During the 2021 season, NFL players who had not received a COVID-19 vaccination were subject to daily tests for the virus and restrictions, such as wearing masks inside team facilities and practicing social distancing.
Rodgers did not get vaccinated — he has said he’s allergic to an ingredient in the vaccines — and instead opted for an alternative treatment to help prevent him from getting the virus. Still, he told reporters he was “immunized” and did not follow all of the league’s protocols for unvaccinated players.
In early November 2021, Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 and admitted he had “misled people about my status.” He was fined $14,650 for the protocol violation and missed a game because unvaccinated players had to isolate for 10 days after testing positive.
Rodgers clearly still had a lot to get off his chest during Tuesday’s show.
“A lot of people had probably fake vac cards back in the day, too,” Rodgers said. “They didn’t have a problem with that. I mean, I remember seeing some of the vax cards. It was, like, written in crayon. I’m like, all right, so we’re gonna pass that on, but we’re gonna be second-rate citizens over here — I gotta wear a yellow armband, train in the back, can’t be around more than three people.
“Oh, you know, you got to wear a mask when you do your your interview, and all of us are going to be masked up the entire time back here, 20 feet away from you, because that’s safety first. What crock of s— we had to go through! Crazy times.”
Although McAfee tried changing the subject multiple times during the first several minutes of the interview, the host eventually embraced the topic and applauded Rodgers for standing “on your side of the truth throughout the entirety of that thing.”
“Your name was slandered,” McAfee told Rodgers. “You were called a murderer. You were called a lot of things.”
Washington, DC – A Senate committee hearing this week has once again shone a spotlight on the political divisions over the United States government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s hearing, held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, continued years of criticism, mainly from Republicans, against immunologist Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to the pandemic.
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Spearheaded by committee chair Rand Paul, several Republicans rehashed claims that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, emerged from an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China, and did not naturally transfer from animals to humans.
Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the hearing was a reflection of the deep, enduring partisan divides over the issue.
But he added that the meeting with Fauci did little to shed new light on the pandemic after years of investigation, hearings and political posturing.
“There’s no space for any civil discussion around any of these issues. There’s no desire really,” Morrison told Al Jazeera.
“So, what’s the lasting impact of this? I mean, it continues to impose unconscionable pain and suffering on [Fauci] and his family. It doesn’t advance the debate one inch on the whole question of COVID origins and what was past US policy and what should US policy be going forward.”
Wuhan lab leak theory
Wednesday’s hearing was based largely on a previous 520-page report from 2024, created by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
That report claimed it was likely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research facility. Senator Paul has embraced this viewpoint, as has President Donald Trump.
In April of last year, shortly after Trump took office for his second term, the White House launched a webpage purporting to reveal “the true origins of COVID-19”, largely based on the report.
The site highlighted several claims that experts say pave over the nuanced scientific debate about the origins of the virus.
Drawing on the 2024 report, the White House asserts that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature” and that “data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans”, setting it apart from previous natural pandemics.
Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, told Factcheck.org that both claims were false.
Senator Rand Paul questions Anthony Fauci during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Wednesday [AFP]
While COVID does contain a characteristic to enter cells that is not found in its closest coronavirus relatives, that quality does exist in other coronaviruses more broadly. As Wertheim put it, “It is most certainly found in nature.”
Meanwhile, a pair of studies released in 2022 found at least two unique paths through which initial human infection occurred, contradicting the White House’s claim that the pandemic arose from a “single introduction into humans”.
The White House webpage also focuses on Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until 2022 and served as the chief medical adviser to former US President Joe Biden, Trump’s election rival.
Biden pre-emptively pardoned him in January 2025, fearing the physician might be arrested under the second Trump administration.
Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Trump took the opportunity to renew his derision of Fauci, writing on Truth Social that the medical expert’s “ideas were CRAZY”.
Trump also accused Fauci, without evidence, of orchestrating a cover-up for China, where COVID was first documented. The Republican leader was serving his first term as president when the pandemic began.
Ongoing debate
To be sure, there has been criticism from within the international scientific community that the lab leak theory was discounted too swiftly in the early days of the pandemic, as it became seen as political.
Trump and other world leaders had been quick to use anti-China rhetoric when discussing the virus.
There currently remains no conclusive evidence proving either the lab leak theory or that the virus had a natural origin. The vast majority of infectious disease scientists, including Fauci, have said neither possibility can be ruled out.
Still, a preponderance of experts say evidence indicates that the virus was most likely transferred from an animal, likely a bat, to humans, in a process called zoonotic spillover.
A 2024 survey of virologists and other scientists, conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), found most respondents believed natural transmission was considerably more likely than a lab leak, although most acknowledged it was impossible to definitively dismiss the theory.
Following three years of research, a World Health Organization (WHO) advisory board released a report in 2025 that also concluded “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover”.
Still, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned, “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.”
