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Live Coverage of Senate Hearings with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired July 29, 2026 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:32:44]

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's take you straight to Capitol Hill. Getting underway right now, you look right there, Senator Rand Paul kicking off the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing with the witness being Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Listen in.

SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): Every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations, not as judgments open to debate, but as dictates of science itself. Your own words demonstrate that you understood the influence you exercised.

On March 14, 2020, you wrote that the task force recommendations were driven by me, yourself, Deb, and CDC. The next day you wrote that you had convinced Mayor Bill De Blasio to close the New York City schools. So, you were involved.

That same night, Governor Gavin Newsom's chief of staff told you that the governor had decided to close California schools, bars and restaurants after watching you on television. Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they made.

The Covid lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education. Small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared. Patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care. Families were separated from dying relatives. Workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs. Worship assembly, employment, education and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.

While you concluded publicly that Covid occurred naturally, your private record tells a different story. In early 2020, your hand- picked virologist warned that the virus appeared to have been manipulated in the lab. In a conference call concerning the origin of the virus, all but two of the participants believed deliberate insertion was possible.

Your concern was not merely theoretical. That same week, you led an urgent effort to determine whether your own agency had funded the research related to these experiments that were now under suspicion. Hours later, your assistant reported that the Wuhan experiments had indeed been reviewed and approved by the NIH.

[08:35:05]

Those were not the actions of officials who believed that a research- related origin was an absurd conspiracy theory. They were the actions of officials urgently trying to determine whether their agency funding was connected to the research under discussion connected to the pandemic. You could not hide that your agency had funded the Wuhan research or your long history of defending gain of function research. The only alternative left was to argue that Covid-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab.

You were not a detached observer. You had an institutional interest in the public believing that federally funded research had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was a conflict of interest from the very beginning.

The authors of the proximal origin of SARS-COV-2 privately had serious doubts about a natural origin. Within days, though, they flipped and they all wrote in proximal origin that the virus was almost certainly not a laboratory construct. That paper was then used by the government, and the media, and you to discredit Americans who were asking the same questions that you and the authors were asking yourselves privately.

You even cited proximal origin from the White House podium. You held it out as evidence that the virus could not have been engineered. But you didn't disclose your role and the discussions that preceded the writing of the paper. You did not disclose the author's original concerns. You did not concern -- you did not reveal that you had been part of the paper, that you had read and offered editorial comments on the paper before it was published, before you began using it as evidence that it couldn't have originated in a lab. You did not disclose that you had immediately investigated yourself whether NIAID funding might be connected to the research. You did not tell the American people the full story.

Newly released private messages indicate that the doubts with the authors and others didn't disappear after the publication. So, while this was being waved at the White House to show that it couldn't come from the lab, the authors were still privately continuing to sign a meaningful probability to a laboratory origin. One thing in public and another in private.

Some of the same scientists discussed avoiding email and carefully managing communications that might eventually be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The pattern is straightforward. Privately, there was alarm. Then, an immediate inquiry to see if NIAID's possible exposure to funding. Then a rapid, public declaration of certainty, continued private doubt and then years of resistance to disclosure.

The question is why? The only logical answer is that your primary concern was avoiding culpability. Your primary concern was hiding the fact that you had approved the funding for this dangerous research.

Your support of gain of function research is extensive and long standing. In 2011, your agency funded Ron Fouchier's laboratory when it mutated the avian flu until it could spread through the air between mammals. This was the tipping point. This is when others became worried.

You funded this. You advocated for this. The federal government's own biosecurity board, though, recommended withholding the details of these experiments because of the danger the research posed. People were concerned that publishing it was publishing a roadmap to creating bioweapons around the world. But you sided with the gain of function scientist, Fouchier, and argued that the benefits of publishing the research far outweighed the risks.

You defended this avian flu transmissibility experiments as critical research. You wrote that even if a scientist became infected and triggered a pandemic, the benefits of the gain of function experiments outweigh the risk.

In 2014, your agency, NIAID, began funding the Wuhan bat coronavirus work. In 2015, Ralph Baric and the Chinese scientist Shi Zengli published NIAID supported research combining a bat coronavirus spike protein with a SARS backbone. The resulting virus could infect human airway cells. It's a novel virus that now can infect human cells. It gained transmissibility. It gained function.

In 2018, the same group of scientists, EcoHealth, Baric, Shi, and their collaborators submitted the DEFUSE proposal -- DEFUSE proposal, which involved the insertion of a furin cleavage site into the coronavirus. DARPA rejected it as too dangerous. When Covid was sequenced, though, early on, in January of 2020, within days scientists discovered that, lo and behold, it had a novel furin cleavage site, just as had been proposed in the diffuse project.

[08:40:11]

This was either an extraordinary coincidence or a smoking gun. Evidence that the Chinese had created Covid-19. It made the laboratory origin question more legitimate, and it made your categorical public denials indefensible.

On May 11, 2021, you told the Senate, the NIH has never, ever and does not now fund gain of function research in Wuhan, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When I gave you the opportunity to correct the record, to reconsider the statement, you responded that you had never before lied to Congress.

