LIVE COVERAGE: TONY FAUCI FACES OFF WITH RAND PAUL ON PANDEMIC ORIGINS

(Note from Angie: Transcript by Claude and it is more inventive than Rand Paul or Josh Hawley sometimes, so please let me know if you see errors. Join me and The Save America Movement for a recap later!)

Sen. Rand Paul: Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May eleventh where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function. Let me finish.

Paul: You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?

Fauci: That is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.

Paul: Let’s read from the NIH definition of gain of function. This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How can you say that is not gain of function?

Fauci: It is not.

Paul: It’s a dance. And you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.

Fauci: Well, now you’re getting into something. If the point that you are making is that the grant that was funded as a subaward from EcoHealth to Wuhan created SARS-CoV-2 — that’s where you are getting. Let me finish.

Paul: We don’t know. We don’t know if it did come from the lab, but all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab, and there will be responsibility for those who funded the lab, including yourself.

Fauci: I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, Senator. Because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments that were given in the annual reports that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible —

Paul: No one’s saying that it caused it.

Fauci: — that those viruses caused the pandemic.

Paul: What we’re alleging is the gain of function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it. You’re not getting away from it. It meets your definition. And you are obfuscating the truth.

Fauci: I’m not obfuscating the truth. You are the one — I want everyone to understand that if you look at those viruses, and that’s judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists, those viruses are molecularly impossible —

Paul: No one’s saying those viruses caused the pandemic. We’re saying they are gain of function viruses because they were animal viruses that became more transmissible in humans. And you funded it. And you don’t admit the truth.

Fauci: And you are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals. I totally resent that. And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.

Hi, everybody. Good morning. I am Dr. Angela Rasmussen, science chair for the Save America Movement and a virologist. I am here today to go over the Tony Fauci hearing before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in the Senate. Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, a Republican, has subpoenaed Tony Fauci to appear at this, where he is going to confront him about a number of accusations that he’s made with regard to the origins of the SARS coronavirus 2 / COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, for the past six years, Tony Fauci and Rand Paul have been going at it about the so-called lab leak that actually did not happen. In July of 2021 — actually, in May of 2021 and then in July of 2021 — Tony Fauci did appear before the HSGAC to testify. And in July, the clip that I just showed was a confrontation that he got into with Rand Paul regarding the origins of the pandemic.

“The overwhelming body of scientific evidence does not support a lab leak”

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. We have a serious issue in the sense that this hearing that is today is effectively a show trial. I want to be really clear about what the scientific evidence is about the origins of the pandemic. And I’ve written a number of articles about this that you can go on my Substack and read. I’ve just written two articles for Zeteo about this. Those articles are there too, and I’ll provide all the links in the transcript for this live when it’s over. But the overwhelming body of scientific evidence does not support a lab leak.

And I’m just going to go over that very, very quickly. What we do know about the origins of the pandemic is that all of the early cases were — we, my colleagues and I, actually applied some statistics to this. We found where those early cases lived, and we found that they clustered entirely around the Huanan Seafood Market, which is on the north side of the Yangtze River in Wuhan, which is a city of eleven million people and is quite large. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is what Rand Paul believes started the pandemic — that’s where he believes the lab leak originated from — is about ten miles to the south on the other side of the river, and it takes about a half hour to get back and forth between the two by train or by car.

So all of the early cases spatially lived around the market, not around the lab. And what we saw is that as time went by — we think that the virus probably emerged into the human population in late November, early December — as time went by, in January, we started to see increased numbers of hospitalizations all radiating outward from around the market, excess mortality that’s unexpected radiating outward from where the market is, not from where the lab is.

So we are seeing signs that there is a new epidemic starting: increased hospitalizations. And I should add that this was increased hospitalizations on top of an already peak flu season that had more flu cases than in the past ten years. And they’re still seeing excess hospitalization for influenza-like illness. They’re also seeing excess mortality, and it’s all radiating outward from where the market is, not from where the lab is.

And a lot of people have suggested that, well, the market was identified early on, so maybe it was a superspreader event. Maybe it was something that was picked up because a lot of cases happened at the market, but that’s not where it started. And so we looked at just the cases that had never been to the market. They had no link to the market whatsoever. And we found out that when we looked at just those cases, the statistical association was even stronger. So that’s a really good indication that the virus actually started spreading in humans from the market and not from the lab, because the lab is again ten miles away and we didn’t see the same cluster of cases around the lab that we saw around the market.

So when we looked in the market, we found there were environmental samples taken, and so we found that the environmental samples that contained genetic material from SARS coronavirus 2 were co-localized with the part of the market in which they sold live animals — and live wild animals in this case, including a number of species that were known to be infected with SARS coronavirus 1 when it emerged in 2002.

Now, SARS coronavirus 1 — the markets were not shut down. It was very clear that it came from the market, and there was actually transmission, multiple spillovers from animals that were being sold in the markets of Guangzhou and Foshan to humans. And there may have actually been some spillover back to the animals as well from infected humans. And this was all genetically traced. This was one of the really cool stories of sort of the advent of our molecular approaches to doing outbreak response — the SARS-1 outbreak, in which they were actually able to trace the exact genome sequences that went back and forth between people and animals in these markets.

So we know that it was from the markets in SARS-1. And many of these same animals were being sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. We found DNA from those animals. And I have found in my lab — I haven’t had a chance to publish it yet just because this data is really tricky to work with and I want to make sure it’s right — but I have found signatures of RNA from the animals, which suggests that the animals were in fact infected, because they were expressing genes that are common to coronavirus infection. But I’m still working on it, so stay tuned for that.

Anyways, we have a lot of other evidence too. We have the evidence, for example — a lot of people have suggested that maybe SARS-2 was spreading cryptically because there was a lab leak way before late November or December. Maybe there was SARS-2 around this whole time and it’s just an artifact that we’re noticing it at the market. That doesn’t seem to be true either, because they did blood bank tests of normal blood samples, people who just donated blood, and they didn’t find antibodies to SARS coronavirus 2 until January coming up in Wuhan, which suggests that nobody was infected at population scale in Wuhan until January, because that was when it was detected in population-level samples.

So that’s the actual evidence. The only evidence to date that it could have come from the lab — and I do want to mention this because we haven’t completely closed the book on the lab, I suppose, in the sense that we haven’t found the smoking raccoon dog or the smoking animal that may have transmitted SARS-2 to humans. And by the way, genetic evidence suggests — some of my colleagues did this work — that there were actually two spillovers of SARS-2 in the Huanan market. There were two lineages of the virus at the time. One lineage spilled over and then another lineage spilled over a week or two later. So there were two independent spillovers. And we actually know this not because of data that we’ve gotten from China, but by doing genetic evidence of all of the sequences of SARS coronavirus 2 — those two viruses gave rise to the SARS-2 pandemic. One of those lineages has become extinct. The other one is continuing to evolve. And it’s now, you know, the eighty millionth iteration of Omicron.

But that is, in fact, the evidence about where the pandemic came from.

“Let me just tell you very quickly what their version of events is”

So Rand Paul and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently released a bunch of documents that they are calling evidence that Tony Fauci covered up the pandemic. So let me just tell you very quickly before we begin, because we’re going to start to begin any minute now, what their version of events is.

Their version of events is that Tony Fauci funded a NIAID — that’s the institute at NIH that he was the director of — funded a NIAID subaward, which is when a person gets a grant or an institution gets a grant and then there’s a collaborator on that grant and they are issued what’s called a subaward so that they have the funds to carry out that work. NIAID issued a subaward to a grant that was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance to do some work on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And some of that work involved finding bat coronaviruses in nature, because the bats that transmit these coronaviruses live in China. And Zhengli Shi, the doctor at Wuhan Institute of Virology who led this subaward, is famous and a very, very excellent scientist and is known for going out, finding new coronaviruses and characterizing them, partly to determine which of them are potentially a threat for other pandemics. And so one of the ways that you do this is when you find these viruses, you try to see if they can infect human cells. And so that’s what they did. And if they can infect human cells, then you also try to see if they might be able to cause disease. Now, they don’t infect humans. Nobody does that, as far as I know, and they shouldn’t. But they do use what are called transgenic mice. Now, these are mice that express the human receptor for the virus. And they did. And Rand Paul says it’s a gain of function.

And now the hearing is starting, so I’m going to shut up and bring this onboard.

Okay, so I just turned off the sound for this live stream on CSPAN because they haven’t quite started yet. But they are getting started. Anyways, I’ll just finish up very, very quickly what I was saying.

So Rand Paul has accused Tony Fauci of doing what’s called gain-of-function research. Now, gain-of-function research means juicing up viruses to see if they are more pathogenic or more transmissible in humans. And it’s really important for people to understand that at the time that we are talking about here, the timeframe in question, the standard was that for gain-of-function research. It was not any of the many other definitions of gain-of-function research that we’ve heard of, including the one that Rand Paul gives, which is modifying viruses so that they can infect another species, modifying viruses so that they have expanded host range, modifying viruses so that they can produce more virus in cell culture — which he claims makes them more transmissible, but that’s absolutely not true. Having more virus in a petri dish does not mean that it has more capability to transmit from one person to another by the respiratory route.

And now Rand calls up, so I’m going to quiet down.

Chairman Rand Paul’s opening statement

Sen. Rand Paul (Chairman): The virus originated in the lab. The American people deserve answers. The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID in a totalitarian country, in a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards. The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology. I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China, admit that the risk of this dangerous research exceeded any possible benefits, ask forgiveness, and pledge to help our government devise safeguards so a man-made epidemic never happens again.

This is disgusting. He’s asking Tony Fauci to take the loyalty oath or face prosecution.

Paul: Instead of an apology, you have for years avoided responsibility. Regarding the lockdowns, you argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close every school, or impose every mandate — and he may have recommended them. But officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations not as judgments open to debate, but as dictates of science itself. Your own words demonstrate that you understood the influence you exercised. On March fourteenth, 2020, you wrote that the task force recommendations were driven by me, yourself, Deb and CDC. The next day you wrote that you had convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the New York City schools. So you were involved. That same night, Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff told you that the governor had decided to close California schools, bars, and restaurants after watching you on television. Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations, and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they made. The COVID lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education. Small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared. Patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care. Families were separated from dying relatives. Workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs. Worship, assembly, employment, education, and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them. While you concluded publicly that COVID occurred naturally, your private record tells a different story.

