Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. scientist who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 pandemic response, is set to face off — again — with a Republican senator probing the origins of the coronavirus.Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky subpoenaed Fauci to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday. It’s part of Paul’s yearslong accusations that the now-retired infectious disease expert had lied about the pandemic, something Fauci has called “preposterous.”Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand 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 his 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 Fauci’s 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.
But they’re likely to further inflame a partisan divide that, years after the pandemic, still makes Fauci a target of vitriol from people who blame him for mask mandates and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.In an earlier letter to Paul, Fauci’s attorneys called his allegations “absolutely baseless” and part of an “obsessive and groundless vendetta.”
