Anthony Fauci refuses to answer questions during US Senate hearing about Covid origins

What the report says

BBC World News reports that Anthony Fauci, the former head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, invoked his Fifth Amendment right during a Republican-led Senate committee hearing on Wednesday about the origins of Covid-19. The constitutional protection allows a person not to provide testimony that could be self-incriminating, and using it is not in itself an admission of wrongdoing.

According to the BBC, Fauci said he was acting on legal advice and cited Senator Rand Paul’s recent release of diary entries as part of his reason for refusing to answer. Fauci accused Paul of trying to draw out comments that could support the senator’s public calls for him to face prosecution. Paul continued questioning him, and the session became tense when one of Fauci’s lawyers tried to intervene and Paul ordered security to remove him.

Paul argued that Fauci’s writings conflicted with his public comments on the virus’s origins, suggesting Fauci privately considered a laboratory origin while publicly favoring natural emergence. The BBC says the diary excerpts show Fauci considering both a lab leak and animal spillover early in the pandemic before later leaning toward a natural-origin explanation while saying he remained open to the lab-leak possibility.

Democratic senators defended Fauci, with Senator Maggie Hassan describing the hearing as an attempt to entrap him. The wider dispute matters because Fauci remains a central figure in US political battles over the pandemic response, including restrictions, public health guidance and investigations into how Covid-19 first emerged. Scientists have not reached a definitive consensus on the virus’s origin.