That’s not what his private record says. His private record consistently shows him, after the initial inquiry into whether or not it was synthetic — the private records show consistently that Tony Fauci thinks that the burden of evidence lies —

Paul: Your concern was not merely theoretical. That same week, you led an urgent effort to determine whether your own agency had funded the research related to these experiments that were now under suspicion.

And isn’t that what you would do if that accusation had been made? You would look into it and investigate it.

Paul: Hours later, your assistant reported that the Wuhan experiments had indeed been reviewed and approved by the NIH.

They had, because they weren’t gain of function according to the way the NIH regulated that research at the time.

Paul: Those were not the actions of officials who believed that lab-related origin was an absurd conspiracy theory. They were the actions of officials urgently trying to determine whether their agency funding was connected to the research under discussion, connected to the pandemic. You could not hide that your agency had funded the Wuhan research or your long history of defending gain-of-function research. The only alternative left was to argue that COVID-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab. You are not a detached observer. You had an institutional interest in the public believing that federally funded research had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was a conflict of interest from the very beginning. The authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2“ privately had serious doubts about a natural origin. Within days, they flipped. And they all wrote in Proximal Origin that the virus was almost certainly not a laboratory construct.

It wasn’t a laboratory construct. And he’s talking about the Proximal Origin paper, which is a paper that several of my colleagues wrote, which they stated that after examining the evidence — this was very early on.

Paul: That paper was then used by the government and the media and you to discredit Americans who were asking the same questions that you and the authors were asking yourselves privately. But you didn’t disclose your role in the discussions that preceded the writing of the paper. You did not disclose the authors’ original concerns. You did not reveal that you’d been part of the paper, that you had read and offered editorial comments on the paper before it was published, before you began using it as evidence that it couldn’t have originated in the lab.

Okay, so what we do when we write papers is often we will run them by other colleagues and get their opinions on them. And then sometimes — in this case, given that it was about the origins of the pandemic and we’re talking about the NIAID director, who’s probably the country’s most prominent virologist — wouldn’t you ask that person for their input on your paper that is about the origins of the pandemic and yet has very little evidence to go on at the time? I would.

Paul: Some of the same scientists discussed avoiding email and carefully managing communications that might eventually be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The pattern is straightforward. Privately, there was alarm, then an immediate inquiry to see NIAID’s possible exposure to funding, then a rapid public declaration of certainty, continued private doubt, and then years of resistance to disclosure. The question is why? The only logical answer is that your primary concern was avoiding culpability.

Oh, that’s bullshit.

Paul: Your primary concern was hiding the fact that you had approved the funding for this dangerous research. Your support of gain-of-function research is extensive and long-standing.

He never tried — in fact, research is not dangerous if done under appropriate biosafety conditions.

Paul: When he mutated the avian flu until it could spread through the air between mammals — this was the tipping point. This was when others became worried. You funded this. You advocated for this. The federal government’s own biosecurity board recommended withholding the details of these experiments because of the danger the research posed. People were concerned that publishing it was publishing a roadmap to creating bioweapons around the world.

Now, this is absurd. Nobody would use that as the roadmap to creating bioweapons, because these methods have literally been published for the last forty years, almost fifty years. In 1981, my Ph.D. advisor published a clone of poliovirus.

Paul: If a scientist became infected and triggered a pandemic — the benefits of the gain-of-function experiments outweighed the risks. In 2014, your agency, NIAID, began funding the Wuhan bat coronavirus work. In 2015, Ralph Baric and the Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli published NIAID-supported research combining a bat coronavirus spike protein with a SARS backbone.

This is called a chimeric virus. This is one way to assess whether or not a virus that has that spike protein could potentially enter and infect a human cell. It’s critical to this type of work with live viruses so that we can understand whether or not that virus in real life would actually infect a human cell and potentially cause a pandemic.

Paul: The DEFUSE proposal, which involved the insertion of a furin cleavage site into the coronavirus — DARPA rejected it as too dangerous. When COVID was sequenced, early on in January, within days scientists discovered that, lo and behold, it had a novel furin cleavage site just as had been proposed in the DEFUSE proposal. This is either an extraordinary coincidence or smoking-gun evidence that the Chinese had created COVID-19. It made the laboratory origin question more legitimate.

There are furin cleavage sites in many, many other beta coronaviruses.

Paul: On May eleventh, 2021, you told the Senate that the NIH has never, ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But I’ll leave that to my colleagues — in a viral glycoprotein, however.

Paul: When I gave you the opportunity to correct the record, to reconsider the statement, you responded that you had never before lied. We were then told that only the government’s narrowest regulatory definition counted here, that you could define gain-of-function in one way in which this wasn’t gain-of-function, in which all of the common sense of the world would be thrown out. All of the idea that the mice were dying and the virus was more transmissible didn’t matter because you had a technical definition that allowed you to deny this. But the real question is, was it dangerous? Was it a wise decision to fund this? And you haven’t deviated from that. You’ve never admitted that it could have been a mistake funding this research in China.

Why would he admit that? He hasn’t done anything wrong.

Paul: They’re asking, does common sense say this research was dangerous in Wuhan? They wanted to know whether their money funded experiments in Wuhan that made bat coronaviruses better able to infect humans. The answer is yes. They wanted to know whether NIAID adequately supervised their work. The answer is no. When you defended this research, you described its benefits in the broadest terms. But when Congress demanded accountability, you hid behind the narrowest possible definition.

Oh, that’s bullshit. You can’t have it go this way. He hid behind the definition of how gain-of-function research is actually regulated.

Paul: It is a crime to destroy federal records. Yet our investigation reveals your assistant diligently reported that she deleted tons of emails. In 2024, you testified that you did not delete federal records. Who’s telling the truth?

Gain-of-function research is work that makes the viruses more transmissible and/or more pathogenic in humans, specifically — not in mice, not in cell culture. In humans.

Paul: The committee asked for your voluntary cooperation to come today. Your appearance had to be compelled by subpoena. You’re here today under duress.

Maybe he didn’t want to show up eagerly to your McCarthyist witch hunt, buddy.

Paul: President Biden issued you a sweeping pardon extending back to 2014. The same pardon he gave to his son, Hunter.

The same pardon he gave to the January 6th committee, I should add.

Paul: A pardon may protect a person from criminal prosecution. It does not erase documents. It does not convert a misleading statement into a truthful one. It does not prevent Congress from establishing what happened. There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials who insist that uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science — “I am the science” — as though it were a commandment.

Well, you’re not.

Paul: They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned because questioning them would undermine public trust.

I don’t think Tony Fauci ever once said that you could not question him.

Paul: It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust.

And I have met Tony Fauci. And when I met him, other than the fact that I was so nervous —

Paul: It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can’t be ordered. It has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny. No government official is beyond accountability. And no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.

It’s not his preferred version of history that we’re talking about. He’s talking about the evidence. Your preferred version of history is this fiction that you’re portraying right now.

Ranking Member Gary Peters’ opening statement

Sen. Gary Peters (Ranking Member): The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has a long and a very proud history of conducting serious oversight on behalf of the American people. When this committee has been at its best, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to investigate complicated issues, to follow the facts wherever they may lead, and produce recommendations that actually strengthen our nation’s security and improve government functions. That bipartisan tradition has produced meaningful work following Hurricane Katrina, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, failures at the Secret Service, and countless other matters. Unfortunately, today’s hearing is the latest step in the chairman’s sharp departure from that long tradition.

Indeed.

Peters: Indeed, this hearing appears to be a culmination of months of biased and selective efforts by the majority under the guise of investigation to basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago.

Indeed.

Peters: In 2021, the chairman has called for today’s witness to be fired, to be arrested. Accused him of leading coverups and conspiracies.

Yep.

Peters: He has even featured the witness prominently in fundraising emails.

Indeed.

Peters: And on the cover of his book. He has also called for the cancellation of the witness’s security detail, despite the fact the witness and his family have received numerous credible death threats. When I served as chairman, Senator Paul and I launched a bipartisan biosecurity investigation that included oversight of risky research and the origins of COVID-19, because we agreed that the committee’s work would be stronger if we did it in a bipartisan manner and just followed the facts. That was and continues to be an area of legitimate and certainly needed oversight. As chairman, Senator Paul has taken the opposite approach. He has abandoned longstanding practice by blocking minority participation in committee oversight actions and has chosen to selectively release committee records that the minority has never had any access to in order to support his agreed or wrong conclusions.

I thought it was supposed to be all about transparency.

Peters: The chairman has repeatedly withheld documents and evidence from members that are entitled to receive them —

Almost like he’s trying to create a narrative.

Peters: — disregarding longstanding Senate rules and committee precedent that have preserved the credibility of our oversight in this committee for decades. I have raised these concerns directly with the chairman, because it’s not just what we investigate that matters, but how we conduct that investigation, that also matters. One-sided investigations designed to validate predetermined conclusions do not serve the American people who sent us to actually uncover the truth and to solve problems. I wrote to the chairman requesting that he adhere to committee rules. But instead of addressing concerns that I raised, he removed part of the committee’s website from the public view. This move not only prevented the public from being able to view those lists of concerns, it adds serious questions about the desire for transparency and legitimate oversight of this matter.

It’s almost like this stuff is all made up for political reasons.

Peters: It’s not simply the chairman’s actions, but what we could be using this committee’s tried and true oversight responsibilities to accomplish. This committee has not held its annual threats hearing at all in this Congress. We have not held a budget hearing for the Department of Homeland Security. There are important hearings that we would have the opportunity to discuss as to how to strengthen our homeland security across the board. No hearings on those topics. Instead of focusing on the national security challenges that we are facing in our country right now —

I should add that infectious disease is a big one.

Peters: — revisiting questions this committee has already examined, including through bipartisan work that Senator Paul and I conducted together when I served as chairman of this committee. But rather than building on that work to strengthen our preparedness against future disasters, we are instead relitigating the past. COVID-19 exposed serious deficiencies in our nation’s public health infrastructure.

We know that. It sure did.

Peters: More than one million Americans lost their lives, and this committee should absolutely continue examining how we can better prepare our nation against future biological threats. Those are the kinds of forward-looking, life-saving questions that will help our nation be better prepared to protect the health and the safety of Americans when the next emergency occurs.

And you know what? That was what Tony Fauci’s job was, and that was why he funded this research.

Peters: At this precise moment, we should be strengthening our capabilities. The Trump administration seems to be doing everything in their power to actually weaken our capabilities. The administration has hollowed out the public health workforce, pushed out and cut funding for public health personnel, shrinking the CDC workforce by a quarter. Thousands of experienced scientists have left government service, and with them has gone critical institutional knowledge that cannot be easily replaced.

