Fauci, who is 85 and retired in 2022, was on Wednesday subpoenaed by Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and a longtime adversary. Fauci accused Paul of an "unhinged" campaign to see him imprisoned, and refused to answer more than 100 questions.
Paul said Fauci was not allowed to plead the Fifth Amendment right to refrain from answering senators' questions, that a pardon from former President Joe Biden would not protect him, and that there would be consequences for refusing to answer. He said the committee had scheduled a vote for next week to hold Fauci in contempt.
Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, serving under multiple Republican and Democratic presidents, and became the face of the US pandemic response, has long been criticised by President Donald Trump and many American conservatives.
Before the hearing, Trump wrote of Fauci on social media: "His ideas were CRAZY!"
More than 1.1 million people died of COVID-19 in the United States, and the pandemic touched off a long-running effort by conservatives to assign blame for the toll of actions taken to stem the global health crisis.
Fauci became the primary target of that anger, criticised for lockdown directives, guidance on mask-wearing and social distancing, and his promotion of vaccines, which became heavily politicised during the pandemic, despite being shown to be safe and effective.
He and many public health officials globally recommended such measures based on scientific evidence available at the time of best practices to slow the spread of a novel and deadly virus for which there was no immunity, until a vaccine became available.
Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci on January 19, 2025, to guard against "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions" for allegations related to COVID or his role in the response.
Paul has for years called for Fauci's indictment and accused him of lying to Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health funded virus research in Wuhan, China, and of helping cover up COVID's origins.
Fauci denies both claims and says he has testified truthfully multiple times before Congress on these issues, with Paul often his chief antagonist.
COVID's origins remain unresolved. The FBI said in 2023 that a leak from a Wuhan laboratory likely caused the pandemic, a claim China said had "no credibility whatsoever."
The CIA said in January 2025 a lab leak was likely, but with "low confidence," while four other US intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe the virus most likely emerged via natural transmission from some animal.
Fauci has maintained since 2021 that he kept an "open mind" that COVID could have leaked from a lab, and spoke publicly in early 2020 about asymptomatic transmission and China's lack of transparency, the very matters Paul says Fauci's diary reveals.