Inside Fauci’s diary
Fauci has long argued the scientific evidence indicates that the virus emerged from natural animal transmission, but he has repeatedly rejected the notion that he has outright dismissed the lab leak theory.
In a 2024 letter to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, his lawyers maintained (PDF) it was “completely wrong” to say that Fauci had ever called the possibility a “conspiracy theory”.
Instead, they said Fauci and his allies rejected an array of conspiracy theories that have been tied to the lab leak theory, including the idea that he had “sneaked unnoticed into the CIA headquarters to try to convince CIA officials to debunk the lab leak theory”.
Wednesday’s hearing was preceded by the release of entries from Fauci’s private diary, stored on a government computer drive.
They were obtained through Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic and Fauci critic, who passed them along to Senator Paul.
In one entry, Fauci described a claim that he “deliberately” worked with the Chinese to create the virus as a “way-out conspiracy theory”.
He and his legal team have also repeatedly rejected Republican claims that he leveraged millions in grant money to compel scientists to change their views about COVID’s origins.
The White House website, for instance, asserts that Fauci “prompted” an early study on COVID origins to downplay the lab leak theory. No evidence has been presented to support those claims, which have also been rejected by the scientists involved.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, talks with President Donald Trump in March 2020 [Evan Vucci/AP Photo]
Did Fauci mislead?
On Wednesday, several Senate Republicans charged that Fauci’s diary entries showed he had intentionally misled the public by downplaying the possibility the virus had emerged from the Wuhan lab.
Fauci’s supporters, however, have said the diary fails to prove any deliberate attempt to mislead. They argue his public and private statements were consistent in the early days of the pandemic, when scientists’ understanding of the virus was shifting daily.
Fauci’s diary entries indicated he met with a group of experts in February 2020, noting “there was not total agreement” on the likelihood the virus had been created via human manipulation. Senator Paul and others said Fauci did not adequately reflect that view in his public statements.
Republicans also seized on a January 26, 2020, entry in which Fauci wrote that initial data suggests “the first infection was in early December and was not connected” to the wet market in Wuhan.
“Now we know the market was not the source but the amplifier,” he wrote.
During the hearing, Senator Paul said the diary revealed that Fauci was “repeatedly saying in public something different than what he believes in private”.
Fauci’s defenders have pointed to a USA Today interview he gave shortly after the diary entry, floating the idea that the market could have been an “amplifier”. Others have argued the diary entries do not contradict the view that the virus was of natural origins.
Public restrictions
Republicans on Wednesday also focused heavily on Fauci’s role in issuing public guidance about how to slow the spread of the COVID virus.
Several states saw schools close and businesses shutter amid social-distancing recommendations.
But those closures became a political lightning rod and featured prominently in the 2020 presidential elections and 2022 midterm races.
Indeed, new studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of social distancing rules. Others indicate mask mandates may have been less effective than previously presented, although research still generally supports that masks may slow the spread of the disease.
As NIAID director, Fauci had no direct authority to impose public health mandates, which were typically introduced by state and local officials. While he had a role in issuing federal guidance, his work was part of a wider government effort involving other agencies and officials.
Speaking on Wednesday, Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, accused Republicans of “relitigating history” and seeking to “turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations were responsible for handling”.
Still, Fauci’s diary does contain uncomfortable revelations about how he wielded his high-profile position. In one instance, he recounted how he offered then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouragement to close city schools. He did the same with an aide to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“I advised De Blasio to go ahead and do it,” he recounted. “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC… He said that he would base this on my recommendation.”
Why now?
During the Wednesday hearing, Fauci invoked his constitutional right to remain silent roughly 100 times, drawing significant public scrutiny.
The 85-year-old Fauci, who enjoyed bipartisan support as NIAID director throughout much of his 38 years in the role, decried the hearing as an attempt to entrap him with perjury.
Critics, including several Democrats on the committee, have also questioned the timing of Wednesday’s hearing, which comes just three months before November’s midterm elections.
Republicans are expected to face an uphill battle in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, and they also risk losing their slim control of the Senate in the vote. A defeat in either chamber would serve as a major setback to Trump in his final two years in office.
The party has struggled to find a defining issue to campaign on, amid affordability woes fuelled by the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.
The hearing also comes at a time when polls have shown public trust in federal health agencies has plummeted since Trump took office.
For instance, a June poll conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab suggests that just 50 percent of respondents said they trusted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That marks a decline from 77 percent in the spring of 2025.
About 69 percent also felt that federal health agencies’ recommendations were too influenced by their leaders’ public opinions.
But Morrison, the health policy expert, saw the hearing as a personal attack on Fauci, with Senator Paul and Secretary Kennedy pursuing an ideological “vendetta”.
Fauci, he said, has come to represent for some Republicans the “iconic embodiment of everything that they have come to believe is craven and corrupt in the US government response” to COVID.