And actually the basic function of these agencies.

Peters: The administration, thanks to political operatives like Russell Vought, has slashed or illegally withheld funding for life-saving medicines and cutting-edge technologies that let us rapidly develop them during an emergency. They’re politicizing the federal grant-making process, proposing to subject all federal grants, including those for disaster relief, housing development, and cancer research, to the whims of political appointees, not nonpartisan experts. All of this has left the American people more vulnerable to infectious disease threats, and we are already tragically seeing the consequences. Staffing and funding cuts have slowed the federal, state, and local response to an ongoing outbreak of a foodborne parasite which has sickened thousands in my home state of Michigan as well as across the country. At the same time, the administration’s cuts to global health programs and international partnerships have greatly reduced our ability to contain dangerous diseases like Ebola before they spread to our shores. We should be examining whether our federal health agencies have the personnel and the resources they need to effectively prevent, detect, and respond to these threats. We should be asking how to strengthen our biodefense efforts to deter our adversaries and prevent biological attacks against our country, and how our government can better coordinate and communicate during public health emergencies. These are the kinds of forward-looking matters that are worthy of this committee’s time. Instead, we are here continuing the chairman’s yearlong focus. History tells us, unfortunately, another pandemic is all but inevitable. The question is whether Congress and this committee will work to better prepare our country, or continue looking backward while our public health infrastructure crumbles around us. Unfortunately, I fear the intent of this hearing is only meant to further a purely partisan agenda and it will not make Americans safer.

It absolutely is meant to further a partisan agenda, and it absolutely will not make Americans safe, and it absolutely will be tremendously harmful to American democracy.

Paul: This is the most transparent investigation in the history of Congress. We actually created a website, and we put all of the information on the website. It continues to operate. The reason it hasn’t been accessed is no Democrat ever signed up for it.

Oh, give me a break.

Paul: Not one Democrat. We told them the access. They never asked for the access code. They haven’t been on the website because they have not cared about the investigation.

They didn’t get the access code? I mean, did you give it to them?

Paul: It’s the practice of this committee to swear in the witness. Dr. Fauci, please stand and raise your right hand. Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

Give it to him, Tony.

Dr. Fauci’s opening statement

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, members of the committee. I served at the NIH for over fifty-four years, thirty-eight of those as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight. In fact, I testified before and/or briefed Senate and House committees well over two hundred times over those thirty-eight years. During and after the COVID pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath, and sat for several days-long transcribed sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing. However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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 that I end up in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote. Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion. Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.

Chairman Paul’s questioning

Paul: We will now begin a round of questioning. Dr. Fauci, your testimony today is compelled —

Well, this is going to be fast.

Paul: As you know, it’s a crime under 18 U.S.C. section 1001 to knowingly make a material false statement to Congress.

Because I want to see what kind of dumb questions they were going to try to get answers to.

Paul: Understanding that you are under oath — the American people would like to understand your reasoning, your rationale for why you chose to fund the research in Wuhan. There have been intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the DOE, have all come to the conclusion that more likely than not, the virus came from the lab in Wuhan.

No, they didn’t. They came to that conclusion with moderate confidence at best at the FBI. And I’m glad Tony’s not going to answer this, because he didn’t make a decision to fund this research, not directly. Tony Fauci, as an individual, does not approve every single NIH subaward.

Paul: Are you sorry?

What kind of investigation starts off with “are you sorry”?

Paul: Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Good for you, Tony.

Paul: In the red folder on your table is a copy of section 192 of Title 2 of the U.S. Code.

Oh, it’s like being on Oprah, except instead of getting a new car, he gets a copy of, like, the laws that he supposedly violated.

Paul: That section makes it a crime for a witness to appear under subpoena to refuse to answer any questions pertinent to the question under inquiry. Do you have that in front of you?

Yeah, it’s called the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, buddy. He doesn’t have to answer.

Paul: Let the record reflect that the witness has refused to answer whether there’s a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.

Oh, come on.

Paul: It is true that you’re appearing under direction of our subpoena to provide testimony on matters under consideration by the committee, including the origins of COVID-19, risky life sciences research, and your tenure as a federal government employee. Additionally, you’ve been provided a full and unconditional pardon dated January nineteenth, 2025 for any offenses against the United States which may have been committed or taken part from January first, 2014 to the date of the pardon, for a ten-year period.

So see, that’s the point. The dates of the pardon. They’re going to try to get him for perjury right now. So it was very smart of these lawyers to advise him not to answer. Because they’re saying that we’ve decided that it was a lab leak. Anything you say that’s actually true — because it wasn’t a lab leak — is now perjury. And it’s after the dates of the pardon.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Paul: Based on the facts presented, I’m going to direct you to answer the questions. The committee has issued a valid subpoena. They have requested your presence here. The questions are very pertinent to your decision-making as head of NIAID.

He’s not going to answer them, Rand, no matter how many times you tell him that he’s supposed to.

Paul: Do you still refuse to answer the questions?

Fauci: Yes. On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Because these are constitutional rights. You know, I’m really glad that Tony Fauci keeps doing this, because I have to say there is no senator, no political party, no objective that should override the Constitution.

Paul: Dr. Fauci, were you ever made aware of gain-of-function research on monkeypox being conducted at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center back at Fort Detrick?

Oh, this is out of —

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Although Tony Fauci, I should add, is not in charge of NBACC.

Paul: Did the CIA ever transfer funds to NIH under an interagency agreement?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights —

This is Tulsi Gabbard. So Tulsi Gabbard alleged that there was this network of biolabs funded by the Department of Defense and eventually also the Department of Homeland Security was involved. They’re trying to say that basically Fauci was sort of the puppet master controlling this, like, international network of gain-of-function labs.

This is going to be really unsatisfying for Rand Paul. Rand Paul really should have learned how to phrase his questions in a more bombastic way that can communicate this to people better. He’s really not explaining to people what he’s trying to get here.

Paul: There is still a question whether or not the intelligence community is adhering to that order. There’s a question of whether or not gain-of-function research is still ongoing. And these are important questions the American people deserve to know. Dr. Fauci, have you been read into the classified Department of Homeland Security program, any prospective special access program? And I’d be happy to tell every single last American what it is and talk about all the issues and concerns.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

But I don’t think actually Americans need to know about every single virology NIH subaward.

Paul: When we look at the research in China, the gain-of-function research that you have denied was gain of function — one of the things that startled the scientists when they saw COVID in the first couple of weeks was when they looked at the sequence of it, they said, oh my God, there’s a furin cleavage site in it. And in this particular family of coronaviruses, the sarbecoviruses, they’d never seen this before. They were also startled to look at it and see how it was coded, what the codons were, and to discover that the codons used out of thirty-six different possibilities turned out to be the one commonly used in gene manipulation by scientists. Dr. Fauci, were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology capable of inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus?

That’s actually a good question, because I’m not sure that they did have the skills to do that.

Paul: So one of the experiments that was pretty common was they would take the backbone of a SARS virus — and this would be a SARS virus that the backbone itself wasn’t that dangerous. But then they would dig through guano, three hundred feet underground, bat guano, and find other viruses, unknown viruses, and take the S protein off of an unknown virus and stick it on a backbone. And then they would infect mice that have humanized cells.

Not humanized cells. They’re expressing a transgene for the human receptor that allows the virus to bind the receptor that we know it can bind, the human receptor, to be internalized into the cell — to see if they’ll infect human cells.

Paul: What if one escapes? What if you keep infecting this and do serial passage? You actually adapt the virus to be infectious to humans.

No, you don’t. Serial passage invokes a lot of changes depending on how you serially passage it. If you serially passage SARS coronavirus 2 in Vero cells — or the cells we use to often grow our stocks — it often loses the furin cleavage site that you’re excited about, because it has a cell-culture-specific adaptation that does not adapt to humans.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Paul: One of the arguments that you and others have made against this virus coming from the lab is it couldn’t have come from the viruses that have been published.

And nobody’s really arguing that. I think from the very beginning, people acknowledged that the viruses that have been published are too evolutionarily distant.

Paul: But what has never been acknowledged by the side who tries to call the other side a conspiracy theory — which is really something you don’t usually see in a scientific debate — an article printed in The Lancet by your friends who called this a conspiracy theory. These are the kind of things you see as a screed on a political website. You don’t really see this in science.

It is a conspiracy theory. How often does this dude read The Lancet? He’s such a bad ophthalmologist that he had to start his own board certification.

Paul: We’re wondering, when you do this, when you combine these viruses and are able to grow them in humanized cells, whether or not this kind of risky research — whether you call it gain-of-function or not, whether you use the definition of gain-of-function, whether this kind of research… I think in your House testimony, you testified that you never traveled to China and that you were unaware that anybody at NIH ever examined the labs, that you trusted the Chinese scientists. I think you said that even recently, that with your discretion, you trusted the Chinese scientists. The problem is that even in our country, we trust our scientists. They’re good American scientists, probably doing the right thing for America. But at the same time, we do oversight to make sure it’s not dangerous research. We also investigate the lab. I believe Fort Detrick, one of our main labs, was closed down in the last year or two because of a research incident that was dangerous with dangerous pathogens.

It was not a research incident.

Paul: The American people would want to know how could you approve this dangerous research in China, say that you trusted the Chinese scientists, and then in the end, you had to admit that you’d never been there and none of your inspectors had ever been there. Dr. Fauci, at any of the labs where this dangerous research was occurring, were any American lab oversight or lab investigators — did they ever appear in these labs to make sure that they were safe labs?

I don’t even know what that means. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has its own institutional biosafety committee that handles all of this.

Paul: And we know this because the first Muddy Waters report, which came from a different Senate committee, showed, in fact, some of their biosafety — it could have come from a virus not previously published. Dr. Fauci, are you aware that Dr. Shi, who worked for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was said to, and I think in her own words, have over a hundred viruses that had not been previously published that could have been a close enough relative to create COVID —

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Paul: Under your testimony previously when you denied ever having funded gain-of-function in China, it was so adamant as to be striking, to leave no room for any interpretation of what is or isn’t gain-of-function research. But there’s another important question. Did you fund gain-of-function research in other biolabs around the world?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Paul: The one research project that we do know you did fund is the one that Ron Fouchier did. It’s important to talk about because this sort of was the beginning of the debate over gain of function.

This wasn’t just me. I wasn’t even aware of the debate ten years ago.

Paul: This was other scientists — over two hundred scientists at the Cambridge Working Group signed a protest because they didn’t think you should fund the research, and they didn’t think it should even be published because it was sort of a roadmap as to how to make a bioweapon.

