Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29, 2026, under a compelled subpoena — and then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, refusing to answer even whether a folder was sitting on the table in front of him. Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) used a blistering opening statement to accuse Fauci of funding dangerous gain-of-function coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, hiding what he privately knew about a possible lab origin of COVID-19, and destroying federal records, while Republicans grilled him on VAERS vaccine-safety signals, a personal Gmail account used with a friend now facing federal charges, roughly $1 million in outside cash prizes solicited using federal staff, and a Biden pardon covering any offenses back to 2014. Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and other Democrats countered that the hearing was a one-sided “show trial” driven by years of Paul’s public calls to jail Fauci, and that the real public-health emergency is underfunding and understaffing at the CDC and FDA under the Trump administration. Paul announced the committee will vote next week on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress. Below is a complete, sourced breakdown of what was said, what has been verified, and what remains disputed. Assistance from Claude AI.
Participants
Republican members (majority):
– Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — Committee Chairman
– Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
– Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.)
– Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
– Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)
– Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)
– Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio)
– Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.)
Democratic members (minority):
– Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) — Ranking Member
– Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)
– Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)
– Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)
– Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.)
– Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) (listed as a committee member; did not question during this session per the transcript)
– Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) (listed as a committee member; did not question during this session per the transcript)
Witness:
– Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH); former Chief Medical Advisor to the President. Served at NIH for 54 years, 38 as NIAID director, under seven presidents.
Also referenced: Fauci’s attorneys David Schertler and Danny Onorato, who were removed from the hearing room by order of the Chairman after Schertler attempted to speak from the audience.
What “Taking the Fifth” Means Here, and Why It’s Legally Contested
Fauci opened with a short statement — not a refusal to speak, but an explanation. He said that given Paul’s public calls over several years for his prosecution and imprisonment, and Paul’s release of Fauci’s personal diary, “the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges” to see Fauci jailed. He then invoked the Fifth Amendment and did so for essentially every substantive question that followed, including ones as mundane as what day of the week it was.
That triggered an immediate legal dispute that ran through the whole hearing. Paul and Sen. Josh Hawley argued Fauci has no remaining Fifth Amendment privilege because President Biden granted him a full, unconditional pardon on January 19, 2025, covering any federal offenses “arising from or in any manner relating to” his NIH and White House task force service between January 1, 2014, and the date of the pardon.
Fact check: This part of the legal argument is well-grounded. In Brown v. Walker (1896), the Supreme Court held that a witness who has already received a pardon covering an offense “stands, with respect to such offense, as if it had never been committed” and cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid discussing it, because there is no remaining risk of prosecution for that conduct (Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591). Constitutional scholars agree a pardon that fully covers the conduct in question generally extinguishes the privilege for that conduct. The more contested question — one the hearing did not resolve — is whether the pardon protects Fauci from being questioned about conduct outside its window (i.e., anything after January 19, 2025) or shields him against a possible future perjury or false-statement charge (18 U.S.C. § 1001) arising from his answers at this hearing, which the pardon obviously cannot cover in advance. Legal commentators, including the Constitution Center, note the scope question is serious enough that a court may ultimately have to decide it — which is exactly what Paul and Sen. Lankford acknowledged near the end of the hearing.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal pushed back on the fairness of the proceeding itself, not the legal doctrine, arguing that no court would let a witness plead the Fifth and then have his lawyer make arguments to the room. Paul had Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, physically removed by security after Schertler tried to speak from a seat at the witness table; Blumenthal later entered a letter from Schertler and Onorato into the record defending Fauci’s decision to invoke the privilege.
Opening Statements: A Committee Split Over Its Own Purpose
Chairman Paul opened by stating that “one million Americans died from COVID-19” and that “some estimate as many as 15 million people died worldwide.”
Fact check: Both figures are accurate ranges. The CDC’s official U.S. COVID-19 death toll is just over 1.1 million. The World Health Organization’s excess-mortality analysis estimated roughly 14.9 million global excess deaths associated with the pandemic in 2020–2021 alone, a number that grew with later waves — so “as many as 15 million” is a defensible mid-range estimate, not an outlier figure.
