Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts, has been subpoenaed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s chairman Rand Paul. Fauci, who helped guide the US response to Covid‑19, is being accused of manipulating intelligence on the origins of the pandemic and lying to Congress to cover up alleged wrongdoing at the agency. He is expected to testify before the committee in July.
The allegations against 85-year-old Fauci are based on materials released by outgoing national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard on 18 June that were apparently collected during a year-long investigation. Gabbard’s office claimed her team gathered testimony from multiple whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging efforts to manipulate intelligence about the origins of the Covid-19 virus.
Fauci, who led the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under seven different US administrations, retired in December 2022.
These claims follow the indictment of Fauci’s 79-year-old former senior adviser David Morens for allegedly using private email accounts to conduct government business. He was also accused of conspiring to hide communications on the origins of Covid-19 and potentially risky coronavirus research that the NIH was funding. Morens has denied the accusations and has not been convicted of any crime.
‘Fauci was the behind-the-scenes adviser who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the [intelligence community] to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research,’ Gabbard’s office stated. In a statement, it said that the NIH, under Fauci’s leadership, provided millions in funding for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, falsely claiming that it ‘is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic’. Analysis by the World Health Organization last year concluded that the weight of evidence supported that ‘the virus jumped from bats to another animal species (an intermediate host) before eventually infecting humans’.
Renée DiResta – an assistant research professor at Georgetown University’s public policy school – says the documents released by Gabbard fail to prove her serious accusations. ‘Gabbard leaps from “some evidence supports a lab-associated origin” to “Fauci caused Covid and manipulated the intelligence community into covering it up,” and those are not remotely the same claim,’ DiResta writes in her Lawfare analysis.
Fauci attracted President Trump’s ire during his first term in office, as well as that of some Republican members of Congress, including Paul, for advice he gave during the pandemic on topics such as masks. To protect Fauci and other officials from political persecution by the incoming Trump administration President Biden took the unusual step of granting them pre-emptive, ‘full and unconditional’ pardons before he left office in January 2025.
Despite this pardon, some Fauci critics within the Trump administration, including White House special counsel for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, believe that Fauci remains vulnerable to legal action. ‘I don’t think a pardon would prevent a class-action civil lawsuit against Fauci personally,’ he told Fox News on 25 June. Paul said on CNBC on 23 June that his committee will examine whether Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from the allegations currently being made.
No comments yet