He warned that their approach, though, could chill any desire for top scientists to wade into government.
“People will say Tony Fauci could have done things a little differently, he made a few mistakes, and he could have admitted those,” Morrison said.
“But the ‘big but’ is certainly none of that warrants what’s happening here.”
Dr Anthony Fauci, a former top United States public health official, has declined to answer questions at a Republican-led Senate committee hearing into the origins of COVID-19 and the handling of the pandemic.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on Wednesday.
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Fauci was called to testify by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who accuses him of misleading Congress and questions whether US-funded research in China played a role in the pandemic, allegations Fauci denies.
Although former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon in 2025, Republicans claim it does not protect him from any alleged crimes committed after it was issued, such as perjuring himself at a Senate hearing.
Fauci’s lawyers advised him not to testify, arguing that anything he said under oath could expose him to new legal risks.
Here is what to know:
Who is Anthony Fauci?
Fauci, 85, is a physician and immunologist who led the US NIAID for 38 years, advising seven presidents, both Republican and Democratic.
He became the public face of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, after helping lead the country’s response to health crises including HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks.
He became a target of conservative criticism over pandemic policies, including mask recommendations, vaccines and school closures.
During his last year in government, Fauci was also chief medical adviser to Biden until he retired in 2022.
During the pandemic, between 2019 and 2022, he kept more than 1,000 pages of diary entries documenting his work advising the White House and responding to the pandemic.
The notes chronicle his interactions with senior officials and the media.
Why is Fauci being questioned?
He was subpoenaed to testify over his handling of the pandemic and its origins before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The hearing, led by Paul, focused on several issues:
COVID-19’s origins: Paul has long argued that the coronavirus that causes COVID may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and questioned whether US-funded research played a role in the outbreak.
Gain-of-function research: Republicans say Fauci misled Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, involving modifying viruses to understand how they evolve and assess pandemic risks. Fauci says the NIH did not fund research that caused COVID-19.
Allegations of a cover-up: Paul accused Fauci of making false statements to Congress and concealing the NIH’s involvement in research in Wuhan. Fauci denies that.
Fauci’s diary: Before the hearing, Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s typewritten diary. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said the notes were government record because they were written by a federal employee on a government computer during a public health emergency and they were found on government property.
Paul said the diary showed differences between Fauci’s private discussions and his public statements. Fauci’s supporters say the entries reflect the uncertainty scientists faced as they learned more about a new virus.
Dr Anthony Fauci appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at the Capitol on July 29, 2026 [Allison Robbert/AP]
What happened at the hearing?
The tense hearing lasted about three hours.
After a brief opening statement, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer more than 100 questions.
He accused committee chairman Paul of having an “obsession” with prosecuting him.
Committee chairman Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky [AFP]
The hearing included several tense moments:
Contempt vote: Paul said the committee would vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer questions, threatening “consequences for refusing to answer”.
Lawyer removed: Paul directed Capitol Police to remove Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, after he tried to speak without being recognised by the committee. “This testimony is from Anthony Fauci. This is not a game with his lawyers,” Paul said. Schertler later described the hearing as an “obsessive vendetta”.
Democrats defend Fauci: Democratic senators said the hearing was politically motivated. Senator Gary Peters called it “a partisan exercise” designed to support “a predetermined conclusion” rather than offering legitimate oversight.
Closing the hearing, Paul asked rhetorically: “Did [Fauci’s] actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?”
Why did Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment?
Fauci said he invoked the Fifth Amendment on the advice of his lawyers because he believed his answers could expose him to new legal risks.
He argued that Paul was trying to build a criminal case against him rather than conduct legitimate congressional oversight.
Although Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from prosecution for actions before January 2025, Republicans say any false statements made under oath during this hearing could still expose him to perjury charges.
The Fifth Amendment protects people from being forced to give evidence that could incriminate them in a criminal case. Invoking it is a constitutional right and does not imply guilt.
What do scientists believe about COVID-19’s origins?
Most scientists believe COVID-19 likely spread naturally from animals to humans, known as zoonotic spillover, pointing to a wildlife market in Wuhan as the most likely place where it first spread.
Fauci has consistently said he believes that scientific evidence points to a natural origin, while remaining open to other possibilities.
Notes from his diary detail a January 2020 call with 11 top virologists and evolutionary biologists – only two were convinced the virus had a natural origin, while the rest debated whether it could have been engineered.
Today, most scientists favour a natural origin, while the US intelligence community is divided.
The FBI said in 2023 that a laboratory-related incident is the most likely origin of the pandemic. The CIA reached the same conclusion in 2025, but with low confidence. Other agencies and the National Intelligence Council continue to favour a natural origin or remain undecided.
Does Biden’s pardon protect Fauci?
Yes, but only what happened before the pardon was issued.
