Senate committee holds Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress
A Republican-led Senate committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions during a July 29 hearing.
WASHINGTON – From a window on the seventh floor, Dr. Anthony Fauci recognized one of the hundreds of protesters swarming the lawn of the National Institutes of Health.
They had blocked entrances and pathways at the Bethesda, Maryland, campus. They set off colorful smoke bombs and blasted air horns every 12 seconds as a reminder that, statistically, someone had just died of AIDS. They carried fake coffins with Fauci’s name on them.
They focused their anger on him, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, for what they felt was the government’s lackluster response to a disease, at that point, killing mostly gay and bisexual men and intravenous drug users.
Fauci watched the man he recognized climb onto the concrete portico of the main building. Police wrestled him down, and Fauci, dressed in his white lab coat, bolted downstairs.
“Peter, is that you?” Fauci asked, as a burly officer marched the man through the main door of the building and toward a police van, his hands zip-tied behind him.
“I did it! I was the first one arrested,” the man, Peter Staley, replied.
Fauci knew Staley, who was HIV-positive, as one of the leaders of the protest. Publicly, Fauci had argued with Staley and other activists over the government’s response to AIDS. Privately, Fauci had met them over dinner and wine, strategizing for hours over how to get experimental drugs quickly to AIDS patients with no other hope.
Fauci wanted to make sure Staley wasn’t hurt. The baffled police officer stood by in disbelief as Staley grinned and assured Fauci he was OK.
“It was an extraordinary moment,” recalled Staley, who remains close friends with Fauci almost 40 years later.
For Fauci, it would be one of many personal moments in a 56-year career that would see him become the nation’s most revered – and, in some cases, reviled – scientist and infectious disease expert.
He served seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden. He advised leaders through anthrax attacks, Ebola outbreaks and SARS scares in Asia. He devised the U.S.’s global attack plan against AIDS.
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, Fauci led the fight against diseases that threatened the lives of Americans and people all over the world.
“He became an icon because of his success,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded him as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases after he retired in 2022.
But it would be the COVID-19 pandemic under President Donald Trump that would turn the 85-year-old, white-haired doctor with the gruff Brooklyn accent into a lightning rod like never before.
Caught between science and politics
Fauci’s job often placed him between politics and science.
George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on HIV and AIDS. Biden gave him a presidential pardon after congressional Republicans threatened him with criminal charges over his handling of COVID. He and his family receive so many death threats that he has his own security detail, which he pays for himself after Trump revoked his taxpayer-funded protection.
On Thursday, Aug. 6, a GOP-led Senate panel voted 8-5 to hold him in contempt of Congress. A week earlier, he had sat stoically for three hours and refused to answer questions about his leadership during the COVID pandemic.
The committee chairman, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and other GOP lawmakers accused him of misleading the public about the virus’ origins. They blamed him for the closure of schools and businesses during the worst days of the pandemic. They claimed the NIH he led funded research that a lab in Wuhan, China, used to create the COVID virus.
Digging through the diary Fauci kept on his government computer, they accused him of saying one thing publicly and another privately about the origins of the virus. They painted him as someone obsessed with celebrities and his own fame. They battered him with serious questions about pandemic-era policies, vaccines and masking guidelines and not-so-serious questions about the day of the week and the color of the carpet in the room.
More than 100 times, Fauci’s response was the same: He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, declined USA TODAY’s request for an interview with Fauci. Schertler charged in a statement that Paul is waging a baseless campaign to put Fauci in jail and harbors a “seemingly pathological” obsession with him.
The broad, pre-emptive pardon he received from Biden covered only the period from 2014 to the end of Biden’s term in January 2025. His attorneys feared Paul was trying to coax Fauci to say something under oath that could be misconstrued and used to prosecute him.
Fauci’s defenders say he has been unfairly made a villain by MAGA Republicans putting politics ahead of science and by those still angry over forced school shutdowns and government-ordered lockdowns during the pandemic.