Okay. “It shouldn’t be published.” This is ridiculous. This is a whole thing that started way back in, like —

Paul: The good news about animal viruses is they don’t infect humans very well. It will infect humans, but doesn’t go from human to human very well. Ron Fouchier, with the money that you provided to him, did an experiment where he caused purposeful mutations —

The ship’s already sailed. We already know how to do this stuff. Anybody could do it, provided you have the viruses and you have the right way to do it.

Paul: People saw this and were aghast at the decision-making process, that you decided to fund this.

Who was aghast? Nobody was aghast.

Paul: This is when the debate came about. And you wrote in support of this in the Washington Post. And you said, even if a scientist is bitten, even if a pandemic should occur, the knowledge is worth the risks. Do you still stand by that? Would you like to qualify at all whether or not the knowledge of gain of function is worth the risks, particularly in this case?

Since we now know the knowledge of gain of function is describing a variety of very, very different experiments. Lots and lots of different experiments can be classified as gain of function.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

People being aghast at something is not evidence. Unnamed people being aghast at something is not evidence. Talking about gain-of-function research in general is not evidence. None of this is evidence of any wrongdoing at all. It doesn’t even suggest ethics violations.

Paul: And he is a scientist at Stanford. He, I think, has classified clearance. He’s been a consultant to our government probably for a decade or more. And he’s written about this publicly. He says the opposite. He said that the risks of this research do not outweigh the benefits. He said we shouldn’t do it.

You know what, that’s David Relman’s opinion. Richard Ebright is so abusive, and he is not a virologist, and neither is David Relman. None of these people have the expertise that is needed to actually make a determination about whether this research is risky or dangerous or not. David Relman’s experience is primarily with studying the microbiome. Richard Ebright’s experience is primarily with looking at the structure of different bacterial polymerases, developing antibiotics. Kevin Esvelt, who’s a CRISPR scientist at MIT, also wrote about this gain of function — I don’t know, he says that basically every viral genome is a recipe for bioterror. None of these people have the expertise to make these statements. They don’t have the qualifications to evaluate this.

Paul: Would you like to at least answer this one question for us today and let us know whether or not you’ve changed your mind on whether or not the benefits of gain-of-function research outweigh the risks?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer.

You know, gain-of-function research, as I mentioned, is a lot of different things. I do not support gain-of-function research that has no purpose. But that is not the purpose here.

Paul: The chairman has denied your assertion of privilege and directed you to answer, but you nonetheless refuse and stand on privilege. The committee will have to consider after this hearing what appropriate action should be taken against you for the failure to testify after being directed to do so. It’s against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today. Senator Peters.

Look at all these people clapping for Rand Paul’s pathetic performance.

“Now, stripping him of his right to counsel”

Paul: You’re not recognized. If you are unruly, you will be removed from the proceeding. You are not recognized. And you are not recognized, sir. Sir, you are not recognized. You are not recognized. Security. You will respect these proceedings. You were told not to sit at the table. You insist on sitting at the table. And we told you you would not be recognized. You are not invited here for testimony, sir. You are being disruptive. Would you behave this way in a courtroom? No, because the judge would put you in jail. I can’t do that today, but I can have you escorted from the premises. So I would say, sir, sit quietly and don’t say another word. I said sit quietly. You are not recognized. Another word and you’re gone.

Nice try, dude.

Peters: Mr. Chairman, I’d like to hear what the attorney has to say.

Paul: He is not recognized by the committee or the chair. If he speaks again, he will be removed from the room. This testimony is from Anthony Fauci. This is not a game with his lawyers. He can advise — his lawyers can give him advice. He’s got a half dozen here. They’re all allowed to talk to him.

Well, unfortunately, he has to have a half dozen of them because of the witch hunt you’re perpetrating against him.

Paul: In fact, the attorney was told not to sit at the table, and he’s not obeying that recommendation. There’s a row behind you, sir. That’s where you were told to sit, and you’re not. And now you’re disrupting the proceedings. And so, look, this is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered — for a lawyer not listening to the rules. That’s the way you want to be remembered. And that’s what you’re going to do. You are not recognized, sir.

That’s how he’d like to be remembered. That’s his legacy. What a piece of shit. Now, stripping him of his right to counsel. So, you know, degrading another one of his constitutional rights. This is just absurd.

Paul: Let the record state that Dr. Fauci will still have the advice of the other half a dozen attorneys that he brought along today.

Sen. Gary Peters

Peters: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The COVID pandemic is not the first or the last public health crisis to impact our nation. In December, I released a report that identified significant failures in our federal government’s preparedness and initial response to COVID-19. It’s a very large report, which I have right here. It contains seventeen key findings and corresponding recommendations, including the need to invest in sustainable domestic manufacturing capabilities for critical medical supplies, build the infrastructure needed to surge testing capacity for infectious diseases, and robustly fund public health emergency preparedness and response across all levels of government. Unfortunately, multiple administrations, including the current Trump administration, have failed to fund or to reform our health preparedness. This is something that I would hope the committee in the future would investigate. It needs to be taken a look at.

Yeah, it does. I mean, that’s one way of putting it. We’re completely gutting all of those things that you just mentioned, Gary.

Peters: There’s a foodborne parasite affecting thousands of people in Michigan and across the country, and our federal agencies still haven’t fully pinned down the source of that outbreak.

No, not at all, actually.

Peters: Measles cases in this country are the highest they’ve been in thirty-five years. More children are getting sick and even hospitalized from this preventable disease. Over a thousand people have died from the Ebola virus in Africa, and we don’t know how widespread this crisis actually is.

It’s pretty widespread, and it’s getting worse.

Peters: We have a virus scare on a cruise ship, and though it hasn’t made headlines in the way that the screwworm threatening our food security has, I remain concerned about bird flu that is also spreading and could one day cause a pandemic.

Yes, I am very worried about that, right along with you, Gary.

Peters: Since January, the Trump administration has taken a number of actions to drastically weaken our ability to fight infectious diseases and biological threats that endanger Americans. These actions are both incomprehensible and are also inexcusable.

But they’re not incomprehensible once you realize that’s the point.

Peters: They include slashing funding for public health and infectious disease research, canceling contracts for cutting-edge vaccine technology, shutting agencies responsible for tackling infectious diseases around the world, firing thousands of federal employees tasked with keeping our communities and our medicines and our food supply safe, and injecting political appointees into what should be nonpolitical grant-making functions. That is something this committee should be looking at. I could go on. I could go on on all the topics that we need to be looking at moving forward to protect this country. We’re not doing that in this committee. That’s what this committee was designed to do.

What we need to do to protect this country is to stop having hearings like this one.

Peters: We should get back to that and think about the future of this country and keeping this country safe.

Yeah, we should.

Peters: When a crisis like COVID-19 strikes, we have an obligation to examine what went right and what went wrong, to provide accountability for the American people. Congress certainly has done that. Between the House and Senate, nearly twenty different committees — twenty different committees, including this committee, as I mentioned — have conducted oversight of the COVID-19 pandemic, conducting transcribed interviews, holding dozens of hearings, and released more than ten reports. Today’s exercise, unfortunately, is a stark departure from those largely bipartisan legitimate efforts. The chairman has shut the minority out of participating equally in these efforts, withheld information, selectively released documents — actions that completely undermine the credibility of this investigation. I will enter into the record without objection, Mr. Chairman, a letter that I sent to you that detailed all of those areas that we have concerns with and where we were shut out. I think today’s hearing, unfortunately, does real damage. It’s turning to turn one person into the scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials across both the Trump and the Biden administration were responsible for handling. It does so in a way that leaves people facing death threats. This is only going to, unfortunately, deter other scientific experts from public service, understanding that this is what they would have to go through as they provide their advice to us. We’re not going to be a nation safer by doing these kinds of activities. And I hope that we can restore our legitimate bipartisan oversight that’s going to help strengthen our public health and pandemic preparedness and other homeland priorities. That’s what this committee needs to focus on. It hasn’t the last year and a half. Let’s hope it does.

What happened in the last year and a half? That’s right. The Republicans got the majority and Rand Paul became the chair.

Sen. Ron Johnson

Sen. Ron Johnson: Mr. Chairman. Dr. Fauci, I hope the American people listen very carefully to Chairman Paul’s opening statement.

Here we go. Ron Johnson, senator from Texas — I mean, it’s a stunning indictment. Sorry, Wisconsin. Massive anti-vaxxer.

Johnson: The actions you took have been so destructive to global health. I certainly understand why you needed a pardon.

Right, because we were planning to go after you like this.

Johnson: You’re not answering any questions because I think it would be almost impossible for you to answer the questions truthfully.

Oh, no. Well, he actually explained why he’s not going to answer any questions — because you’re trying to railroad him.

Johnson: What you did —

What did he do besides his job?

Johnson: — self-incriminating. It’s pathetic.

Ron Johnson held a committee meeting, an oversight hearing a couple months ago, basically saying that COVID vaccines cause turbo cancer and myocarditis, and he had a whole lineup of anti-vaxxers.

Johnson: There are so many legitimate questions that deserve answers, and now you’re not going to provide those answers. So with my limited time, I’m going to —

Bloviate.

Johnson: — talk about things that my investigation revealed —

His investigation.

Johnson: — that have not been adequately answered and quite honestly haven’t been adequately covered. I’ll kind of combine the questions into kind of one. But, you know, I certainly — let’s put up the last COVID chart. I was warned pretty early on about the dangers of the experimental gene therapy that you’ve called a vaccine, but it really falls under the definition of gene therapy.

mRNA vaccines cause turbo cancer. Spike is toxic. No, it doesn’t. It does not integrate into the genome.

Johnson: I was going to ask you, I mean, were you carefully monitoring the safety surveillance systems like VAERS and V-safe that literally were deluged with complaints?

Is Tony Fauci going over VAERS? That’s actually the CDC’s job, and he works for the NIH.

Johnson: There have been almost one point seven million adverse events reported to the VAERS system. Of those, over thirty-nine thousand were deaths. And of those deaths, twenty-four percent occur on the day of vaccination within one or two days.

Here we go. Some crack analysis from the scientists over at Children’s Health Defense.

Johnson: Twenty-four percent, by the way, just happens to be the same percentage that a Rasmussen poll pointed out the American public believe they know somebody who died of the experimental gene therapy.

