presidential pardon doesn’t protect you from the truth,” Paul told Fauci, arguing Americans still deserve answers about decisions made during the pandemic.
The hearing took an unusual turn when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Fauci a series of basic questions—including what day of the week it was, the color of his tie and even the color of the committee room carpet. Fauci declined to answer each one, invoking the Fifth Amendment every time. Hawley later posted on X, “No honest person pleads the Fifth.”
The appearance followed Paul’s release of more than 1,100 pages from Fauci’s pandemic-era diary, which Republicans say paint a different picture than his public messaging. Paul wrote on X that “what Anthony Fauci wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Among the entries drawing the most attention is a January 2020 note stating the Wuhan seafood market “was not the source, it was the amplifier.” Another February 2020 entry described discussions among prominent scientists in which a laboratory accident was considered a plausible explanation for the outbreak.
The journals also contain pointed comments about Fauci’s critics. He described some opponents as “crazies,” dismissed Paul’s allegations as a “conspiracy theory,” and after one contentious exchange wrote, “If anybody is lying here it is he.”
Fauci rejected any suggestion that invoking the Fifth was an admission of guilt. In prepared remarks, he accused Paul of pursuing an “unhinged obsession” with prosecuting him and said his attorneys advised him not to answer because they believed the hearing could expose him to future legal jeopardy.
While Wednesday’s hearing produced few answers about COVID’s origins, it left behind one unmistakable image: the country’s best-known pandemic official repeatedly responding with the same phrase—
“I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment.”