On January 19, 2025, Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any federal offences he may have committed since 2014, saying the move aimed to protect Fauci from “politically motivated prosecutions”.
The pardon does not cover actions taken after it was issued. Fauci could face legal consequences if he were accused of committing a new crime, such as making false statements under oath during Wednesday’s Senate hearing.
Paul and other Republicans also argue that because Biden’s pardon shields Fauci from criminal liability for his past actions, he can no longer claim that his testimony about those actions would incriminate him and should not be able to invoke his Fifth Amendment.
The legal standing of this argument is not clear, and Paul has acknowledged that it is a novel “legal question that the courts may have to decide”.
Can Fauci be held in contempt or prosecuted?
Potentially, but it remains unclear whether either will happen.
Paul said the Senate committee will vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer more than 100 questions.
Being held in contempt means lawmakers believe a witness has refused to cooperate with a lawful investigation. It does not automatically lead to criminal charges, but can trigger further legal action.
If the committee approves the measure, it could refer the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, ask a federal court to pursue a civil action, or, in the rarest case, ask the Senate to use its powers to detain a witness through the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
Paul has not said which option, if any, he plans to pursue.
WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The move injects new drama into the lingering tensions between Fauci and Republican lawmakers over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and accusations he lied about the origins of COVID-19, which he denies.
Fauci was set to answer lawmakers’ questions after being subpoenaed by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had a fraught relationship with the now-retired infectious-disease expert and led the charge seeking that he testify, again, under oath about his role in containing the pandemic.
Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth, at least for now, sidesteps calls for his prosecution if he is accused of lying at Wednesday’s hearing, part of a yearslong campaign for his arrest spearheaded by some Republicans in Congress. But it may also further inflame partisan divides that have festered for years about the origins and handling of the pandemic, which was declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020.
Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, has become a target of those frustrations. But to his supporters he is an emblem of sound scientific expertise.
In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said, adding that while it pains him to do so, he is following his attorney’s advice by taking the Fifth.
Paul releases some of Fauci’s diary
Paul in his opening statement sought to build the case that Fauci helped produce the COVID-19 pandemic by approving funding of research on virus mutations and then covered up his complicity.
“Instead of an apology, you have for years avoided responsibility,” Paul said.
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee’s ranking member, said that Paul’s hearing was a partisan exercise and that the hearing was looking backward instead of focusing on current national security challenges.
Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Some of the diary entries – including Fauci’s uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus and how best to curb it before vaccines could be created – already were reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.
But they have nonetheless drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for mask mandates, school closures and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
Ahead of the hearing, President Trump wrote on social media that he stopped relying on Fauci over the course of the pandemic because he felt Fauci made bad decisions on masks, shutdowns and other issues.
In a statement, Fauci’s attorney David Schertler said Paul’s accusations are “false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered public office, said Monday that his department gave the diary entries, which were created on a government computer, to the committee. He told a Fox News Channel host that he thought Fauci might lie before the committee, opening him to perjury prosecution despite his preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Scientists scrambled to Fauci’s defense ahead of the unusual hearing — the second time the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has been back before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving the government in 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, he talked the nation through numerous outbreaks over decades, including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.
Some disease experts criticize the accusations against Fauci
In a public letter, more than 150 infectious-disease experts and other scientists wrote that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and that they are “urging our elected representatives in Congress stop these witch-hunts.”
The expected crux of Wednesday’s hearing was whether NIH-funded research in China may have played a role in how the pandemic started.
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 did not find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people.
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded what’s known as gain of function research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — at a lab in Wuhan.
The NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. But the definition of gain of function covers both general research and especially risky experiments to enhance the ability of potential pandemic viruses to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci has previously stressed he was using the risky experiment definition and that “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.
Trump, a Republican, last year paused some federally funded gain of function research, and on Tuesday his administration announced new rules to tighten oversight.
Neergaard and Swenson write for the Associated Press. Swenson reported from New York.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on September 14, 2022. On Monday, Paul issued a subpoena to Fauci to testify on allegations he covered up the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
June 23 (UPI) — Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he has subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci after the former infectious diseases official backed out on an agreement to testify on the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Hill reported that this is the first subpoena issued by Paul as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Last week, Anthony Fauci notified us that he will not voluntarily testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, even though he had previously agreed to do so,” Paul wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “Therefore, today we have issued a subpoena for him to publicly testify.”
The post on X included a photo of Rand appearing to sign the subpoena.
Last week, Anthony Fauci notified us that he will not voluntarily testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, even though he had previously agreed to do so. Therefore, today we have issued a subpoena for him to publicly testify. pic.twitter.com/r9CS0z5UnC— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 22, 2026
Paul has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over policies and recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The senator accused Fauci of covering up U.S. research at a lab in Wuhan, China, which he said caused the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’ve been negotiating with him for material and for testimony,” Paul said in an appearance on CNBC on Tuesday.