This is actually why I call my Substack Rasmussen Retorts — because Rasmussen Reports is a shitty Republican polling firm that does stuff like that. They do polls that are like, do you know somebody who died from the experimental gene therapy vaccine? And then they’re like, check it out, we just got like eight percent of the respondents saying that they know somebody who died from the experimental gene therapy vaccine.

Johnson: I think the actions you took to make sure that disinformation wasn’t spread —

This wasn’t disinformation. This was the truth. It is disinformation. You’re manipulating data from databases that don’t say anything about vaccine injuries or vaccine safety.

Johnson: My investigation shows that on March first of 2021, less than three months after the emergency use authorizations, he was warned by Dr. Anna Sharshman, a data mining expert, that the algorithm they were using to analyze VAERS data was going to hide and mask safety signals. Twenty-six days later, and three months consecutively after that, they did data runs with a new algorithm that unmasked those safety signals. They showed dozens of safety signals — sudden cardiac death, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, Bell’s palsy.

Yeah, and you know what happens when that occurs? That means that you could report anything. People have reported, like, that they grew a giant purple penis on their forehead. And, like, that’s in VAERS. Obviously, that’s not — you can’t verify anything that’s in VAERS.

Johnson: Your diaries now show that you actually suffered — I think probably June of the year, they convene a work group at CDC, usually part of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. But maybe that injection, all those boosters you took, might have caused it. And I’ll ask this question. Were you ever made aware of the fact that Peter Marks was warned that the algorithm was going to hide the safety signals? And were you told that senior FDA officials were given dozens showing dozens of safety signals? Raise your hand — how many people have known somebody who died from the COVID injection?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Johnson: Next area I want to go through. In that same month of March 2021, an employee at NIH, Dr. Nath, had a team of researchers who were diagnosing and treating individuals who’d been severely injured by the genetic therapy injections. Dr. Nath told those individuals, stay quiet. We want to make sure that we gather all the information and then release it to doctors so they can treat people like yourself.

Well, that’s not a bad approach. It’s not “keep quiet.” It’s “don’t tell people shit that you’re not sure about.”

Johnson: I’ll enter this in the record. Publishing that study — it finally was put on a preprint server, telling no one, I think about May of 2022. I think what’s noteworthy about this is Dr. Nath told the injured participants that early treatment, early intervention was crucial. Early treatment — that means hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. And yet within the NIH they were questioning, what was Dr. Nath doing? They didn’t want to publish it because publishing it would create vaccine hesitancy.

No, I don’t think that NIH ever did that. NIH is not saying that we’re going to lie about safety signals. NIH says we’re going to look into this more carefully.

Johnson: Throughout the pandemic, I always pushed early treatment. We’ve got things in here where you were really concerned about remdesivir because it was untested, but hydroxychloroquine is an approved drug. Maybe some safety issues, but we had a great deal of experience with it. Suggest that perhaps all of a sudden you have the Surgisphere study retracted within two weeks because it’s completely false, totally blew up the use of hydroxychloroquine, and then it does not work to ivermectin. Because I had close contact by so many people, I referred them to doctors who actually had the courage and compassion to treat.

Which also doesn’t work. Oh, you mean the grifters who are selling people ivermectin that doesn’t work? At a huge markup, I should add.

Johnson: But I was going to ask you whether you were involved in the FDA attack on ivermectin.

The FDA attack on ivermectin? The FDA did not attack ivermectin. The FDA declined to authorize or approve ivermectin. So there’s no evidence — it doesn’t work for COVID. It works great for helminthic infections and some ectoparasites.

Johnson: I just don’t want to take time to find the exact quote. On that exact same day, and I’ve got the studies right here — there was a website that was tracking the randomized controlled studies. Here they are. Showing a sixty, seventy percent efficacy of ivermectin.

What a waste of paper. Printing that stuff out?

Johnson: The same thing you say — there’s no evidence. There’s all kinds of evidence.

There’s no evidence, actually. Everything that he’s holding, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not evidence.

Johnson: Loved ones had to go to hospitals, had to sue hospitals. Just, would you try it? So I want to know, to what extent were you involved in sabotaging hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and did you do that because you knew the only way you could get an emergency use authorization for these experimental gene therapies was if there was no effective treatment? So is that why you helped sabotage these cheap generic drugs in favor of remdesivir, which by the way, nurses called “run, death is near”?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

I also hate remdesivir. It doesn’t work very well.

Johnson: But let me end on this note, because this just came to light. Now you actually lied to your own diary. You lied to your own diary. On March twenty-seven, 2020, you wrote in your diary: “To my surprise, yesterday the POTUS sent a letter to governors outlining a plan to reopen county by county while monitoring the spread of virus in low-risk counties. This was half-baked and never shown to Deb or I before it was sent out.” So we have evidence that, in fact, you know, you were fully aware of it and certainly approved, if not authored it. I simply ask you, I mean, is that true?

What is he talking about? He said it was half-baked.

Johnson: Did you literally lie to your own diary? Did you know of that letter? Did you lie to your own diary? Again, Mr. Chairman, I’d ask you to — answer that one simple question. Honestly, did you lie to your own diary?

Tony looks like he’s about to start laughing. I would too.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Under the advice of counsel, I think you should laugh in his face, Tony. Because it’s stupid.

Sen. Maggie Hassan

Sen. Maggie Hassan: Thank you. Dr. Fauci, I want to start by thanking you for more than fifty years of service to this country at the National Institutes of Health. And it is unfortunate that you have been put in the position that you are in today. And it must be enormously frustrating to know that this hearing is designed to entrap you.

Indeed.

Hassan: It must be very frustrating for your attorneys to hear the chair’s mischaracterization of the legal issues and posture that impact your decisions at the witness table today.

Indeed. Very much so.

Hassan: I was going to ask you a series of questions about things that are relevant right now to the people of the United States about the state of public health in this country. Since President Trump took office in 2025, more than four thousand five hundred cases of measles have been reported. That is more cases in the year and a half since Donald Trump has been president than were reported from 2000 to 2024 combined. Children are dying because there has been increased vaccine hesitancy fueled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, and frankly, his entire administration. Thousands of people in the United States of America have been sickened by a foodborne parasite, and the outbreak is nowhere near under control, as staffing at the FDA and other critical public health entities has been slashed by Russell Vought and Elon Musk. Last year, the National Institutes of Health awarded, I think it’s two hundred and one fewer grants compared to the previous years — two hundred and seven, I am corrected — compared to previous years. As those grants were either canceled or delayed, especially at the beginning of the Trump administration, I can tell my colleagues what the impact was on people in New Hampshire, on scientists in New Hampshire, on clinical trials in New Hampshire, where people’s cancer treatment was interrupted because Elon Musk and Russell Vought know better, they say, than the people at NIH about what to fund. And because they did some sort of word search, it seems, through some of the grants — and boy, oh boy, if you were studying rural health in New Hampshire and trying to understand how to better engage people who need health care in rural America, that was off the table. America is losing researchers and scientists to other countries, because researchers and scientists, highly trained, highly qualified, invested in often by the American taxpayer, are finding the hostility from this administration so strong that it interferes with their science, and they want to pursue science wherever that science takes them. I also sit on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. We have had a number of hearings with nominees recently to fill critical spots.

Oh, here we go.

Hassan: One of those nominees is Dr. Erica Schwartz, a brilliant woman — medical degree, biomedical engineering degree. I think she also told us she has a law degree and a master’s in public health. She was a two-star admiral in the United States Navy. An experienced doctor. And yet, when I asked her if she would push back at Secretary Kennedy if he instructed her to suspend the promotion of the flu vaccine, as he did at some point in the last few months — there’s an email to prove it — she couldn’t answer that question. She either could not, would not, or had been bullied into evading a question about whether she, as the director of CDC, would stand up to Secretary Kennedy, the most unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services this country has ever seen, and more than unqualified, somebody who pursues conspiracy theories, degrades people with disabilities, and continues to promote disproved science.

And kill people.

Hassan: That’s the state of health care and public health in this country right now, not to mention the trillion dollars or so of cuts to the Medicaid program that is decimating health care in my state and decimating it around the country, not to mention the refusal of my colleagues and this administration to extend critical tax credits for people who are trying to afford insurance on the Affordable Care Act.

That’s right.

Hassan: I just was at one of my community health clinics, and they are reporting fewer and fewer people coming in for care, disrupting care because they can no longer afford health insurance. And that is impacting, of course, the revenue stream to the community health clinic, their ability to hire and pay people, their ability to take care of their community.

I’m glad the Democrats are at least using this propaganda session for good.

Hassan: That’s what I wish we were having hearings about in this committee and in the HELP committee.

That is right.

Hassan: That’s what I wish we were trying to address in a bipartisan way.

That’s what you were elected to do, and I wish you were too.

Hassan: But instead, we are here… because you had a distinguished career trying to put Americans’ public health first.

Making a mockery out of our American democratic procedures. I want to be very clear about this: the research that Tony Fauci funded has saved millions of lives in America and around the world.

Sen. James Lankford

Sen. James Lankford: Dr. Fauci, thanks for coming today. I know you’re invoking your Fifth Amendment right, which you have the right to be able to do constitutionally, but thanks for coming and being a part of this. There are a lot of issues and a lot of questions that have come up, and hopefully some day in the future we’ll be able to get all this clarity to be able to pull together. There were over a million Americans that died from COVID. You know that well. You were tracking the numbers literally every single day, those affected and those that died, from the earliest days. There are a lot of lessons that we’ve got to learn from this that we should put into history to be able to determine what happens in the future. How do we respond in the future? How do we deal with something like this again? It was uncharted territory for everyone. But I would tell you, countless families, including my own, watched a loved one die behind glass or through a screen because we couldn’t get access to him. Children couldn’t get to school. People missed their prom.

Once again, this is Tony Fauci’s fault.

Lankford: There are lots of things that happened that dramatically changed the future of the country. The mental health issues that we have continued to deal with from the isolation have been profound. Even something as simple as children that wore masks or were around adults wearing masks for all that time are slower in learning language now, because they couldn’t watch someone’s lips moving, and so they’re slower in that. Amazingly enough, churches and places of worship were forced to be closed down. There were even churches that met with a pastor who preached in the parking lot and the congregants all met in their cars with windows up, and police came and scattered them and said, you can’t be here. The simple act of social distancing became an issue, as everyone guessed, what’s the right distance to be away from someone else? It was six feet. Whether that was right or not, who knows? Literacy rates have declined, not to mention the loss of lives and health experiences that have been out there for many Americans. So there are legitimate questions. I wanted to be able to raise some of those to be able to walk through some of this, because it has been very, very challenging. As we’ve gone through some of your notes and your diary and other things that are out there, we’re trying to be able to pull bits and pieces of things to be able to learn lessons. On May the sixth, 2020, you wrote at that time, “I had a conversation with Robert Redfield,” as you know well, was then the director of CDC, “about the fact that greater than one million children worldwide have missed their measles vaccination because of the shutdown.” You stated, “This is terrible and needs to be addressed, since on that basis alone there would be far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children. I need to bring this up to the TF” — the task force. Did you ever have an opportunity to bring up the potential —

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

The reason that we have measles infection rates going around the world now is disinformation campaigns by the secretary and all of his little anti-vaccine issues.

