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Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment at Senate Hearing, Refuses to Testify on COVID

The former top infectious disease expert declined to answer more than 100 questions before Rand Paul’s committee, citing fear of prosecution. Paul announced a contempt vote for next week

Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who became the public face of America’s COVID-19 response, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights on Wednesday and refused to answer questions at a Senate hearing convened to examine the pandemic.

Fauci told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that he feared Republicans would use his testimony to pursue perjury charges. “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 that could vindicate his repeated public pledges, citing his words, that I end up ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said, addressing committee chairman Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” Fauci added. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

Fauci declined to answer more than 100 times over the course of a nearly three-hour hearing. At one point, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri mocked the immunologist by asking what day of the week it was and what color tie he was wearing. Each time, Fauci gave the same response: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Paul announced at the close of the hearing that the committee would vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt. He argued that Fauci’s blanket pardon from former President Joe Biden, issued before Biden left office in January 2025, meant the Fifth Amendment privilege no longer applied.

Democrats on the panel defended Fauci, with Senator Gary Peters of Michigan calling the hearing a partisan exercise designed to entrap the witness.

President Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social, attacking Fauci’s pandemic record. “His ideas were crazy,” Trump wrote, claiming that “many more people died of Covid under the Biden administration than under the Trump administration” and touting what he called the “spectacular success” of his own coronavirus response.

Trump said he had believed from the start that the virus came from the Wuhan lab in China, adding that “Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China” and that “over time I trusted him less and less.” The president said Fauci “made too many wrong decisions, like on masks. Remember at the beginning he was an anti-masker. Then he became a super-masker. In any case, I didn’t let him shut down the country, even though he wanted to.”

Trump said he followed a federalist approach during the pandemic, leaving decisions to governors. “The Republican governors did a much better job than the Democrats. Fauci was largely sidelined, and then sleepy Joe Biden came along and made Fauci a ‘king!’ I called Biden to tell him that Fauci was worthless, that he either didn’t understand anything or was dishonest.”

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