For nearly three hours on 29 July, the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee heard one sentence repeated over a hundred times.

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

Dr Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who guided the American COVID-19 pandemic response across two administrations, sat before the committee and, beyond a brief opening statement, said nothing else.

In more than 250 appearances before Congress across his 54-year career, including 14 hours of transcribed interviews with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in January 2024, Fauci had never before declined to answer a question.

But the man who subpoenaed him, Committee chair Senator Rand Paul, had already told the world what he wanted out of the exercise.

“The power of some of us must be used for good, like putting Fauci in jail,” Paul tweeted in December 2024. “I want to give him a subpoena and a jail cell.”

Fauci’s lawyers argued the hearing amounted to a trap. Any answer, however truthful, could be mined for inconsistencies and forwarded to a Department of Justice that has systematically displayed a disregard for independence from the administration by prosecuting political opponents.

Top administration officials indicated as much in the weeks before the hearing. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr told Fox News that Fauci “could be subject to perjury prosecution” if any inconsistencies were unearthed during testimony.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” Fauci said. Paul’s crusade dates back to 2021, when he told Fox & Friends the 38-year leader of the National Institutes of Health “could be culpable for the entire pandemic.”

A week later, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt and refer the matter for prosecution, the first such action against a former federal health official in modern US history.

“Framing public health decisions as matters of criminal intent rather than complex crisis management undermines public faith in medical recommendations, vaccines, and scientific consensus,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “It is an abuse of power, legally baseless, and sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the future of public health.”

‘Who the f*** did you think you were?’

The stated purpose of the hearing was to uncover the origins of COVID-19, a question of global importance that, six years after the pandemic killed an estimated 25 million people worldwide, remains unresolved.

Leading scientific consensus remains that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats to humans through contact with infected wildlife at Wuhan’s Huanan wet market. No intermediate animal host has been confirmed, however, and the hypothesis that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied bat coronaviruses, has never been ruled out.

The hearing made no progress on this question. Instead, it bundled political battles over lockdown policy, vaccine safety and the pandemic’s origins into a single prosecutorial narrative aimed at assigning blame for a global catastrophe on a scientist who does not hold the answers to where COVID-19 began, and has no power to compel the Chinese government to release them.

“Who the fuck did you think you were?” Senator Bernie Moreno said, accusing Fauci of being a “megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people.”

His outrage centred on the 2020 arrest of Alecia Kitts, an Ohio mother tased and handcuffed at her son’s middle school football game for refusing to wear a mask, an enforcement action carried out under a statewide order issued by Republican Governor Mike DeWine.

Republicans cast Fauci as a shadowy autocrat who unilaterally caused the pandemic, imposed lockdowns and pushed dangerous vaccines on the world, ascribing to a scientific advisor a degree of unchecked power more accurately associated with the leader of their own party.

Fauci issued recommendations that were adopted, adapted or rejected by thousands of officials at every level of state and federal government. Governments and health authorities around the world, from the World Health Organization (WHO) to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, reached similar conclusions and imposed similar or stricter measures.

The United States was, by most comparative measures, more lax, and also had a higher per-capita COVID death toll than peer nations.

Trump’s ‘greatest achievement’?

Vaccine misinformation, a defining characteristic of the Kennedy health department, surfaced as well. Senator Ron Johnson referred to COVID-19 vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” and cited misleading adverse event reports as evidence of mass harm.

The vaccines were produced under Operation Warp Speed, which President Trump still calls “one of the greatest achievements ever.” Modelling estimates the programme prevented over 3.2 million additional deaths through November 2022.

Johnson also claimed Fauci had “sabotaged” ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug instrumental in controlling river blindness in West Africa, which gained a second life during the pandemic as an unproven COVID-19 treatment promoted by anti-vaccine influencers and widely purchased in its veterinary formulation as a horse dewormer. The most comprehensive meta-analysis to date, covering 33 randomised controlled trials, found ivermectin had no effect on COVID-19 mortality.

Paul and his political allies also circulated the debunked claim of an 82% vaccine-linked miscarriage rate, a figure derived from a statistical error in a 2021 CDC study that has been refuted repeatedly and repackaged as new evidence, shared as breaking news on Paul’s Twitter on Tuesday.

Fauci’s diary

Paul released over 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary ahead of the hearing, whose entries became the evidentiary centrepiece of the case against him.