Lankford: Really coming up is the lab issue. This was clearly discussed, about whether this came from a lab or whether this came from nature. There are obvious issues and differences between the two to be able to know this. You’ve had a lot of conversation on this. Scientists around the world were in conversation on this. There were different statements that you even made in your private notes and your public notes on it. On January the twenty-sixth of 2020 — this is before we had our even our first tragic death of coronavirus in the United States — you wrote, “It now appears using every data that the genomic data, the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” which was the big rumor that was out there, the wet market in China. “We know the market was not the source. It was the amplifier.”

Right.

Lankford: On January the thirty-first, you wrote about a phone call. You wrote, “The people on the phone felt the mutations around the furin cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally, since it would require an evolutionary jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility this could have been deliberately inserted, and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.” February the first —

I mean, so this was six years ago. We barely knew anything about this virus. This is called hypothesis development.

Lankford: “Ron said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time in diverting our efforts to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original gain-of-function person with Yoshi. Also, Kristian was the other one.” “The rest, Kristian Andersen, is possibly possible.” “And given the fact that Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in gain-of-function sequencing viruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.” That’s a remarkable statement for February the first of 2020.

It’s his impression when they’re having a scientific discussion.

Lankford: You knew well that something was moving. You identified February the first, before any of us had ever heard of the Wuhan lab — not only the Wuhan lab in the conversation, but literally the scientist that you named in your own notes, the lead scientist that was there. It’s interesting to me on that. And the questions I was going to ask you were just your background and knowledge about the Wuhan lab and Dr. Shi and all the details. I’m aware of where you have been on trying to be able to plead your Fifth Amendment right, which is your right to be able to do, but also want to be able to find out some facts to be able to help us for the future on this. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in May of 2020 — they think it came out of the lab; that has only been recently unclassified — had this statement: “We assess all the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus, specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cell receptors, were present at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology in mid to late” — now the question that I have for you is this is May the twenty-seventh of 2020. All the conditions.

This is the report that most people will see. They’ve never been able to show any kind of progenitor virus. In order to have a lab leak, you have to have the virus. They never have. There’s no evidence whatsoever. Nobody’s ever produced it. Any lab, anywhere in the U.S., anywhere in China — no lab had that virus.

Lankford: It’s important for the future that people in your position have to have access to this kind of information. Is there any way you can answer that question?

That’s how strong that evidence would be.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Lankford: You wrote on January the twenty-sixth of 2020, “We should be allowed to send our CDC epidemiologists to China to work with them,” so they could see the data firsthand. You also wrote on February the twelfth, 2020, that you had great concerns about the World Health Organization, because they depend greatly on China, and as you stated, often bows to them. This is a really important issue that we’ve got to resolve for the future. It’s not just our cooperation with Chinese scientists. It’s our acknowledgment that China covered up their data, wouldn’t allow our scientists to be able to come in. They cleaned up the wet market. They cleaned up the other areas. They wouldn’t allow you to get access to all the other scientists there, including their health records, what happened to them, or even all the sequencing that they had done in advance. For the future of our research and our cooperation with any scientists around the world, I think it’s really important that we resolve, if we’re going to fund research and cooperate with you, we’ve got to have certain things from you. If things go sideways, we’ve got to have access to all information in all places. You were noting not only that China was affecting the World Health Organization and that China was bending them to their will, and so the World Health Organization was putting out data that you saw, at least at that point, as being from a Chinese perspective, covering up what was going on. But you also noted we weren’t able to get access to all this information. We’ve got to be able to figure this out for the future to be able to make sure that research that is done, we have access to all information. If something goes sideways at some point, which clearly it did at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — how are you going to have access to all information?

We already have all of the information.

Lankford: How are you going to get all the information from China? The security standards there than many other labs around the world, yet they were doing this very dangerous research. What can we gain? And what advice could you give us to say, in a future setting, we’ve got to make sure that we actually get information from people, and we can be guaranteed that we’re going to get that insight?

Fauci: Yes, sir. I plead the Fifth. On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Lankford: I yield back.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal

Sen. Richard Blumenthal: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to go back to the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the darkest days or times in our history. Hospitals were overflowing. Navy medical ships were docked in the Hudson River. Emergency rooms were unprecedentedly triaging. More so than the worst week of the pandemic, which happens to have been the last week of President Trump’s first term, more than twenty-five thousand Americans died of COVID-19. Easy to forget those dark days. But for the past eighteen months, the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign to rewrite this history.

Indeed.

Blumenthal: And today’s proceeding, I fear, is part of that effort.

I know for a fact that today’s proceeding is part of that effort.

Blumenthal: In our Senate’s history —

It sure is.

Blumenthal: The Trump administration has launched a baseless set of smears against vaccines that helped pull us out of that public health crisis.

That’s right.

Blumenthal: Vaccines that are undoubtedly President Trump’s greatest accomplishment. It has slashed funding to local public health departments that were on the front lines of the pandemic. And those health care workers are heroes. It has disparaged those heroes as woke or wasteful. And it has used a politicized Department of Justice to target the researchers who helped us track and understand the novel virus. Today’s hearing is another page in that playbook, sadly, tragically. Dr. Fauci, you spent five decades in public service, including nearly four decades in leadership at the National Institutes of Health, helping to conquer COVID-19, also HIV, swine flu, Zika, Ebola, and other epidemics, with real-life results saving human lives. Put aside all the flowery rhetoric that we hear in the United States Senate — Dr. Fauci has saved lives, as have public health officials in the United States and throughout the world, and today we are demeaning and degrading their life-saving service. Republicans are eager to rebrand you as a villain in order to distract from their own failure to protect Americans from soaring health care costs that have been rising astronomically in the last couple of years, and from unsafe food, which has caused cyclospora to spread, and resurgent measles as a result of the anti-vaccine policy. This hearing is the culmination of a years-long crusade which started more than six years ago when Dr. Fauci dared to contradict President Trump.

Indeed.

Blumenthal: The campaign to vilify you, Dr. Fauci, is just one part of this larger campaign against science and against America, a campaign that has made Americans less safe. It is shameful that in a country like ours, a dedicated public servant like Dr. Fauci has experienced persistent threats to his life since the pandemic because of the lies that are told about him. His attorney has been gagged, thrown out of this hearing room for being unruly in asserting his client’s constitutional rights. He has written a letter to the chairman that is an explanation for the reasons why Dr. Fauci is, in fact, invoking his constitutional right. It is a right. And I would ask that this letter from David Schertler and Daniel Nardello be made part of the record, if there’s no objection.

It sounds like two attorneys, not a half dozen.

Blumenthal: The attorney has also issued a statement within the last half hour, I believe, that sets forth again the reasons that he is here to help protect his client’s rights. And I would ask that that statement be made part of the record as well, Mr. Chairman.

Paul: Without objection.

Blumenthal: Let’s be very clear. The Fifth Amendment is a right of everyone appearing before an authority like this one.

Indeed.

Blumenthal: It should be respected.

Not only should it be respected, it needs to be respected by law.

Blumenthal: The reason that Dr. Fauci has invoked it, in the words of his attorney, quote: “During and after the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci appeared at least a dozen times for congressional hearings in the Senate alone in answer to questions about the very issues on which you purport to seek information. He has been thoroughly transparent and consistent in providing factual information to Congress, and he is deeply familiar with the processes and protocols of sharing information with the legislative branch.” And then referring to the chairman: “This yearslong public crusade against Dr. Fauci makes one thing clear. This is not a serious effort to seek information from Dr. Fauci in a transcribed interview for a valid legislative purpose. You are single-mindedly fixated on seeing Dr. Fauci prosecuted for imaginary crimes, and you are so invested in that outcome that you have created a personal brand around it.” Those are the words of his attorney. He has created a personal brand around it. And he cites as well the statements of the chairman, which indicate a clear intent that the result of this proceeding be a prosecution. Quote: “The power of some of us must be used for good, like putting Fauci in jail.” That’s from December twenty-three, 2025. “I want to give him a subpoena and a jail cell.” Also from December of 2025. The first was 2024. Those kinds of statements by the chairman of a committee, in tweets, certainly provide a well-founded fear that the proceeding underway is simply an effort to trap Dr. Fauci in some kind of criminal wrongdoing.

Literally, Rand Paul has been so clear about his desire to do this for years and years and years.

Blumenthal: During some of the dark days in this body under Senator Joe McCarthy, it became standard operating procedure to seek that kind of prosecutorial objective. We should not be part of a rerun of that kind of effort. This attempt to rebrand one of the most challenging times in our nation’s history is a shortsighted act of desperation that will leave us less prepared for the next pandemic. It is an insult to the memory of more than one million Americans who died from COVID-19.

It sure is.

Blumenthal: If there are valid scientific questions about the origins of this pandemic, COVID-19, about the kinds of steps that were taken to counter it, about the need for more preparation, they should certainly be addressed. But not in a show trial.

Exactly.

Blumenthal: Not as part of a continuing vendetta against a single individual.

Indeed.

Blumenthal: And unfortunately, I fear that is what we are seeing today. America deserves better.

And it is going to be a template for doing this to many other individuals.

Paul: In no courtroom in America can you have your witness plead the Fifth Amendment and then your attorney gets to testify. That’s what that letter is. The attorney’s complaining and testifying, saying he didn’t do it, the prosecution’s unfair. You don’t get to do that. That’s one thing you give up when you take the Fifth Amendment. You say, I’m not going to testify. I’m not going to give you any information. You don’t then get to put your lawyer forward to justify it. He can do it in the press, but you can’t come and testify. He was not invited to testify. And he didn’t testify. And it was appropriate to have him ejected.

And you booted him. And you’re also mocking Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights. So your opinion on this, Rand Paul, is ignored.

Sen. Rick Scott

Sen. Rick Scott: I mean, I know people have been asking questions about Dr. Fauci for years. So Dr. Fauci, your diary has made clear that you love being a hero, a celebrity —

Oh, for God’s sake.

