SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared this morning for a hearing convened by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. The Senator chairs the Homeland Security Committee, and he accuses Fauci of covering up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paul and other Republicans asked Fauci many questions along those lines, but Fauci declined to answer. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself. NPR's global health correspondent Jonathan Lambert watched the hearing, and he's here with us in the studio to recap it. Hi, Jon.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: Hi, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: So give us a recap also of why was Fauci testifying today?
LAMBERT: Yeah. So last month, Senator Paul subpoenaed Fauci to appear as part of an ongoing investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he showed up. Paul has long used Fauci as a foil in railing against the pandemic response. And they have a history of sparring at these things. And at the start, it seemed like we might be in for a replay. Senator Paul opened by rehashing claims he's made before about Fauci covering up evidence of a lab leak in China. He's also made new allegations that stemmed from over 1,000 pages of Fauci's private notes that Paul released over the weekend.
PFEIFFER: And run through some of those allegations with us.
LAMBERT: Yeah, there are many. Here's basically how Senator Paul summarized it.
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RAND PAUL: Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally, while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab.
LAMBERT: Scientists I've spoken with dispute that characterization. They say that the senator is cherry-picking examples from early in the pandemic, when there was a lot of confusion and scientists were constantly updating what they were thinking based on new evidence. Now most virologists think that evidence supports the virus jumping from an animal to a human, not from a lab.
PFEIFFER: What did Fauci say about the allegations against him?
LAMBERT: Well, he opened by noting how he's appeared at hearings like these and answered questions over 200 times during his career. But then he accused Senator Paul of being obsessed with him, pointing in part to the release of his diary.
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ANTHONY FAUCI: The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, "behind bars."
LAMBERT: He said on the advice of his lawyers that he would invoke his rights under the Fifth Amendment.
PFEIFFER: But, Jonathan, I recall that before former President Biden left office, he issued a preemptive pardon to Fauci. Is that - am I remembering that correctly?
LAMBERT: Yes, you are remembering that right.
PFEIFFER: So does that pardon not protect him?
LAMBERT: It protects him from what he - it protects him from anything that he might or might not have done during his time in office, but not afterwards. And at the time, Fauci said that there were no possible grounds for any criminal investigation of him, but that he appreciated the pardon because of the very intense threats against him and his family. And I talked to Stanley Brand, a law professor at Penn State, about all of this. He says that the hearing might have been aimed at getting Fauci to trip up and commit perjury. Any statement that he makes that might conflict with, say, the hundreds of pages of private notes just released could constitute perjury. And that wouldn't be covered by the pardon. So he says pleading the Fifth makes sense.
STANLEY BRAND: Given the background of this, where they've made obvious threats to try to prosecute him even before the hearing, I don't see that he had any real choice.
PFEIFFER: So because Fauci pleaded the Fifth, does that mean the hearing was quite short?
LAMBERT: No. It went on for nearly three hours. Senator Paul and Republican lawmakers asked repeated questions about various threads of the lab leak hypothesis. Senator Lankford from Oklahoma seemed to blame Fauci for the spike in measle cases this year, pointing to mis-vaccinations during the pandemic. But after each question, Fauci declined to answer. And at one point, Fauci's lawyer even tried to say something, but Senator Paul shut him down and ultimately had him removed.
PFEIFFER: So where does the process go from here?
LAMBERT: So Senator Paul has vowed repercussions for Fauci's silence. He says that he's planning to hold a vote in the committee next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
PFEIFFER: And you may be covering that, too, back to tell us about it next week.
LAMBERT: Maybe.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's global health correspondent Jonathan Lambert. Thank you.
LAMBERT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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