“This has gone on for some time. He slow-walked us and slow-walked us. Finally agreed to come in voluntarily … then last week he says he’s not coming in.
“With this subpoena power, we will bring him in, unless he fights this in court.”
Fauci was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the COVID-19 outbreak until 2022. He was also a top medical adviser to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the crisis.
A U.S. intelligence analysis initially found there was insufficient evidence to prove COVID-19 was leaked from a research lab in Wuhan. In 2025, the CIA adjusted its stance.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin-based on the available body of reporting,” an unnamed CIA representative said in a statement in January 2025.
During testimony in 2024, Fauci said he was open to both perspectives.
“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it,” he said during his opening statement before a House committee hearing.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, testifies before a Senate committee hearing on the National Immunization Program’s preparedness for future public health challenges on Capitol Hill in 2001. Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI | License Photo
Dr. Fauci’s attorney says Aaron Rodgers should ‘stick with football’
During the 2021 season, NFL players who had not received a COVID-19 vaccination were subject to daily tests for the virus and restrictions, such as wearing masks inside team facilities and practicing social distancing.
Rodgers did not get vaccinated — he has said he’s allergic to an ingredient in the vaccines — and instead opted for an alternative treatment to help prevent him from getting the virus. Still, he told reporters he was “immunized” and did not follow all of the league’s protocols for unvaccinated players.
In early November 2021, Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 and admitted he had “misled people about my status.” He was fined $14,650 for the protocol violation and missed a game because unvaccinated players had to isolate for 10 days after testing positive.
Rodgers clearly still had a lot to get off his chest during Tuesday’s show.
“A lot of people had probably fake vac cards back in the day, too,” Rodgers said. “They didn’t have a problem with that. I mean, I remember seeing some of the vax cards. It was, like, written in crayon. I’m like, all right, so we’re gonna pass that on, but we’re gonna be second-rate citizens over here — I gotta wear a yellow armband, train in the back, can’t be around more than three people.
“Oh, you know, you got to wear a mask when you do your your interview, and all of us are going to be masked up the entire time back here, 20 feet away from you, because that’s safety first. What crock of s— we had to go through! Crazy times.”
Although McAfee tried changing the subject multiple times during the first several minutes of the interview, the host eventually embraced the topic and applauded Rodgers for standing “on your side of the truth throughout the entirety of that thing.”
“Your name was slandered,” McAfee told Rodgers. “You were called a murderer. You were called a lot of things.”
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US Senate’s Fauci hearing renews COVID origin debate but reveals little | Donald Trump News
Washington, DC – A Senate committee hearing this week has once again shone a spotlight on the political divisions over the United States government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s hearing, held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, continued years of criticism, mainly from Republicans, against immunologist Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to the pandemic.
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Spearheaded by committee chair Rand Paul, several Republicans rehashed claims that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, emerged from an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China, and did not naturally transfer from animals to humans.
Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the hearing was a reflection of the deep, enduring partisan divides over the issue.
But he added that the meeting with Fauci did little to shed new light on the pandemic after years of investigation, hearings and political posturing.
“There’s no space for any civil discussion around any of these issues. There’s no desire really,” Morrison told Al Jazeera.
“So, what’s the lasting impact of this? I mean, it continues to impose unconscionable pain and suffering on [Fauci] and his family. It doesn’t advance the debate one inch on the whole question of COVID origins and what was past US policy and what should US policy be going forward.”
Wuhan lab leak theory
Wednesday’s hearing was based largely on a previous 520-page report from 2024, created by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
That report claimed it was likely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research facility. Senator Paul has embraced this viewpoint, as has President Donald Trump.
In April of last year, shortly after Trump took office for his second term, the White House launched a webpage purporting to reveal “the true origins of COVID-19”, largely based on the report.
The site highlighted several claims that experts say pave over the nuanced scientific debate about the origins of the virus.
Drawing on the 2024 report, the White House asserts that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature” and that “data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans”, setting it apart from previous natural pandemics.
Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, told Factcheck.org that both claims were false.
While COVID does contain a characteristic to enter cells that is not found in its closest coronavirus relatives, that quality does exist in other coronaviruses more broadly. As Wertheim put it, “It is most certainly found in nature.”
Meanwhile, a pair of studies released in 2022 found at least two unique paths through which initial human infection occurred, contradicting the White House’s claim that the pandemic arose from a “single introduction into humans”.
The White House webpage also focuses on Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until 2022 and served as the chief medical adviser to former US President Joe Biden, Trump’s election rival.
Biden pre-emptively pardoned him in January 2025, fearing the physician might be arrested under the second Trump administration.
Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Trump took the opportunity to renew his derision of Fauci, writing on Truth Social that the medical expert’s “ideas were CRAZY”.
Trump also accused Fauci, without evidence, of orchestrating a cover-up for China, where COVID was first documented. The Republican leader was serving his first term as president when the pandemic began.