Paul’s central argument was that Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then used his public authority and a scientific paper he privately helped shape — “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — to discredit the idea that COVID-19 could have leaked from that lab, all while internally investigating whether his own agency’s funding was connected to the outbreak.
Ranking Member Gary Peters used his opening to object to the hearing’s premise and process, not to defend the substance of Fauci’s record. He said Paul has “abandoned longstanding practice by blocking minority participation,” selectively released documents, and is using the committee to “legitimize a predetermined conclusion” reached years ago — noting Paul has called for Fauci’s firing and arrest since 2021 and featured him in fundraising emails. Peters argued the committee should instead be investigating current public-health failures: a roughly 25% reduction in CDC staffing, a food-borne parasite (Cyclospora) outbreak, and cuts to global health programs, which he attributed to the Trump administration and budget official Russell Vought. Paul responded that the accusation of blocking access was “categorically false,” saying the committee built a public website and “no Democrat ever signed up for it.”
The Core Allegation: Gain-of-Function Research and the Wuhan Lab
This was the hearing’s central subject, and it’s where the most technical claims were made.
Paul’s argument, in brief: NIAID funded a 2015 published experiment (led by Ralph Baric at UNC and Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) that combined a bat coronavirus spike protein with a SARS backbone, creating a virus able to infect human airway cells. In 2018, the same research group — with EcoHealth Alliance — submitted a proposal called DEFUSE to insert a “furin cleavage site” into a coronavirus backbone; the Pentagon’s DARPA rejected it as too risky. When SARS-CoV-2 was sequenced in January 2020, scientists found it had a novel furin cleavage site, the same genetic feature the rejected proposal had described. Paul called that either “an extraordinary coincidence or a smoking gun.”
Fact check — what’s established and what’s disputed: It is documented and undisputed that NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted bat-coronavirus research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that the 2018 DEFUSE proposal (which did seek to study furin cleavage sites) was submitted to DARPA and rejected. The dollar figures cited for that funding vary by source — government watchdog reports (HHS Inspector General, GAO) and outside reporting put the NIH-to-EcoHealth grants at roughly $3.4–$8 million over several years, with $598,500 to $1.8 million of that subcontracted onward to the Wuhan institute, depending on which award and time period is counted; Sen. Ernst’s $1.4 million figure and $515,418 in separate subcontract figures she cited to the Harbin Veterinary Institute are within that same broad range of documented NIH/USAID funding streams to Chinese labs. What remains genuinely disputed among scientists and U.S. intelligence agencies is whether the furin cleavage site is evidence of laboratory manipulation or a naturally occurring feature — declassified U.S. intelligence assessments are themselves split, with some agencies (including the FBI and, more recently, the CIA) leaning toward a lab-related origin with low-to-moderate confidence, and others favoring natural spillover. No U.S. intelligence agency has reached high-confidence certainty either way. Paul’s framing that “intelligence agencies… have all come to the conclusion” it was more likely a lab leak overstates the actual, mixed state of the declassified intelligence community assessments.
On the “gain-of-function” semantics fight: Fauci told the Senate in 2021 that NIH “has never…funded gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan lab, a statement that hinges on a narrow federal regulatory definition of the term. Paul and outside virologists have long argued that, regardless of the technical label, the underlying experiments made viruses more transmissible or pathogenic in ways the public would reasonably call “gain of function.” This is a real, long-running scientific and definitional dispute (documented in outlets like FactCheck.org going back to 2021) rather than something a fact-check can simply resolve in one direction — it turns on which technical definition of “gain-of-function” is applied.
Paul separately noted NIAID’s 2011 funding of Ron Fouchier’s avian flu research, in which the virus was mutated until it spread through the air between ferrets. This is well documented; it was the subject of an intense, public scientific controversy in 2011–2012 (including a voluntary research pause and a letter from over 200 scientists), and Fauci did publicly defend the research’s value in a 2012 Washington Post op-ed, writing that the benefits could outweigh the risk even of an accidental release.