We were then told that only the government's narrowest regulation of definition counted here, that you could define gain of function in one way in which this wasn't gain of function, in which all of the common sense of the world would be thrown out. All of the idea that the mice were dying and the virus was more transmissible didn't matter because you had a technical definition that allowed you to fund it.

But the real question is, was it dangerous? Was it a wise decision to fund this? And you haven't deviated from that. You've never admitted that it could have been a mistake funding this research in China.

The American people weren't asking for a semantics debate over what is gain of function. They were asking, does common sense say this research was dangerous in Wuhan? They wanted to know whether their money funded experiments in Wuhan that made bat coronaviruses better able to infect humans. The answer is yes. They wanted to know whether NIAID adequately supervised their work. The answer is no.

When you defended this research, you described its benefits in the broadest terms. But when Congress demanded accountability, you hid behind the narrowest possible definition. You can't have it both ways.

Your conduct concerning federal records raises further questions. It is a crime to destroy federal records. Yet our investigation reveals your assistant diligently reported that she deleted tons of emails. In 2024, you testified that you did not delete federal records. Who's telling the truth, you or your assistant?

The committee has obtained repeated instructions from you, telling federal officials to delete communications. On February 2, 2020, one day after an origins call, you told Francis Collins, please delete this email after you read it.

The committee asked for your voluntary cooperation to come today. Your appearance had to be compelled by subpoena. You're here today under duress. You are here today because of the court ordering it.

President Biden issued you a sweeping pardon, extending back to 2014. The same pardon he gave to his son, Hunter. A pardon may protect a person from criminal prosecution doesn't rewrite history. It does not erase documents. It does not convert a misleading statement into a truthful one. And it does not prevent Congress from establishing what happened.

There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials who insist that uncertainty must be hidden for the publics own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science, I am the science, as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned because questioning them would undermine public trust.

They have it backwards. It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can't be ordered. It has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny. No government official is beyond accountability. And no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.

I now recognize Senator Peters for his opening remarks.

SEN. GARY PETERS (D-MI): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has a long and a very proud history of conducting serious oversight on behalf of the American people. When this committee has been at its best, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to investigate complicated issues, to follow the facts wherever they may lead, and produce recommendations that actually strengthen our nation's security and improve government functions. That bipartisan tradition has produced meaningful work following Hurricane Katrina, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, failures at the Secret Service, and countless other matters.

[08:45:03]

Unfortunately, today's hearing is the latest step in the chairman's sharp departure from that long tradition. This hearing appears to be a culmination of months of biased and selected efforts by the majority under the guise of a committee investigation to basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago.

In 2021, the chairman has called for today's witness to be fired, to be arrested, accused him of leading cover ups and conspiracies. He has even featured the witness prominently in fundraising emails and on the cover of his book. He has also called for the cancellation of the witness' security detail, despite the fact the witness and his family have received numerous, credible death threats.

When I served as chairman, Senator Paul and I launched a bipartisan biosecurity investigation that included oversight of risky research and the origins of Covid-19. Because we agreed that the committee's work would be stronger, if we did it in a bipartisan manner and just followed the facts. That was and continues to be an area of legitimate and certainly needed oversight.

As chairman, Senator Paul has taken the opposite approach. He has abandoned long standing practice by blocking minority participation in committee oversight actions, and has chosen to selectively release committee records that the minority has never had any access to in order to support his pre-drawn conclusions.

The chairman has repeatedly excluded committee's minority and withheld documents and evidence from members that are entitled to receive them, disregarding long standing Senate rules and committee precedent that have preserved the credibility of our oversight in this committee for decades.

I have raised these concerns directly with the chairman, because it's not just what we investigate that matters, but how we conduct that investigation. That also matters. One-sided investigations designed to validate predetermined conclusions do not serve the American people who sent us to actually uncover the truth and to solve problems.

I wrote to the chairman requesting that he adhere to committee rules, but instead of addressing concerns that I raised, he removed part of the committee's website from the public view. This move not only prevented the public from being able to view those list of concerns, it had serious questions about the desire for transparency and legitimate oversight of this matter.

But what makes today's hearing particularly disappointing is not simply the chairman's actions, but what we could be using this committee's true and time oversight responsibilities to accomplish. This committee has not held its annual threats hearing at all in this Congress. We have not held a budget hearing for the Department of Homeland Security. There are important hearings that we would have the opportunity to discuss as to how to strengthen our homeland security across the board. No hearings on those topics.

Instead of focusing on the national security challenges that we are facing in our country right now, today's hearing looks backwards, revisiting questions this committee has already examined, including through bipartisan work that Senator Paul and I conducted together when I served as chairman of this committee. But rather than building on that work to strengthen our preparedness against future disasters, we are instead relitigating the past.

Covid-19 exposed serious deficiencies in our nation's public health infrastructure. We know that. More than one million Americans lost their lives. And this committee should absolutely continue to examine how we can better prepare our nation against future biological threats.

