WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the prominent U.S. infectious disease scientist who helped steer the federal response to COVID-19, is heading back into a familiar confrontation with a Republican senator focused on the coronavirus’s origins.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has subpoenaed Fauci to testify Wednesday before a Senate committee, extending a yearslong campaign in which Paul has accused the retired public health official of misleading the country about the pandemic. Fauci has dismissed those claims as “preposterous.”
Ahead of the hearing, Paul made public more than 1,000 pages from Fauci’s personal diary during the pandemic years. Citing entries about the early effort to determine how the virus first emerged, Paul wrote on X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Some of those notes, including Fauci’s uncertainty during the pandemic’s opening days as scientists worldwide rushed to understand the new virus and how to contain it before vaccines were available, had already surfaced in his 2024 memoir and in interviews he gave at the time.
Still, the diary release is expected to deepen a political rift that has persisted years after the pandemic began. Fauci remains a lightning rod for critics who blame him for mask mandates and other public health measures they say violated personal freedoms, even as the virus was killing hundreds of thousands of people.
In a previous letter to Paul, Fauci’s lawyers rejected the senator’s accusations as “absolutely baseless,” describing them as part of an “obsessive and groundless vendetta.”
The hearing has prompted a swift defense from scientists, who criticized the proceeding as unusual. It will mark the second time Fauci, a longtime National Institutes of Health scientist, has returned to Congress to address pandemic origins since leaving government service in 2022. Though COVID-19 made him a household name, Fauci spent decades guiding the public through health crises including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.
In a public letter, more than 150 infectious disease specialists and other scientists said “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and urged members of Congress to stop what they called “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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