The most cited entries date from late January 2020, when Fauci convened urgent calls with virologists. On 31 January, he recorded scientists warning that mutations around the furin cleavage site — a feature found in no other known closely related coronavirus, which enhanced the virus’s ability to infect human cells and contributed to the pandemic’s severity — “could not have occurred naturally.”

The next day, Fauci wrote that participants raised the possibility of “deliberate insertion” of the cleavage site through genetic engineering, naming the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead researcher, Shi Zhengli, and her gain-of-function work. On 2 February, he told NIH Director Francis Collins: “Please delete this email after you read it.”

Paul framed the entries as a cover-up, but they are also consistent with a scientist entertaining all possibilities in the face of genuine uncertainty and crisis. Fauci’s own notes record that “there was not total agreement” on the call. A later entry shows him writing that he is “almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak.”

What followed from those early calls was the Proximal Origin paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. The same scientists who privately entertained the possibility of engineering concluded, after further analysis, that the virus was “not a laboratory construct.”

The paper became one of the most cited and contested publications of the pandemic. It has been challenged but never retracted, and its core finding — that SARS-CoV-2’s genomic features have natural explanations — has been supported by an array of subsequent research, and natural origin remains the leading hypothesis on the virus’s emergence.

Yet the exact mechanism through which it acquired the furin cleavage site remains without a definitive explanation, making it a focal point for proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis and a vital unanswered question about COVID-19’s origins.

The $600,000 question

The hearing’s central allegation, that Fauci funded gain-of-function research that created SARS-CoV-2, rests on a sub-grant of roughly $600,000 distributed over six years through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The concern over research enhancing the arsenal of viruses is real. In 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research. More than 300 scientists signed a statement calling for a pause on experiments creating “potential pandemic pathogens.” The moratorium was lifted in 2017 under a review framework that multiple investigations have found inadequate.

Whether the EcoHealth-funded work met the regulatory threshold is genuinely disputed. Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University molecular biologist who is a founding member of the Cambridge Working Group on biosafety that pushed for the 2014 US moratorium on gain-of-function research, and a longstanding of biosafety practices at the Wuhan lab, says the EcoHealth-funded work “unequivocally” qualified.

Yet Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute who is herself sympathetic to the lab-leak hypothesis, has disputed the gain-of-function label, saying the work involved “testing naturally occurring SARS viruses, without a reasonable expectation that the tests would increase transmissibility.”

Definitional questions aside, the causal chain linking a $100,000-a-year sub-grant, a rounding error within NIH’s roughly $47 billion annual budget, to a global pandemic that killed millions requires assumptions no investigation has substantiated.

Fauci did not personally authorise the grant, and has called the leap from EcoHealth funding to pandemic creation “the most ridiculous, majestic leap I’ve ever heard of.”

What science says about the origins

A four-year investigation by the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) concluded in June 2025 that “the weight of available evidence suggests zoonotic spillover, either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”

But it left the lab-leak hypothesis explicitly on the table, with chair Dr Marietjie Venter noting: “Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and how it entered the human population, will remain inconclusive.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed that position: “All hypotheses must remain on the table. We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics.”

On the zoonotic side, geospatial analysis published in Science showed the earliest cases forming a bullseye centred on the Huanan seafood market, not the Wuhan lab ten miles across the Yangtze. The researchers concluded that “SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were associated with activities concentrated in the southwest corner of the market,” the same section “where vendors were selling live mammals, including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and red foxes.”

A study published in Cell found genetic material from “multiple plausible intermediate hosts” in that same corner, concluding that raccoon dogs, masked palm civets, hoary bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines had all “previously been implicated in bat coronavirus cross-species transmission through the animal trade.” Separate phylogenetic analysis identified two viral lineages that diverged before human transmission, consistent with two independent spillovers.

“It’s absurd how strong the geographical association is,” evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey, who led the geospatial research, told NPR, estimating the probability of the clustering being coincidental at “one in 10,000.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization who co-authored both the Science and Cell studies, has argued the evidence is “consistent with spillover from animals to humans at the Huanan market, under extremely similar circumstances as SARS-CoV-1,” and “incompatible with all lab leak hypotheses proposed.”

She has noted that a lab-leak scenario consistent with two lineages would require two independently infected workers both reaching the same market, ten miles from the lab, without infecting anyone en route.

