Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a three-hour Senate hearing about the government's pandemic response. The hearing revived disputes over pandemic origins, Fauci's prior testimony and documents drawn from his government diary. Fauci was subpoenaed to testify under oath before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
He declined to answer more than 100 questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. President Joe Biden granted Fauci a pardon in early 2025, but lawmakers argued that new testimony could create exposure to a fresh perjury allegation. Fauci previously led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and became a central public figure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul said the committee would vote the following week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt. Paul used excerpts from more than 1,000 pages of a diary that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said was recovered from government computers. Republican lawmakers have accused him of misleading Congress about research and the virus's origins; Fauci has denied those accusations.
A congressional contempt referral and a criminal prosecution are separate steps, and any enforcement decision would involve additional institutional actors.
The remaining evidentiary limit is specific: The hearing did not adjudicate the lawmakers' accusations, and the diary excerpts did not by themselves establish that prior sworn testimony was false. The next records expected to change the factual picture are the committee's announced contempt vote and whether the panel releases a full evidentiary record rather than selected excerpts. Until those records appear, the attributed figures, filings and official descriptions remain the most current public account and may be revised by the institutions that produced them. Each figure refers to the date and scope identified above; it does not imply a later total or broader category. Subsequent orders, filings, datasets or official updates can revise those figures without changing the documented sequence of events at the cutoff.