Scott: — and you’re having the eyes of the world upon you. You love every newspaper profile, every photo shoot, every fancy dinner with the elites. To the Americans who lost family members, who lost trust in our federal government, you’re not a hero. Unfortunately, you’re a villain. You made yourself the story and abandoned the American people to serve your own ego.

Shut up, Rick.

Scott: I’d like to talk about your relationship with David Morens. He was the senior advisor in the NIAID Office of the Director, your office, for sixteen years. He was your friend. He was a frequent guest at your house. You reportedly co-authored over fifty scientific articles with him.

Yeah, what’s the matter with having friends?

Scott: You turned to him first right after COVID-19 first occurred. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice charged him with conspiracy against the United States, in addition to other charges, as part of a conspiracy to conceal information and falsify records to suppress alternative theories about the origins of COVID-19. Now, you publicly kicked this man to the curb, saying “Dr. Morens was not an advisor to me on institute policy or other substantive issues.” So let’s start with the use of personal Gmail accounts in David Morens’s relationship with Peter Daszak: “I forgot to say that there’s no worry about FOIA. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Look, I’m not defending this behavior.

Scott: Dr. Fauci, did Dr. Morens’s relationship with Peter Daszak concern you? Yes or no?

But at the same time, David Morens is —

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

And Tony probably doesn’t want to produce more evidence for show trials like this in the future.

Scott: Did you ever receive a text about your work at NIAID to your personal cell phone?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did any text about your work at NIAID that went to your personal cell phone ever become part of federal records?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did you maintain a personal email account while serving as director?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did you ever receive work-related communications on that Gmail account from David Morens?

None of your business.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did you preserve any work-related communications on that Gmail account from David Morens?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did David Morens ever provide you with documents outside of those two ways that would violate NIH policy?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Now, let’s look at two other communications. You emailed Dave Morens on January twenty-six, 2020, quote: “It is important that I speak with you tonight. Please call me at home.” This is part of exhibit two that you have in front of you. This email sent the same day, the exact same day you write in an internal document, quote: “Now we know the market was not the source. It was the amplifier,” unquote. Would you call the origins of COVID-19 a substantive issue?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Did you discuss COVID-19 origins with Dr. Morens on this phone call?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Now let’s take a closer look at the last time you testified before Congress. This is part of what you have in front of you — exhibit four, which is part of the record. In June 2024, you testified that Dr. Morens, quote, “was not an advisor to me on institute policy or other substantive issues. Furthermore, his office is located in a different building from that of the NIAID director,” unquote. Is that still your testimony today?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

That means he gives advice. The fact is, David Morens’s job was not to make policy.

Scott: Now I’ve got exhibit five, which you have in front of you. On October twenty-four, 2021, David Morens texted you to provide information about an advocate for the controversial EcoHealth Alliance grant. You thank him and tell him that you will check the information. Would you agree that this shows an advisory relationship between David Morens and yourself?

His job title was literally “Senior Advisor to the Director.” This is so dumb. Tony was telling him the scope, literally, of David Morens’s advisory responsibilities. But David Morens was supposed to be an advisor to Tony Fauci. His job title was, again, literally Senior Advisor to the Director. And you know how I know that? It was on his email — some of the ones that he did send me from the NIH.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Is there any document in your possession today that would contradict your prior congressional testimony?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Have you deleted, destroyed, or instructed anyone to destroy records after learning Congress was investigating these matters?

I love this. They’re just going from one Republican to the next.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

And somehow Tony Fauci is not falling all over himself to be like, I’m so sorry, I committed all these crimes. What is the matter with these people?

Scott: As you know, Dr. Morens still faces charges related to destroying records while you distance yourself from him. Is that fair to a decades-long friend?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: When is the last time you spoke to him?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: In hindsight, are you disappointed how you handled COVID? Do you have any regrets?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: Any regrets? Dr. Fauci, I want to close with this. Here’s how you impacted my family and people close to me. I have daughters with children. You can’t imagine the questions they had around vaccines for their kids and themselves.

Oh, so your daughters are anti-vaxxers and that’s been so hard for you.

Scott: To make the right decision for their health — I can tell you pregnant women who worked with me were so scared, because every time they went to the doctor, they were told something different about taking the vaccine. And you caused this. Imagine being a mom trying to protect their kids, or an expectant mother trying to figure out what to do. Every three weeks a doctor tells you a new set of guidance on a vaccine. The haphazard information you released and pushed on the American people with little research —

Fauci does not make vaccine guidance.

Scott: — is why there’s so much distrust in our institutions today. That trust is crucial to public health. And you, more than any person in my lifetime, have destroyed that trust for millions of Americans. You lied to hundreds of millions of people amid the worst public health crisis in the century. You failed to follow your own guidance. You forced people to watch their loved ones die alone over the phone.

It’s disgusting.

Scott: You destroyed the federal government’s credibility when it comes to public health. We have entire generations of Americans who rightfully so have lost trust in institutions and people because of you. This has destroyed decades of progress and lifetimes of work because you wanted to fuel your own ego and be the center of attention. What would you do differently with what you know today, Dr. Fauci?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Scott: All the evidence is right here and you still can’t bring yourself to tell the truth or apologize, because you received an auto-pen pardon from a staffer in the Biden White House. If we have another pandemic tomorrow, millions could die because of what you did — what you did to make Americans lose trust in their government when it comes to medicine and health care. How many families have you apologized to who had to watch their loved ones die alone? You breached public trust, and now you’re hiding behind a fraudulent pardon. Your legacy will not be as a man who has saved America from COVID, but as a man who destroyed the public trust in America’s public health institutions in exchange for five years of fame. This is how history will remember you. I yield back.

That’s how history will remember him — as somebody who undid America and ushered in totalitarianism.

Sen. Andy Kim

Sen. Andy Kim: Thank you, Dr. Fauci, for coming out in front of this committee. I know it’s not what you would want. It’s not what you deserve. I just want to say and start by just saying thank you to you for your service to this nation. I didn’t know much about you prior to the pandemic. I came to learn about you, as so many Americans did, but I also had the opportunity to talk to you and engage with you as someone who was a member of the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis over in the House of Representatives. When I learned about your background — thirty-eight years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appointed by President Reagan, served under seven presidents, four Republicans and three Democrats — I admire that greatly. I myself had a chance to serve in the executive branch, serving in government under both a Republican president and a Democratic president. And I believe that we need more of that type of work. A place where we can understand our jobs not as coming from a place of partisanship and politics, but that of just public service. And right now I feel the hyper-partisanship growing in this country in dangerous ways. I feel it much more present here on the Hill than I did back when I served as a nonpartisan career public servant at the State Department. And I worry about it. I worry about what kind of trajectory we’re on as a country and what this causes when it comes next for public service and those willing to step up for our nation. And it’s not just in the attacks, but we see it brought out with the cuts to funding, the firing of federal workers, the demonization of their motivations. People calling our public servants criminals, thinking that they are there solely to undermine others that are trying to engage. I look at it right now — it’s not just that the people are being attacked, our public servants being attacked, but that it’s undermining the very nature of the work of governance. You know, these cuts to HHS funding, to NIH funding, to the grants, cuts to the researchers doing the critical work to find cures and medicines — these firings and these cuts, they’re creating a chilling effect, honestly, a chilling effect for the next generation of people who might consider stepping up to serve our nation, to be the next generation of researchers, who now are wondering whether or not this is the right thing for them to do at a time when they see some of their colleagues, or those that they looked up to, being attacked, their funding being cut. Researchers that I talked to who are now either leaving the country or considering leaving the country to do their work because of the sheer unpredictability of America. That this nation, so great, so powerful, has now been crippled with this sense of unpredictability and unreliability. That is not the type of country that I hope we strive to be. I’ve raised this because these attacks upon Dr. Fauci, it’s not just about him. It’s sending signals to others. Others who are thinking about serving our country, our scientists, our doctors, our health care professionals, our researchers — trying to show to them that if you don’t get in line with the politics, that you will also potentially be subject to attacks.

That is a hundred percent correct.

Kim: And from the work that he has done, from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to COVID, we’ve seen him try to engage in these crises. They’re not easy. Especially when it’s a novel disease, when you don’t know what comes next. A lot of unknowns, having to make decisions without the full breadth of knowledge we always wish we had in hindsight. But there is nothing perfect, no perfect clarity when it comes to pandemics, when it comes to crises. I worked in national security in wars and crises. I made judgment calls, gave my best advice to generals, to ambassadors, even to a president. Did I get it all right? No. Did I do my best? I did everything I thought I could with the information that I had. That’s what we all can do. The public servants, they do this work because they love this country and they strive to improve it. It’s not an easy job, but it is because there is so much at stake in our country. These public servants do it because they are in the arena. I just want to end by just reading a portion of this, because I think it’s important as we’re thinking about how to be able to treat public servants through this country to think through this. And in the words of Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” Thank you for your service, Dr. Fauci. I yield back.

That was beautiful.

Sen. Josh Hawley

Sen. Josh Hawley: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?

Oh, fucking A.

Hawley: Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?

This is so obnoxious.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon —

All right, after this bullshit, I’m going to probably have to step off. I actually have a news hit on News Nation to talk about this very hearing. And I think that it is still important to that. I also am not sure that we’re going to get much more out of this, because right now Josh Hawley is asking him what color the carpet is, what color his tie is. And he’s just making Fauci take the Fifth over and over again.

Hawley: You can’t hide under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned. As you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more — Brown v. Walker, 1896 — when he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege. You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you, now shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn’t about the Constitution. This isn’t about the law. This is about showing solidarity with —

This is a sitting U.S. senator who supported people who were trying to overthrow our government. Never, ever forget that.

Hawley: — the traitors who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. You did all kinds of terrible things. It’s because during the pandemic, you got rich, didn’t you? You got rich while people were dying — hundreds of thousands of Americans, over a million in the end. And you were getting rich. And not only were you doing that, you were using federal employees, your taxpayer money, to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars. You did all of that during the pandemic, didn’t you? That’s a question.

Oh, that’s a little bit different than what color is my tie. Look, when you get prizes, awards, things like that, sometimes they come with honoraria. Sometimes when you give a talk, you get an honorarium for giving it. It’s pretty normal. I don’t rake in a million dollars, but I do actually get paid sometimes for giving talks or getting awards or that kind of thing. Usually they do come with a cash prize.