Paul closed this line of questioning by reading criticism of gain-of-function research from three real, independent scientists — Stanford’s David Relman, Rutgers’ Richard Ebright, and MIT’s Kevin Esvelt — all of whom have published public objections to this category of research. Fauci invoked the Fifth in response to every question in this section.
Vaccine Safety Signals: VAERS, Peter Marks, and Dr. Nath
Sen. Ron Johnson spent much of his time on vaccine-safety monitoring. He cited VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) figures of roughly 1.7 million adverse-event reports worldwide, more than 39,000 of them deaths, and said 24% of those deaths were reported within one to two days of vaccination.
Fact check: The VAERS figures are in the right ballpark — aggregated public VAERS data has shown tens of thousands of death reports (estimates in mid-2025 put the figure near 38,000, consistent with Johnson’s number). But VAERS is explicitly a passive reporting system: anyone, including patients and family members, can file a report, and the CDC’s own disclaimer states a report “does not mean that the vaccine caused the adverse event, only that the adverse event occurred some time after vaccination.” Public-health researchers have repeatedly cautioned that raw VAERS totals, used without adjustment or investigation, substantially overstate confirmed vaccine-caused harm. Johnson’s timing statistic is real, but on its own does not establish causation — a point neither Johnson nor Fauci (who declined to answer) addressed in the hearing.
Johnson also cited an internal NIH matter: that Dr. Peter Marks, then head of the FDA’s CBER vaccine division, was warned in March 2021 by data-mining expert Dr. Ana Szarfman that the agency’s VAERS analysis algorithm risked masking real safety signals, and that a corrected analysis 26 days later surfaced signals including cardiac and neurological events. He also described NIH researcher Dr. Avindra Nath’s 2021 study of patients with serious post-vaccination neurological symptoms, which internal emails (Johnson said he would enter into the record) show colleagues discussing delaying publication out of concern it would “feed vaccine hesitancy.” These are specific, documented internal NIH/FDA communications rather than general assertions; this outlet has not independently verified the underlying emails, which were introduced as hearing exhibits rather than public documents at the time of writing.
Early Treatment: Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and Remdesivir
Johnson pressed Fauci on whether he helped “sabotage” hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in favor of remdesivir, an antiviral that costs roughly $3,000 per course and was, Johnson said, nicknamed “run-death-is-near” by nurses. He cited a chart claiming ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine showed far fewer reported deaths per year in FDA data than remdesivir or the COVID vaccines, and said “60 studies” showed ivermectin’s efficacy.
Fact check: This is one of the most scientifically contested claims in the hearing, and it deserves real context. The Cochrane Collaboration — widely regarded as the gold standard for medical evidence synthesis — reviewed ivermectin trials in 2021 and again since, and concluded the evidence was of “very low to low certainty” and did not support using ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19; several individual studies claiming strong ivermectin benefit were later retracted or found to contain fabricated data. Websites that aggregate “60 studies” showing ivermectin efficacy typically include non-peer-reviewed and preprint studies, some of dubious quality, and mixing all of them together produces a very different picture than the major peer-reviewed meta-analyses. On hydroxychloroquine, it is true the discredited Surgisphere study was retracted within two weeks in 2020 after fabricated data was discovered. On remdesivir, it’s also true the World Health Organization recommended against its routine use in November 2020, citing insufficient evidence it reduced mortality — a point Johnson accurately cited. In short: the retraction of the Surgisphere study and the WHO’s remdesivir guidance are verifiable facts; the claim that ivermectin was proven effective by “60 studies” is not supported by the leading systematic reviews and remains a minority scientific position.
Johnson also read from a February 2020 email exchange he attributed to Nobel laureate Dr. Drew Weissman (co-developer of the mRNA vaccine platform), in which Weissman told Fauci that early mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccine data showed the particles reaching the placenta and fetus in animal studies, raising a question about immune response in amniotic fluid — a real area of vaccine-safety research that continued to be studied and monitored as mRNA vaccines were later authorized for use in pregnancy.
