subpoenaed<\/a> Fauci to appear before the Senate committee, citing the immunologist\u2019s decision not to voluntarily testify.<\/p>\nIn Wednesday\u2019s opening statement, Paul sought to build the case that Fauci helped cause the COVID-19 pandemic by approving funding for research on virus mutations and then covered up his complicity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope today Dr Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund research in China, admit that the risk of this research exceeded any possible benefits,\u201d Paul said.<\/p>\n
Other Republicans, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, criticised Fauci for avoiding their questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, doc?\u201d Hawley said.<\/p>\n
Using the Fifth Amendment does not imply guilt or innocence. Rather, it is a constitutional mechanism to protect individuals from being compelled to provide potentially self-incriminating testimony, in cases where there is reasonable fear of prosecution.<\/p>\n
Experts say that Fauci\u2019s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment during his testimony allows him to sidestep calls for his prosecution, if he is accused of lying at Wednesday\u2019s hearing.<\/p>\n
While taking questions from reporters Wednesday afternoon, Trump responded to one about Fauci\u2019s appearance at the Senate hearing. Trump said that he disagreed with Fauci on many topics and accused Fauci of \u201cmaking a lot of mistakes\u201d. He also said he was \u201cnever a big fan of\u201d the retired immunologist.<\/p>\n
When asked why Fauci may have invoked the Fifth Amendment, Trump said, \u201cWhy he did that was very simple: His lawyer told him to. I don\u2019t know if he would have been better off not doing it,\u201d he said. There were a lot of questions that I guess he could have answered, and some maybe he didn\u2019t feel comfortable in answering. But his lawyer told him to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fauci\u2019s refusal to answer questions on Wednesday may inflame partisan divides that have festered for years about the origins and handling of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
The most common theory about the origins of COVID-19 is one of \u201czoonotic spillover\u201d \u2014 that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans.<\/p>\n
But some believe the virus could have come instead from a laboratory setting, a theory that has been embraced by Trump\u2019s White House and Senator Paul.<\/p>\n
However, there is no new scientific information supporting that \u201claboratory leak\u201d theory.<\/p>\n
Fauci himself has long maintained that he is open to both theories but that there\u2019s more evidence supporting the idea that COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans, the way other coronavirus strains like SARS and MERS did.<\/p>\n
Fauci has long been a target of COVID-related frustrations. In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul has an \u201cobvious obsession with calling for my prosecution\u201d.<\/p>\n
Experts in the US medical community have largely rallied around Fauci, calling the accusations against him \u201cbaseless\u201d.<\/p>\n
In a public letter earlier this month, more than 150 infectious-disease experts and other scientists wrote that \u201cno credible evidence has been produced to support\u201d the \u201cabsurd charges\u201d that Fauci covered up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese conspiracy theories have led to a five-year period of harassment and threats of violence directed at Dr Fauci and his family,\u201d the letter said. \u201cIt is time to stand up for our scientists and say no to these witch-hunts.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Republican-led subcommittee that studied the origins of COVID-19 in 2024 did not find any evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Retired immunologist Anthony Fauci, 85, has declined to answer questions from United States senators about his handling of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[115187,1376,893,43,84,44,714,41,39,42,40,772,1690,16119],"class_list":["post-834571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-coronavirus-pandemic","tag-donald-trump","tag-government","tag-headlines","tag-health","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada","tag-world-health-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}