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Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., said Thursday that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before the committee next week after being subpoenaed.
Paul said the hearing is expected to take place Wednesday, July 29, after Fauci declined an earlier request to appear voluntarily. The senator issued a subpoena last month compelling his testimony.
Lawmakers are expected to question Fauci about his previous congressional testimony regarding whether the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The worst public health decision in history, yet Democrats still praise Dr. Anthony Fauci,” Paul wrote on X. “At next week’s hearing, I will make sure Fauci answers for his dangerous decisions and the consequences they had for millions.”
The hearing follows the release last month of a declassified intelligence report by former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The several-hundred-page report concerns Fauci’s tenure as NIAID director, the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing investigation into the origins of the virus.
“My committee has painstakingly combed through millions of documents related to the government’s response to COVID. Our investigation reveals that Anthony Fauci destroyed government records and recommended that other members of government delete emails and then delete them from their deleted files,” Rand noted in another post to X.
“Dr. Fauci and his virologist allies privately believed that the pandemic may have come from a lab leak but publicly argued that it was implausible. They conspired to condemn and demean anyone who argued that the pandemic could have leaked from the Wuhan Lab and never, ever accepted responsibility for the terrible decision to fund this dangerous research in China,” he added.
The origin of COVID-19 remains the subject of debate. Some U.S. government agencies have assessed that a laboratory-related incident is the most likely explanation, while others continue to assess that the virus most likely emerged naturally or say the available evidence remains inconclusive.
Fauci has consistently maintained that the evidence favors a natural origin of the virus rather than a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.