The David Morens Relationship and Federal Records
Sen. Rick Scott focused on Fauci’s decades-long friendship with David Morens, a former senior NIAID advisor whom the Department of Justice charged earlier this year with conspiracy and destroying/falsifying records connected to concealing information about COVID origins.
Fact check: David Morens’ federal indictment on these charges is a matter of public record; the government’s allegations against him — including instructing colleagues to use personal email and delete records to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — have been separately reported. What is not independently confirmed is the specific claim, quoted from an email exhibit, that Morens told EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak that Fauci was “too smart” to let colleagues send him things by official channels that “could cause trouble,” or the extent of Fauci’s own knowledge of Morens’ alleged FOIA evasion — Fauci declined to answer every related question. Scott also referenced Fauci’s 2024 testimony that Morens “was not an advisor to me on institute policy or other substantive issues,” and asked whether text messages and a 2021 exchange about the EcoHealth Alliance grant undercut that characterization. This is a direct, documented tension between a prior sworn statement and other evidence Republicans say they now possess, though Fauci did not address it under oath at this hearing.
Cash Prizes and Personal Finances
Sen. Josh Hawleyargued that federal employees on Fauci’s staff — chief of staff Greg Folkers and assistant Patricia Conrad — used government time and resources to help Fauci apply for and win outside cash awards, including the Dan David Prize, which Hawley said was worth $900,000.
Fact check: Reporting on the underlying emails (cited by outlets including the Epoch Times and Fox Business) confirms NIAID staff helped assemble award nomination packages and coordinated with federal ethics officers to clear the awards — this appears to be accurately sourced from documents Paul’s office has released. However, the Dan David Prize itself is publicly listed as a $1 million award, not $900,000; Hawley’s figure appears to understate the prize’s actual value. Fauci won the Dan David Prize in 2021. Separately, public financial disclosures reported by outlets including Forbes and Fox News confirm Fauci was the highest-paid federal employee in the U.S. government for several consecutive years before his December 2022 retirement, with 2022 compensation of roughly $480,000 — more than the president’s salary — and that his net worth and federal pension (reported around $400,000+ annually) are matters of public record, consistent with the figures Hawley cited.
The Bill Gates Security Clearance Claim
Late in the hearing, Paul entered into the record a Department of Energy letter stating that Bill Gates held a “Q” clearance — the DOE’s top-secret-equivalent clearance, typically associated with nuclear program access — from 2014 to 2021, overlapping Fauci’s NIAID tenure. Sen. Rick Scott then asked a rapid series of questions about whether Fauci knew of any Gates partnership with classified U.S. programs or gain-of-function research; Fauci invoked the Fifth each time.
Fact check: The existence of Gates’ Q clearance during that window is independently reported (Daily Caller cited the same DOE documentation) and is tied publicly to Gates’ investment in the nuclear-innovation company TerraPower, not to any confirmed NIAID or biodefense connection. No evidence was presented at the hearing establishing a direct link between the clearance and Fauci’s or NIAID’s work; the clearance’s existence is real, but the insinuated connection to gain-of-function research remains speculative based on what was presented.
Public Statements vs. Private Diary: Masks, Distancing, and Lockdowns
Sen. Ashley Moody built the hearing’s most detailed “public-versus-private” case, contrasting Fauci’s public statements with his own diary and subsequent testimony:
- On masks: Fauci told 60 Minutes on March 8, 2020, “right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with a mask.” Weeks later, after the CDC reversed course, Fauci explained the original guidance was driven by a desire to preserve scarce mask supplies for healthcare workers — not by an assessment that masks didn’t work.
- On the six-foot rule: Fauci reportedly told Congress in 2024 he was not aware of studies supporting the specific six-foot distancing guideline and called it “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”
- On school and business closures: Fauci said publicly in July 2022, “I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” but his diary — quoted at the hearing — describes personally convincing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools, bars, and restaurants, and discussing shutting down the entire country with the president.
- On Gov. Ron DeSantis: Fauci’s diary reportedly called DeSantis “a total jerk” and said his resistance to mask mandates put “our democracy…in dire danger.”
