The Senate has subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci following the release of documents that critics said showed the former head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) provided misleading testimony to lawmakers.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on June 22 that he asked Fauci to voluntarily testify to the panel he chairs, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but Fauci declined.
“Therefore, today I have issued a subpoena requiring him to testify before the Committee, in public, next month,” Paul said on X.
Fauci, 85, did not return a request for comment.
Fauci, the head of the NIAID from 1984 to 2022, told lawmakers while testifying in 2024 that he did not talk about viral research related to COVID-19 with intelligence officials. He said at the time he was briefed by intelligence officials “about possibilities of there being activities going on in different laboratories.”
Fauci did brief intelligence officials on the origins of COVID-19 and advised them to look at papers that supported the theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, came from nature, according to documents declassified by the Office of Director of National Intelligence earlier in June.
One summary released by the office said that Fauci reminded officials that for other viruses confirmed or believed to have a natural origin, it took years to find the origin, or the origin still has not been found. Fauci also said that officials should talk to experts who believed COVID-19 came from nature. One of his recommendations was Kristian Andersen, co-author of paper called Proximal Origin that purported to show COVID-19 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins secretly assisted with that paper, according to emails published by Paul, but were not listed as authors or mentioned as contributors.
Fauci, whose agency also provided funding to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, near where the first COVID-19 cases appeared, told Paul in contentious hearings during the pandemic that the United States did not fund a type of risky research called gain-of-function there. Other officials have said that’s not true.
Tulsi Gabbard, who released the new files on her last day as director of national intelligence, said in a statement that “politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe.”