Ongoing debate
To be sure, there has been criticism from within the international scientific community that the lab leak theory was discounted too swiftly in the early days of the pandemic, as it became seen as political.
Trump and other world leaders had been quick to use anti-China rhetoric when discussing the virus.
There currently remains no conclusive evidence proving either the lab leak theory or that the virus had a natural origin. The vast majority of infectious disease scientists, including Fauci, have said neither possibility can be ruled out.
Still, a preponderance of experts say evidence indicates that the virus was most likely transferred from an animal, likely a bat, to humans, in a process called zoonotic spillover.
A 2024 survey of virologists and other scientists, conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), found most respondents believed natural transmission was considerably more likely than a lab leak, although most acknowledged it was impossible to definitively dismiss the theory.
Following three years of research, a World Health Organization (WHO) advisory board released a report in 2025 that also concluded “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover”.
Still, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned, “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.”
Inside Fauci’s diary
Fauci has long argued the scientific evidence indicates that the virus emerged from natural animal transmission, but he has repeatedly rejected the notion that he has outright dismissed the lab leak theory.
In a 2024 letter to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, his lawyers maintained (PDF) it was “completely wrong” to say that Fauci had ever called the possibility a “conspiracy theory”.
Instead, they said Fauci and his allies rejected an array of conspiracy theories that have been tied to the lab leak theory, including the idea that he had “sneaked unnoticed into the CIA headquarters to try to convince CIA officials to debunk the lab leak theory”.
Wednesday’s hearing was preceded by the release of entries from Fauci’s private diary, stored on a government computer drive.
They were obtained through Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic and Fauci critic, who passed them along to Senator Paul.
In one entry, Fauci described a claim that he “deliberately” worked with the Chinese to create the virus as a “way-out conspiracy theory”.
He and his legal team have also repeatedly rejected Republican claims that he leveraged millions in grant money to compel scientists to change their views about COVID’s origins.
The White House website, for instance, asserts that Fauci “prompted” an early study on COVID origins to downplay the lab leak theory. No evidence has been presented to support those claims, which have also been rejected by the scientists involved.
Did Fauci mislead?
On Wednesday, several Senate Republicans charged that Fauci’s diary entries showed he had intentionally misled the public by downplaying the possibility the virus had emerged from the Wuhan lab.
Fauci’s supporters, however, have said the diary fails to prove any deliberate attempt to mislead. They argue his public and private statements were consistent in the early days of the pandemic, when scientists’ understanding of the virus was shifting daily.
Fauci’s diary entries indicated he met with a group of experts in February 2020, noting “there was not total agreement” on the likelihood the virus had been created via human manipulation. Senator Paul and others said Fauci did not adequately reflect that view in his public statements.
Republicans also seized on a January 26, 2020, entry in which Fauci wrote that initial data suggests “the first infection was in early December and was not connected” to the wet market in Wuhan.
“Now we know the market was not the source but the amplifier,” he wrote.
During the hearing, Senator Paul said the diary revealed that Fauci was “repeatedly saying in public something different than what he believes in private”.
Fauci’s defenders have pointed to a USA Today interview he gave shortly after the diary entry, floating the idea that the market could have been an “amplifier”. Others have argued the diary entries do not contradict the view that the virus was of natural origins.
Public restrictions
Republicans on Wednesday also focused heavily on Fauci’s role in issuing public guidance about how to slow the spread of the COVID virus.
Several states saw schools close and businesses shutter amid social-distancing recommendations.
But those closures became a political lightning rod and featured prominently in the 2020 presidential elections and 2022 midterm races.
Indeed, new studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of social distancing rules. Others indicate mask mandates may have been less effective than previously presented, although research still generally supports that masks may slow the spread of the disease.
As NIAID director, Fauci had no direct authority to impose public health mandates, which were typically introduced by state and local officials. While he had a role in issuing federal guidance, his work was part of a wider government effort involving other agencies and officials.
Speaking on Wednesday, Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, accused Republicans of “relitigating history” and seeking to “turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations were responsible for handling”.
Still, Fauci’s diary does contain uncomfortable revelations about how he wielded his high-profile position. In one instance, he recounted how he offered then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouragement to close city schools. He did the same with an aide to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“I advised De Blasio to go ahead and do it,” he recounted. “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC… He said that he would base this on my recommendation.”
Why now?
During the Wednesday hearing, Fauci invoked his constitutional right to remain silent roughly 100 times, drawing significant public scrutiny.
The 85-year-old Fauci, who enjoyed bipartisan support as NIAID director throughout much of his 38 years in the role, decried the hearing as an attempt to entrap him with perjury.
Critics, including several Democrats on the committee, have also questioned the timing of Wednesday’s hearing, which comes just three months before November’s midterm elections.
