Fauci refused to answer 15 questions about the last pandemic while Trump pushes to strip vaccines before the next one
Rand Paul will move a contempt vote next week, days after the administration banned the gain-of-function research at the centre of his case.
Anthony Fauci sat in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday, under subpoena, and refused to say anything at all.
“Although it pains me to do so ... under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” he told the committee.
He then declined 15 questions from Republican senator Rand Paul, repeating the same sentence each time. Republicans tried to break the pattern by asking him things that could not incriminate anyone — Josh Hawley asked him to name the colour of his tie and the carpet. Fauci gave the same answer.
Paul had one of his lawyers, David Schertler, removed from the room for trying to speak.
The committee will vote on holding Fauci in contempt next week. Paul says the Fifth does not apply because Joe Biden pardoned Fauci on January 19, 2025 for anything connected to COVID-19 or his 38 years running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s lawyers say the pardon does not cover new statements, which is the point.
Fauci accused Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with putting him in prison. Trump posted before the hearing that Fauci’s ideas were crazy.
The hearing produced nothing new about the origins of the pandemic.
The day before it, the administration issued the policy that settles the argument Paul has spent years prosecuting. The United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research bans federal funding for dangerous gain-of-function work at home and abroad, implementing an executive order Trump signed in May 2025.
Which leaves the other half of the pandemic ledger.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Trump has been pressing Robert F Kennedy Jr to cut vaccines harder and faster, asking the health secretary at his Virginia golf course in May whether he had the yips.
Kennedy has already cut the routine childhood immunisation schedule from 17 recommendations to 11. A federal judge halted the changes in March after the American Academy of Pediatrics sued, and paused the advisory committee Kennedy had illegally reconstituted. The government is appealing. Kennedy also sought to move $5 billion — more than 10 per cent of the entire National Institutes of Health budget — toward research into vaccines and autism, a link dozens of studies have failed to find.
Trump’s own pollster warned in December that the position is a loser in swing districts.
Paul Offit, of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said measles is now at its highest rate in 30 years, with deaths rising from whooping cough, flu and tetanus.
“Trump has become the president of Measles Land,” he said.