Fact check: These quotations are drawn directly from diary entries and prior testimony described in the hearing record and were not disputed by Fauci, who invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than confirming or denying them. This outlet cannot independently verify the diary excerpts beyond what was read into the congressional record, since the diary itself has not been independently published in full; the specific quotes attributed to it are consistent with prior reporting on Paul’s committee releasing Fauci diary material earlier in 2026.
The Contentious Exchanges
Several moments were less about facts and more about political theater:
- Sen. Bernie Moreno quizzed Fauci on who wrote the Fifth Amendment (James Madison) after Fauci declined to answer even that; Fauci invoked the privilege each time. Moreno also told the story of an Ohio mother he said was arrested for attending an outdoor high school football game during pandemic restrictions, and asked Fauci repeatedly whether he would apologize to various groups of Americans; Fauci did not answer any of these questions.
- Sen. John Fetterman took a notably different, reflective tone, saying he lost family members to COVID and acknowledging he once dismissed the lab-leak theory as partisan before it became a more mainstream scientific possibility.
- Sen. Andy Kim praised Fauci’s decades of service across seven presidential administrations and closed by reading Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” passage, warning that political attacks on public health officials could deter future scientists from government service.
- Sen. Joni Ernst cited a passage from Dr. Deborah Birx’s memoir alleging Fauci and other officials met privately to “block any of the President’s escape routes” ahead of the March 2020 shutdown recommendations — a claim from Birx’s book that Fauci did not address.
- Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Joni Ernst separately raised NIH-funded research involving fetal tissue from elective abortions used in “humanized mouse” models for coronavirus and other infectious-disease studies — a research practice that has been publicly reported and debated for years and was a point of controversy independent of this hearing; the current NIH director has stated the practice will not continue.
What Happens Next
Chairman Paul stated the committee’s investigation and questioning were “limited to the period of your pardon” (2014–2025) and directed Fauci to answer whether he destroyed or ordered the destruction of any federal records in that window; Fauci again declined, citing the Fifth Amendment. Paul announced the committee is scheduled to vote next week on a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress. Sen. Lankford separately raised a parliamentary question — drawing a comparison to the 2013 case of IRS official Lois Lerner, who was held in contempt after giving an opening statement and then declining to answer questions — asking whether the same “you can’t testify and also take the Fifth” logic should apply here. That legal and procedural question was not resolved during the hearing.
Sources
Political Transcript Wire. “Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Hearing Testimony of Anthony Fauci.” Political Transcript Wire, VIQ Solutions Inc., 29 July 2026, ProQuest, www.proquest.com/usnews/wire-feeds/senate-homeland-security-governmental-affairs/docview/3369437701/sem-2.
Additional verification and context drawn from:
– NPR: “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment in Rand Paul Senate hearing”
– NBC News: “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment right…calls Rand Paul ‘unhinged’”
– Axios: “Fauci faces contempt vote after invoking Fifth Amendment in Senate hearing”
– NPR: “Biden pardons Fauci, Milley and members of Jan. 6 panel”
– Constitution Center: “Do presidential pardons remove the Fifth Amendment rights of recipients?”
– Supreme Court: Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591 (1896), via Justia
– Epoch Times reporting on Dan David Prize nomination emails
– Fox Business: “Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment as Hawley accuses him of using taxpayer money for cash awards”
– Wikipedia: Dan David Prize
– Forbes: “Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Highest Paid Employee In The Entire U.S. Federal Government”
– The Week: “US: Dr Fauci is the highest-paid Federal employee”
– Daily Caller: “Obama Granted Bill Gates Top Secret Clearance At Energy Department”
– Wikipedia: Q clearance
– Cochrane Library: “Ivermectin for preventing and treating COVID-19”
– UPI: “CDC: U.S. Measles cases reach 35-year high of 2,318”
– PMC: “Measles Update — United States, January 1–April 17, 2025”
– HHS Office of Inspector General: NIH/EcoHealth Alliance oversight report
– GAO: “Federal Research: NIH Could Take Additional Actions to Manage Risks”