Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky subpoenaed Fauci to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday. It’s part of Paul’s yearslong accusations that the now-retired infectious disease expert had lied about the pandemic.
Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
In an earlier letter to Paul, Fauci’s attorneys called his allegations “absolutely baseless” and part of an “obsessive and groundless vendetta.”
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.
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.
