Fauci remains silent as senators grill him on COVID-19 origins

**Anthony Fauci** (0:01)
WBUR podcasts, Boston.
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.

**Kalyani Saxena** (0:19)
Dr. Anthony Fauci is testifying in front of Congress today, but he's keeping it tight-lipped and invoking the Fifth.
It's Wednesday, July 29th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR, Boston. I'm Kalyani Saxena. Today on the show, we're going to talk about the Department of Homeland Security's top lawyer, who's going after US district court judges by name on social media. We'll hear from one judge who knows just how dangerous that rhetoric can be.

**Esther Salas** (1:01)
This is an intentional act by this administration to churn out this negative PR campaign against the judiciary. There is a more sinister reason, and that is if something happens to one of us, we had it coming.

**Kalyani Saxena** (1:13)
Also, we'll take a closer look at how medical schools are responding to new recommendations around nutrition, from Health Secretary Robert F.

**Katherine J. Wu** (1:21)
Kennedy Jr. I think when we are talking about nutrition education components in med school, it's definitely important for it to be there, but we also cannot spend all of our time speaking about nutrition because there's so many other components about medicine that need to be taught.

**Kalyani Saxena** (1:40)
But first, we've got to unpack that strained hearing on Capitol Hill today with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Here's a quick recap to get you up to speed. Dr. Anthony Fauci led the U.S.'s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He was the federal government's top infectious disease expert for decades. But in the years since, he's faced accusations from Republican lawmakers that say that he lied about the origins of the pandemic. Republican Senator Rand Paul is leading the charge on those accusations.
While Dr. Fauci was pardoned by former President Joe Biden, he could be in hot water if he purges himself under oath now.
So experts say it's actually in his best interest to say very little. And Dr. Fauci seems to have taken that strategy to heart. Today, he repeatedly exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In simple terms, he refused to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic. Host Indira Lakshmanan spoke with Atlantic staff writer Katherine J. Wu about the hearing and her latest article, The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:54)
So Senator Rand Paul led the charge on this hearing. He has long accused Dr. Fauci of covering up an alleged leak of COVID-19 from a lab in Wuhan, China. That lab leak theory has been widely discussed and debated. The consensus among virologists seems to be that the virus likely came from a wild animal through wet markets. First, let's address that theory. Do Paul and other critics of Fauci have any legitimate reason to distrust the origins or the government's handling of the pandemic?

**Katherine J. Wu** (3:27)
Certainly, this is a question that is still unresolved. I think anyone who says at this point that the matter is completely a closed case doesn't have legs to stand on. But exactly as you say, the scientific consensus points to a natural origin so far. And the preponderance of evidence does really point in that direction.
I think the accusation of there being dangerous funding of research and possible biosecurity issues is worth looking into because if that were to be the case, we would certainly want to prevent that from happening again. But it really seems like in the past five years or so, the evidence on the lab leak side has really been a series of accusations cycled over and over and over, and very little new evidence has emerged. So the accusations seem to recycle themselves, but we're not really moving very much far forward on that front.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (4:24)
Well, one thing that we do know that we didn't know a few days ago, Senator Paul released more than 1,000 pages from Anthony Fauci's private diary that apparently he had kept on a government server. Why now?
Some of those were kind of embarrassing personal observations that seemed to show Fauci as seeking fame or enjoying fame. Why did Senator Paul do this? What does he stand to gain?

**Katherine J. Wu** (4:51)
That is certainly a question for Senator Paul, but it really does seem like, based on the timing of this and the way that he framed those diary entries, he seems to be very intent on catching Fauci in a lie, finding some sort of evidence that he engineered some sort of massive cover-up, and pointing to this idea that in his diary, he admitted that there was a possibility that there may have been a lab leak very, very early on in 2020, and he did look into that. But as science just works in general, understanding evolved over time as new evidence emerged. It really seems like an additional motivation here was to embarrass Fauci significantly before this hearing, where there was an enormous attack on his character. Right.