Republicans are expected to face an uphill battle in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, and they also risk losing their slim control of the Senate in the vote. A defeat in either chamber would serve as a major setback to Trump in his final two years in office.
The party has struggled to find a defining issue to campaign on, amid affordability woes fuelled by the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.
The hearing also comes at a time when polls have shown public trust in federal health agencies has plummeted since Trump took office.
For instance, a June poll conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab suggests that just 50 percent of respondents said they trusted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That marks a decline from 77 percent in the spring of 2025.
About 69 percent also felt that federal health agencies’ recommendations were too influenced by their leaders’ public opinions.
But Morrison, the health policy expert, saw the hearing as a personal attack on Fauci, with Senator Paul and Secretary Kennedy pursuing an ideological “vendetta”.
Fauci, he said, has come to represent for some Republicans the “iconic embodiment of everything that they have come to believe is craven and corrupt in the US government response” to COVID.
He warned that their approach, though, could chill any desire for top scientists to wade into government.
“People will say Tony Fauci could have done things a little differently, he made a few mistakes, and he could have admitted those,” Morrison said.
“But the ‘big but’ is certainly none of that warrants what’s happening here.”
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Why did Anthony Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment? Senate hearing explained | Coronavirus pandemic News
Dr Anthony Fauci, a former top United States public health official, has declined to answer questions at a Republican-led Senate committee hearing into the origins of COVID-19 and the handling of the pandemic.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on Wednesday.
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Fauci was called to testify by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who accuses him of misleading Congress and questions whether US-funded research in China played a role in the pandemic, allegations Fauci denies.
Although former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon in 2025, Republicans claim it does not protect him from any alleged crimes committed after it was issued, such as perjuring himself at a Senate hearing.
Fauci’s lawyers advised him not to testify, arguing that anything he said under oath could expose him to new legal risks.
Here is what to know:
Who is Anthony Fauci?
Fauci, 85, is a physician and immunologist who led the US NIAID for 38 years, advising seven presidents, both Republican and Democratic.
He became the public face of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, after helping lead the country’s response to health crises including HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks.
He became a target of conservative criticism over pandemic policies, including mask recommendations, vaccines and school closures.
During his last year in government, Fauci was also chief medical adviser to Biden until he retired in 2022.
During the pandemic, between 2019 and 2022, he kept more than 1,000 pages of diary entries documenting his work advising the White House and responding to the pandemic.
The notes chronicle his interactions with senior officials and the media.
Why is Fauci being questioned?
He was subpoenaed to testify over his handling of the pandemic and its origins before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The hearing, led by Paul, focused on several issues:
What happened at the hearing?
The tense hearing lasted about three hours.
After a brief opening statement, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer more than 100 questions.
He accused committee chairman Paul of having an “obsession” with prosecuting him.
The hearing included several tense moments:
Closing the hearing, Paul asked rhetorically: “Did [Fauci’s] actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?”
Why did Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment?
Fauci said he invoked the Fifth Amendment on the advice of his lawyers because he believed his answers could expose him to new legal risks.
He argued that Paul was trying to build a criminal case against him rather than conduct legitimate congressional oversight.
Although Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from prosecution for actions before January 2025, Republicans say any false statements made under oath during this hearing could still expose him to perjury charges.
The Fifth Amendment protects people from being forced to give evidence that could incriminate them in a criminal case. Invoking it is a constitutional right and does not imply guilt.
What do scientists believe about COVID-19’s origins?
Most scientists believe COVID-19 likely spread naturally from animals to humans, known as zoonotic spillover, pointing to a wildlife market in Wuhan as the most likely place where it first spread.
Fauci has consistently said he believes that scientific evidence points to a natural origin, while remaining open to other possibilities.
Notes from his diary detail a January 2020 call with 11 top virologists and evolutionary biologists – only two were convinced the virus had a natural origin, while the rest debated whether it could have been engineered.
Today, most scientists favour a natural origin, while the US intelligence community is divided.
The FBI said in 2023 that a laboratory-related incident is the most likely origin of the pandemic. The CIA reached the same conclusion in 2025, but with low confidence. Other agencies and the National Intelligence Council continue to favour a natural origin or remain undecided.
Does Biden’s pardon protect Fauci?
Yes, but only what happened before the pardon was issued.
On January 19, 2025, Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any federal offences he may have committed since 2014, saying the move aimed to protect Fauci from “politically motivated prosecutions”.
The pardon does not cover actions taken after it was issued. Fauci could face legal consequences if he were accused of committing a new crime, such as making false statements under oath during Wednesday’s Senate hearing.
Paul and other Republicans also argue that because Biden’s pardon shields Fauci from criminal liability for his past actions, he can no longer claim that his testimony about those actions would incriminate him and should not be able to invoke his Fifth Amendment.