Those are the kinds of forward-looking, lifesaving questions that will help our nation be better prepared to protect the health and the safety of Americans when the next emergency occurs. Unfortunately, at this precise moment, we should be strengthening our capabilities. The Trump administration seems to be doing everything in their power to actually weaken our capabilities.

The administration has hollowed out the public health workforce. They have fired, pushed out, and cut funding for public health personnel, shrinking the CDC workforce by a quarter. Thousands of experienced scientists have left government service, and with them has gone critical institutional knowledge that cannot be easily replaced. Certainly not quickly replaced.

[08:50:05]

The administration, thanks to political operatives like Russell Vought, has slashed or illegally withheld funding for life-saving medicines and cutting edge technologies that let us rapidly develop them during an emergency. Mr. Vought is now further politicizing the federal grant making process, proposing to subject all federal grants, including those for disaster relief, housing development and cancer research to the whims of political appointees, not non-partisan experts. All of this has left the American people more vulnerable to infectious disease threats. And we are already tragically seeing the consequences.

Staffing and funding cuts have slowed the federal, state and local response to ongoing outbreak of a foodborne parasite, which has sickened thousands in my home state of Michigan, as well as across the country. At the same time, the administration cuts to global health programs and international partnerships have greatly reduced our ability to contain dangerous diseases, like Ebola, before they spread to our shores. We should be examining whether our federal health agencies have the

personnel and the resources they need to effectively prevent, detect and respond to these threats. We should be asking how to strengthen our biodefense efforts to deter our adversaries and prevent biological attacks against our country, and how our government can better coordinate and communicate during public health emergencies.

These are the kinds of forward-looking matters that are worthy, are worthy of this committee's time. Instead, we are here continuing the chairman's year-long focus on one individual.

History tells us, unfortunately, another pandemic is all but inevitable. The question is whether Congress, and this committee, will work to better prepare our country for it, or continue looking backward while our public health infrastructure crumbles around us.

That is the hearing that we should be having today. Unfortunately, I fear the intent of this hearing is only meant to further a purely partisan agenda and will not -- it will not make Americans safer.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

PAUL: The accusation that the committee has denied access to the minority's records is categorically false. This is the most transparent investigation in the history of Congress. We actually created a website and we put all of the information on the website. It continues to operate.

The reason it hasn't been accessed is no Democrat ever signed up for it. Not one Democrat. We told them the access. They never asked for the access code. They haven't been on the website because they have not cared about the investigation.

It's a practice of this committee to swear in the witness.

Dr. Fauci, please stand and raise your right hand.

Do you swear that the testimony will give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: I do

PAUL: Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

FAUCI: Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Peters, members of the committee, I served at the NIH for over 54 years, 38 of those as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight. In fact, I testified before and/or briefed Senate and House congressional -- Senate and House committees well over 200 times over those 38 years.

During and after the Covid pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath, and sat for several days long, transcribed, sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing.

However, given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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," unquote.

[08:55:21]

Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.

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.

Thank you.

PAUL: We will now begin a round of questioning.

Dr. Fauci, your testimony today is compelled by a lawful subpoena. As you know, it's a crime under 18 USC Section 1001 to knowingly make a material false statement to Congress with a penalty up to five years of imprisonment. Understanding that you are under oath, the American people would like to understand your reasoning, your rationale for why you chose to fund the research in Wuhan.

There have been, you know, intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the DOE have all come to the conclusion that more likely than not the virus came from the lab in Wuhan. And so, we'd like to know what was the rationale, what was the discussion, how -- you know, what went behind the decision to fund the research in Wuhan? How did you come to the conclusion that a totalitarian country would be capable of doing this in a BSL-2 lab, a lab that lacked the security? What was the reasoning? And are you -- are you sorry, basically, for making the decision? Would you, you know, like -- given another chance say, well, gosh, circumstances now, as I know it, maybe it wasn't a wise thing. Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?

FAUCI: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

PAUL: In the red folder on your table is a copy of Section 192 of Title Two of the U.S. code. Your counsel has been provided a copy as well. That section makes it a crime for a witness appearing under subpoena to refuse to answer any questions pertinent to the question under inquiry. Do you have that in front of you?

FAUCI: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

PAUL: Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there's a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.

It is true that you're appearing under direction of our subpoena to provide testimony on matters under consideration by the committee, including the origins of Covid-19, risky life sciences research, and your tenure as a federal government employee.

Additionally, you've been provided a full and unconditional pardon dated January 19, 2025, for any offenses against the United States which may have been committed or taken part from January 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon, for a ten-year period.

Arising from or in any manner related to your service as director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as chief medical advisor to the president, have you refused this pardon or do you have any reason to believe this full and unconditional pardon, this grant of immunity, would somehow require you to plead the Fifth Amendment?

FAUCI: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

PAUL: Based on the facts presented, I'm going to direct you to answer the questions. The committee has issued a valid subpoena. They've requested your presence here. The questions are very pertinent to your decision-making as head of NIAID, as well as a chief advisor to the president. Do you still refuse to answer the questions?

FAUCI: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

[08:59:59]

PAUL: Let's do this.