No evidence has been produced that the Wuhan lab possessed a close ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. The nearest known relative, a bat virus called BANAL-52, was found by a separate research team in caves in Laos.

And while the lab’s presence in Wuhan is frequently cited as a decisive coincidence, China operates 40 to 60 Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs and over 1,000 BSL-2 facilities nationwide. The EcoHealth-funded work was conducted at a BSL-2 facility, a level that critics and some collaborators later said was inadequate for the coronavirus research underway.

The lab-leak case gains ground

Animal Source Most Likely Origin of SARS-CoV2 but Missing Chinese Data Leave Findings Inconclusive: WHO Expert Group

The lab-leak hypothesis was not always taken seriously. In the pandemic’s first year, prominent scientists and major news organisations dismissed it as a conspiracy theory, and platforms including Facebook and YouTube removed content promoting it. The subsequent accumulation of circumstantial evidence, combined with China’s refusal to share data, has left the door open.

Alina Chan of MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute has made the most scientifically grounded case for a lab origin. She points to the furin cleavage site’s resemblance to the unfunded 2018 DEFUSE proposal, a grant application submitted to the Pentagon’s research agency DARPA by EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute and University of North Carolina researchers, which described inserting exactly that type of feature into a SARS-like coronavirus. DARPA rejected it as too risky.

Chan also notes that WIV researchers reportedly fell ill with COVID-like symptoms in autumn 2019, and that key evidence found rapidly in the SARS and MERS outbreaks has never surfaced for COVID-19. Chan also maintains “several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible,” and calls for subpoenas of research exchanges rather than prosecution.

The CIA and FBI have assessed a research-related origin as more likely, at low and moderate confidence respectively, but the WHO SAGO panel described these intelligence assessments as “very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.”

The Trump administration has gone further, treating the lab leak not as a hypothesis but as a closed case. In 2025, it took down government websites providing COVID-19 health information and replaced them with a White House page titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.”

Former Biden White House COVID coordinator Ashish Jha recently told CNN he had changed his mind: “Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak. No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are officials in China.”

China withholds answers

Both sides of the debate agree on one thing: the reason the question remains open is China.

On 3 January 2020, two days after the world learned of the outbreak, China’s National Health Commission ordered laboratories to hand over or destroy early coronavirus samples. Beijing has confirmed the order. At least 100 individuals with December 2019 symptom onset were sampled; only about 20 sequences have reached international researchers.

The Huanan market was shut on 31 December 2019, its animals removed untested, and the site decontaminated. The WIV’s database of 22,000 wildlife samples went offline in autumn 2019 and was never shared.

Dr Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old Wuhan ophthalmologist who warned colleagues about a SARS-like illness on 30 December 2019, was detained by police and forced to sign a confession. He contracted COVID-19 and died on 7 February 2020, at age 34.

China blocked WHO investigators from entering the country in January 2021, then denied them the requested data. An AP investigation found Beijing “froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the virus from the first weeks of the outbreak.”

When WHO proposed a second-phase investigation in 2021 that included audits of Wuhan laboratories, China’s Vice Health Minister rejected the plan outright, calling it “impossible” and saying Beijing would “not accept such an origin-tracing plan as it, in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science.”

China Rejects WHO Plan for Next Phase of COVID Origins Investigation

“Persecuting Fauci for trying to answer questions about the virus source in 2020 when we were all misled by the Chinese government is a sideshow,” David Hunter, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford, wrote in STAT News.

“To blame Fauci for not solving the origin of COVID-19 makes as much sense as blaming a detective in Washington, DC, for not solving a murder in Wuhan.”

Meanwhile, the administration accusing Fauci of leaving America vulnerable to COVID-19 is dismantling the infrastructure that would defend it against the next pandemic.

Trump’s FY2026 budget proposes cutting NIH by $18 billion, a 44% reduction, and slashing the CDC by roughly half. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, has said the cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

The origins of COVID-19 may never be definitively settled. But the hearing made one thing clear: the political apparatus pursuing Fauci is not interested in preventing the next pandemic. It is interested in assigning blame for the last one, while the country that holds the evidence refuses to share it, and the country demanding answers burns down its own capacity to find them.

Image Credits: The White House, Worobey et al., Science, 2022., Crits-Christoph et al., Cell, 2024., José Mauquer .