The legal standing of this argument is not clear, and Paul has acknowledged that it is a novel “legal question that the courts may have to decide”.
Can Fauci be held in contempt or prosecuted?
Potentially, but it remains unclear whether either will happen.
Paul said the Senate committee will vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer more than 100 questions.
Being held in contempt means lawmakers believe a witness has refused to cooperate with a lawful investigation. It does not automatically lead to criminal charges, but can trigger further legal action.
If the committee approves the measure, it could refer the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, ask a federal court to pursue a civil action, or, in the rarest case, ask the Senate to use its powers to detain a witness through the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
Paul has not said which option, if any, he plans to pursue.
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Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment and declines to testify in Republican-led COVID-19 Senate hearing
WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The move injects new drama into the lingering tensions between Fauci and Republican lawmakers over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and accusations he lied about the origins of COVID-19, which he denies.
Fauci was set to answer lawmakers’ questions after being subpoenaed by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had a fraught relationship with the now-retired infectious-disease expert and led the charge seeking that he testify, again, under oath about his role in containing the pandemic.
Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth, at least for now, sidesteps calls for his prosecution if he is accused of lying at Wednesday’s hearing, part of a yearslong campaign for his arrest spearheaded by some Republicans in Congress. But it may also further inflame partisan divides that have festered for years about the origins and handling of the pandemic, which was declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020.
Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, has become a target of those frustrations. But to his supporters he is an emblem of sound scientific expertise.
In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said, adding that while it pains him to do so, he is following his attorney’s advice by taking the Fifth.
Paul releases some of Fauci’s diary
Paul in his opening statement sought to build the case that Fauci helped produce the COVID-19 pandemic by approving funding of research on virus mutations and then covered up his complicity.
“Instead of an apology, you have for years avoided responsibility,” Paul said.
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee’s ranking member, said that Paul’s hearing was a partisan exercise and that the hearing was looking backward instead of focusing on current national security challenges.
Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Some of the diary entries – including Fauci’s uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus and how best to curb it before vaccines could be created – already were reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.
But they have nonetheless drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for mask mandates, school closures and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
Ahead of the hearing, President Trump wrote on social media that he stopped relying on Fauci over the course of the pandemic because he felt Fauci made bad decisions on masks, shutdowns and other issues.
In a statement, Fauci’s attorney David Schertler said Paul’s accusations are “false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered public office, said Monday that his department gave the diary entries, which were created on a government computer, to the committee. He told a Fox News Channel host that he thought Fauci might lie before the committee, opening him to perjury prosecution despite his preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
Scientists scrambled to Fauci’s defense ahead of the unusual hearing — the second time the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has been back before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving the government in 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, he talked the nation through numerous outbreaks over decades, including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.
Some disease experts criticize the accusations against Fauci
In a public letter, more than 150 infectious-disease experts and other scientists wrote that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and that they are “urging our elected representatives in Congress stop these witch-hunts.”
The expected crux of Wednesday’s hearing was whether NIH-funded research in China may have played a role in how the pandemic started.
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 did not find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS jumped into people.
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded what’s known as gain of function research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — at a lab in Wuhan.
The NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. But the definition of gain of function covers both general research and especially risky experiments to enhance the ability of potential pandemic viruses to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci has previously stressed he was using the risky experiment definition and that “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.
Trump, a Republican, last year paused some federally funded gain of function research, and on Tuesday his administration announced new rules to tighten oversight.
Neergaard and Swenson write for the Associated Press. Swenson reported from New York.
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Sen. Paul subpoenas Fauci for COVID-19 testimony
June 23 (UPI) — Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he has subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci after the former infectious diseases official backed out on an agreement to testify on the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Hill reported that this is the first subpoena issued by Paul as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Last week, Anthony Fauci notified us that he will not voluntarily testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, even though he had previously agreed to do so,” Paul wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “Therefore, today we have issued a subpoena for him to publicly testify.”
The post on X included a photo of Rand appearing to sign the subpoena.
Paul has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over policies and recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The senator accused Fauci of covering up U.S. research at a lab in Wuhan, China, which he said caused the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’ve been negotiating with him for material and for testimony,” Paul said in an appearance on CNBC on Tuesday.
“This has gone on for some time. He slow-walked us and slow-walked us. Finally agreed to come in voluntarily … then last week he says he’s not coming in.
“With this subpoena power, we will bring him in, unless he fights this in court.”
Fauci was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the COVID-19 outbreak until 2022. He was also a top medical adviser to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the crisis.
A U.S. intelligence analysis initially found there was insufficient evidence to prove COVID-19 was leaked from a research lab in Wuhan. In 2025, the CIA adjusted its stance.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin-based on the available body of reporting,” an unnamed CIA representative said in a statement in January 2025.
During testimony in 2024, Fauci said he was open to both perspectives.
“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it,” he said during his opening statement before a House committee hearing.
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