Dr. Anthony Fauci again faces questions from Senate Republicans about pandemic origins

Washington– Dr. Anthony Fauci, the American scientist who helped lead the country’s COVID-19 pandemic response, is set to once again face off against a Republican senator investigating the origins of the coronavirus.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky summoned Fauci to appear before a Senate committee on Wednesday. This is part of Paul’s years-long accusation that the now-retired infectious disease expert lied about the pandemic, something Fauci called “preposterous.”

In the run-up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal memoirs covering the pandemic years. Referring to some observations about early efforts to understand how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci wrote “in private and what he told the country are two different stories.”

Some of the diary entries — including the uncertainty he felt in the early days of the pandemic as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus and how best to suppress it before vaccines could be produced — were actually reflected in Fauci’s 2024 memoir and in interviews conducted at the time.

But it is likely to further inflame the partisan divide that, years into the pandemic, still makes Fauci the target of harsh criticism from people who blame him for mandating mask-wearing and other policies they believe violate their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.

In an earlier letter to Paul, Fauci’s lawyers called his claims “completely baseless” and part of a “baseless maniacal vendetta.”

Scientists rushed to Fauci’s defense ahead of the extraordinary hearing — the second time the longtime NIH scientist has returned before Congress to discuss the origins of the pandemic since leaving government in 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced him to millions of Americans, he has spoken to the nation during several outbreaks over the decades, including the HIV, Ebola and 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 presented to support these ridiculous accusations” and that they “urge our elected representatives in Congress to stop this witch hunt.”

The expected gist of Wednesday’s hearing: whether research funded by the National Institutes of Health in China may have played any role in how the pandemic began.

Many scientists believe that the virus likely appeared in nature and was transmitted from animals to humans, and came to light when it spread in a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There is no new scientific information to support that the virus may have leaked from the laboratory, a theory that Paul supports. The GOP-led subcommittee that studied the issue in 2024 found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

Fauci has long said publicly that he is open to both theories, but there is more evidence supporting the natural origins of COVID-19, the way other deadly viruses, including the coronavirus’s cousins, SARS and MERS, jumped into humans.

Republicans also accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency had funded “gain-of-function” research — the practice of enhancing the virus in the laboratory to study its potential real-world impact — at a laboratory in Wuhan.

The National Institutes of Health for years provided grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that used some of the money to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses typically transmitted by bats. But the definition of “gain of function” covers both general research and particularly risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci previously stressed that he was using the definition of a risky experiment and that it would be “molecularly impossible” for bat virus experiments to turn into a pandemic virus.

The Trump administration last year temporarily halted some federally funded gain-of-function research, and on Tuesday announced new rules to tighten oversight.