AP News72%
Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment in a contentious Senate committee hearing 27%
By LAURAN NEERGAARD69% ALI SWENSON64%
7/29/2026, 2:03:13 AM
Keywords: Anthony Fauci, Rand Paul, Donald Trump, Pandemics, Coronavirus, Indictments, U S Republican Party, Congress, Ky State Wire, Kentucky, Dc Wire, Covid 19, District Of Columbia, Fauci Covid19 Pandemic Senate Rand Paul, Health, Maggie Hassan, United States Congress, United States House Of Representatives, New York, Wuhan, Disease Outbreaks, David Schertler, Politics, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Joe Biden
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Quote-first Misdirection, Hasty Generalization, and Pessimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 16.1% saturation with 85 hits. Analysis detected 644 faulty-reasoning hits from 529 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 31.4% and a BS Rank of 27% (21,946 of 30,030 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 73.10% of the article peer group.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr.
Anthony Fauci on Wednesday repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision, at least for now, shielded Fauci from answering questions that could expose him to accusations of lying under oath.
Though he received a pardon in early 2025 from Democratic President Joe Biden, some Republicans pursuing a yearslong campaign for his arrest had suggested he could still face charges for any perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing.
The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen.
Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had an antagonistic relationship with Fauci.
In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”
“Today will be the capstone to Anthony Fauci’s 40 years of abuse of power at NIH,” Paul said.
“History will judge, but the facts as we now know them paint a sordid tale of dishonesty, misjudgment and ultimately the hubris, the likes of which the world has never seen.”
In a heated moment during the hearing, Paul ejected Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, from the room after he tried to speak without being recognized.
In a statement, Schertler said the removal was “outrageous and demonstrates the completely biased and baseless nature of this proceeding.”
In another statement, he called Paul’s accusations about Fauci “false and disgraceful.”
Republicans accuse Fauci of lying while Democrats say he didn’t deserve that
In the combative hearing, Paul and other Republicans accused Fauci of lying in earlier testimony about the coronavirus’ origins, something the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has forcefully denied.
Democrats called the hearing a politically motivated attempt at entrapping Fauci and praised the scientist for his work during the pandemic.
With Fauci declining to answer questions throughout, Paul dominated the approximately three-hour hearing, listing a litany of accusations and detailed questions.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins.
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.
But 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 that 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 “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have turned into the pandemic virus.
President Donald Trump paused some federally funded gain-of-function research last year, and on Tuesday his administration announced new rules to tighten oversight.
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Swenson reported from New York.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
Speakers
3speakers26%attributed speech390writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageRand Paul of Kentucky
62 attributed words45% of attributed speech42% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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