Hawley: And what were these individuals doing in the depth of the pandemic, in November of 2020, when millions of Americans were suffering from COVID? What were they doing? I’ll tell you what they were doing. Their focus was on your behalf, soliciting and gathering information for a cash award. Let’s look at it. You’ve got his email right here, right over my shoulder. Greg Folkers says, “I’m working on this nomination for the Dan David Award for Fauci. We need to beef up the COVID part. Do you have language in the can that you can share that delineates how we responded in new ways to COVID?” He sends this to multiple federal employees. What was the Dan David Award? Do you remember, Doc?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel —

It is also not uncommon to have a nomination for an award, especially for somebody at Fauci’s level. It is not unusual for somebody to solicit nominations from that person.

Hawley: Because he used federal employees to get it. And this wasn’t the only award. In fact, you applied for and received at least eight other federal cash prizes on federal time using federal employees and federal resources.

And I know this because I also sit on an awards board.

Hawley: Besides the Dan David Award, you’ve got the Partnership for Public Service. You’ve got the Adelson Prize. You’ve got the Smithsonian Award. You’ve got the National Academy of Medicine Award. You’ve got the CDC Foundation. In fact, you turned your staff into a full-time application machine. You actually wrote to people and said, do you think maybe I’d qualify? And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn’t just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn’t that true?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Hawley: Here they are right over my shoulder. Here’s all of them. The people that you used — federal employees — so that you could go and get cash money. And the most hilarious part is that you weren’t content to even dragoon them into applying for all of these cash awards. You then had them go out to the ethics agencies and ethics watchdogs and demand that you be able to get the money. We’ve got it in your emails. Your staff and employees on federal time using federal resources being paid with federal dollars are soliciting cash for you. And then they’re turning around and saying to the agency, we don’t want just an answer. We want to get to yes, because Fauci wants the money. He wants it. “We want to get to yes and yes takes time.” This is your chief of staff again using federal email to pressure the agency’s own ethics people so that you can get money. And it violated the law.

That’s right. And it is ethical. But you have to go through the ethics process. And again, there is nothing wrong with your staff managing that. That is a normal part.

Hawley: It is a question. You can answer. Go ahead.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Hawley: Federal law, as you very well know, prohibits the solicitation of cash awards or other personal benefits for federal employees. And it certainly prohibits using your own employees to do this.

He’s completely mischaracterized all of his things. Oh, 205? I wonder how many times he practiced that. Powerful, Josh. Just like when you did this to the January Sixers.

Hawley: You were supposed to be the nation’s doctor and you’re playing one on TV, but this is what you were doing with your time.

You were playing a January 6 cheerleader on TV, except you weren’t really playing, were you? You do support that.

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Hawley: Yeah. Yeah, I can see why. I can certainly see why. You know what I can’t quite figure out is why you were so obsessed with it, because you’re already rich. I mean, and your scheme worked here. I mean, your net worth now is north of twelve million dollars. You knocked down over a million dollars in cash awards using federal resources.

It’s like watching Patrick Bateman from American Psycho try to hold the high ground over somebody.

Hawley: Now you’re worth more than twelve million dollars. You’ve got a pension that in its first year paid out north of four hundred thousand dollars a year. A million people dead. You’re using federal employees to get cash awards for you. A million people dead. And you’re here taking the Fifth, because you don’t want to admit that what really happened in all that time was a multi-month, multi-year course of self-dealing. Isn’t that true, Dr. Fauci?

Fauci: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Hawley: Yeah, well, silence is admission.

No, it’s not, actually.

Hawley: And here’s the real thing. At the end of the day, it wasn’t just about the money, really, was it? It was really about a power trip. I mean, through all of this, you wanted to be the most famous scientist in the world. You were so focused on getting every award and every drop of cash that you could, all because you wanted to be on TV. You wanted to be the sun god of science. You wanted to be the guy who was in charge of it all. You wanted to blast Trump. You wanted to make sure that nobody else stole your spotlight. You wanted to be the guy.

Completely making things up. Making it seem like sitting for InStyle magazine is a crime. This is not a crime. He has every right not to answer questions for the American people when those questions are making a mockery of our Senate, of our judicial system, of our democracy.

Hawley: I tell you what, here’s my conclusion from all this.

I don’t give a shit about this stupid picture on InStyle magazine. This is legal. It’s not a crime. I don’t care if Fauci lost his way. I don’t care if Fauci had a big ego. I don’t care if he was thrilled to meet celebrities. I don’t care if he liked being on TV. Personally, I don’t — I suspect he probably didn’t either. I suspect he very much doesn’t like being on TV today. He’s not a narcissist and a megalomaniac, but even if he were, has he committed a crime? He has not committed a crime. Has he committed a crime? He has not committed a crime.

Hawley: And I hope you’ll go home and write that in your diary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I hope we get a look at your priorities one day, Josh Hawley, as well as your emails, so that we can see who you’ve been corresponding with.

“I’m not here to perhaps attack you or defend”

Unidentified senator: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m not here to perhaps attack you or defend or anything. It’s really just more, honestly — I just want to acknowledge I have had members of my family die from COVID. And now I also grieve for people that I’ve met that have lost their business through the pandemic, and they’ll never be the same. During the pandemic I was the lieutenant governor, so we were in the middle of all of that maelstrom, trying to find the right balance between protecting life and protecting —

I’m not sure how much more we’re going to get out of it. I don’t know. I do have a lot of people who seem to be very engaged, but at the same time, most of the comments I’m seeing are that this is such a bogus hearing — which, in fact, it is. And I do think that we’ve kind of gone over everything that we could possibly go over, although I’m curious to hear John Fetterman’s regret. Maybe that he’s a total putz who lied to all of his constituents about what he was going to do when he got elected.

Sen. John Fetterman

Sen. John Fetterman: Oh, boy. And I thought it seemed to make sense.

Okay, John Fetterman’s belief in the lab.

Fetterman: Now, there was a really advanced kinds of theory. You have this unknown virus out. So I’ll get one minute. Very partisan thing. And now it seems now it’s more and more emerging theory that that would have come from the lab.

No, it’s not an emerging theory, moron. It is absolutely not. You shouldn’t be talking about things that you don’t understand.

Fetterman: We are not become, you know, as I might have been, blinded by the partisan idea that maybe the truth might come from a side that’s different than you are. But I think we should really be willing to pursue truth.

Yes, we all know how nonpartisan you are.

Fetterman: That may have emerged, you know, after all of that. So, and I now cede the remainder back to the chair.

Paul: Thank you.

Okay. I’m not sure that was a question.

“This was just really a straight disinformation campaign”

All right. I think I’m going to cut this right now, because this hearing has really just been a disinformation fest, with some good stuff from the Democrats coming in occasionally, with the exception of John Fetterman’s incoherent ramble there at the end.

I hope that everybody really gets the take-home message that this was just really a straight disinformation campaign. And the purpose of this, of course, as the Democrats correctly noted, is to entrap Fauci in either a lie — they seem to be trying to get him to admit to crimes, or to deny them and then, quote, commit perjury, as Rand Paul introduced at the beginning of this hearing. So it was absolutely right for Tony to take the Fifth for the entire hearing, because it was pretty obvious that no matter what he said, the Republicans were going to try to use it against him to, in fact, prosecute him.

And really the endgame here is that — and what everybody needs to understand is that prosecuting Fauci is not about Fauci entirely. For Rand Paul, it might be. But prosecuting Fauci is about setting the precedent to prosecute anybody who has a political opinion that is different from yours, on the basis of made-up stuff about science, with the understanding that people don’t understand the science well enough to push back and to object to people being essentially railroaded for crimes that they didn’t commit.

So everybody really does need to pay attention to this, because if Fauci is successfully prosecuted, that says very, very bad things for our entire democracy and all of our individual constitutional rights. It certainly says bad things about science. And again, I’m at the American Society for Virology annual meeting right now. Boy, is this a grim environment. My colleagues are really scared because our field faces an existential threat, and so does all of science — which means that our country will be less safe and less secure, because we won’t have any of that research that Tony Fauci funded that created all of those vaccines and drugs that have saved so many lives.

And with that, I’m going to sign off. And thank you all so much for joining me today. I’m going to set up a recap episode of this later on. I’m hoping to have a special guest who can talk with great expertise about gain-of-function research and who knows Tony Fauci personally. And we’ll see about that. But I’ll let you guys know about that. And stay tuned. I’m going to be on News Nation in a few minutes. Bye-bye.

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Related from Rasmussen Retorts

• Rasmussen Retorts Episode 5: Five Reasons Why We Think It Was Zoonotic

• NIH FFS: The Freedom From Science Lab Leak Lecture Series

• CREID Pro Quo: A Lie That Will Kill People

• The Saga of the H5N1 Freedom Ostriches

• Drowning in a Sea of Virus

Links from this episode

My Zeteo pieces on this

• Tulsi, Trump, and the War on Fauci – Part 1: The Smear Campaign

• Tulsi, Trump, and the War on Fauci – Part 2: The ‘Lab Leak’ Obsession

The actual evidence on pandemic origins

• Worobey et al., Science 2022 — The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic (PMC free full text)

• Pekar et al., Science 2022 — The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2 (the two-spillover work)

• Andersen et al., Nature Medicine 2020 — The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

• Menachery, Baric, Shi et al., Nature Medicine 2015 — A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence (the chimeric spike/backbone paper Paul described)

• Herfst, Fouchier et al., Science 2012 — Airborne transmission of influenza A/H5N1 virus between ferrets

The hearing and the paper trail

• CNN — Diary entries, a subpoena and an anticipated clash

• NPR — Rand Paul releases Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary notes

• STAT — Anthony Fauci gets Biden preemptive pardon

• DOJ — Former Senior NIAID Official Indicted for Concealing Federal Records (David Morens)

• HSGAC Democrats — Peters Investigation Finds Significant Failures in Federal Government’s Pandemic Preparedness and Initial COVID-19 Response (the 17-findings report)

• Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591 (1896)

• 5 CFR § 2635.205 — “Limitations on use of exceptions” (the gift/solicitation rule Hawley cited)

• OMB — Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (proposed rule)

Drugs that don’t work for COVID

• The Lancet — Learning from a retraction (the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine retraction)

• Naggie et al., JAMA 2022 — Effect of ivermectin vs placebo on time to sustained recovery in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 (ACTIV-6)

• JAMA 2023 — At a higher dose and longer duration, ivermectin still not effective against COVID-19

Thank you Jeremy Faust, MD, Al Mauroni, Del Potter, Elisabetta Pilotti, Elizabeth G., and many others for joining! See you for the recap.