For Fauci, they say, the focus has always been the science.
“I never saw him say one thing privately and another publicly,” said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general during Trump’s first term and worked with Fauci almost daily during COVID as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Like many scientists working in government, Fauci understood there is often tension between science, policy and the practical realities of communicating with the public during a health crisis, Adams said.
“Those are difficult judgments, and reasonable people can disagree about them,” Adams said. But, “I always felt he was guided by what he believed was in the best interest of the health of the American people, not by politics or personal gain.”
A ‘responsibility’ to help people in need
Fauci credits his parents with instilling the values that led him to a career in medicine and public health.
Born into an Italian-American family, Fauci grew up in a three-bedroom apartment above his father’s pharmacy at 13th Avenue and 83rd Street in Brooklyn. In his 2024 memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he described his family as loving and close-knit.
His father, Stephen Anthony Fauci, whom he remembered as a shy man with a strong sense of ethics, integrity, and kindness, ran the pharmacy from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week. He took a 45-minute break in the evening to have dinner with his family.
On Sunday, when the pharmacy was open half a day, Fauci worked the counter, ringing up prescriptions. He delivered them on his Schwinn bicycle on weekends and during school breaks and summer.
In between, he was the starting point guard on the basketball team at Regis High School, an all-boy Jesuit school.
Fauci remembered his father accommodating customers who could not afford their medication. When he asked why, his father replied: “They cannot afford it. They are struggling. We will just put it on a tab,” Fauci wrote in his memoir.
Some bills were never paid.
“Our father taught us early in life,” Fauci recalled, “that because we were fortunate, it was our responsibility to help people when we could.”
He went to Cornell University Medical College, graduated first in his class in 1966 and accepted a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in 1968, studying how the human body protects itself against infectious diseases and cancers.
Except for one year at New York Hospital, Fauci would remain at NIH for the rest of his career in public health.
An AIDS czar who listens
Fauci was puzzled by what he was reading. He had picked up the government’s morbidity and mortality weekly report from a pile of junk mail on his desk at the National Institutes of Health. An article detailed an unusual form of pneumonia in five men who otherwise had been healthy.
It was June 5, 1981. AIDS had arrived in America.
Over the next decade, AIDS would become a global crisis and the focus of Fauci’s professional life as he led the government’s response. The virus would kill more than 700,000 Americans.
Fauci saw patients in the early days of the epidemic when no treatments were available. He testified before Congress and pressed Ronald Reagan’s administration to dedicate billions of dollars to AIDS research. Fauci built a research program that tried to learn how to stop HIV from destroying the immune system.
At the time, AIDS was often a death sentence. Because Fauci was seen as the federal government’s AIDS czar, he became the target for activists who felt the administration wasn’t moving fast enough. The writer Larry Kramer branded him a murderer in an open letter published in 1988.
Two years later, on May 21, 1990, hundreds of activists stormed the offices of the National Institutes of Health. They demanded the government allow dying patients access to potentially lifesaving drugs that hadn’t yet been approved by the government.
“We realized that our only salvation was going to come from science,” said Staley, who left his Wall Street job to become a political activist with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP.
Fauci sympathized with his critics and did something other government officials had been unwilling to do, Staley said: He heard their concerns. He invited them to meetings in his office and, later, to long dinners over bottles of wine at restaurants and in the home of his top aide.
The discussions got heated. Fauci listened, really listened, agreeing at times and pushing back strongly when he didn’t. The meetings gave him insight he couldn’t get anywhere else. He responded by appointing people with HIV to committees overseeing AIDS research. He pressed the Food and Drug Administration to allow thousands of people into experimental drug trials.
Gradually, many of the critics became close friends.
“I am brutally honest with the guy,” Staley said. “The stuff I have told him over the years, nine out of 10 people would end the friendship.” But, “he wanted to hear that. He wanted that feedback.”
From respected scientist to ‘nay-saying bureaucrat’
By early 2020, COVID was spreading rapidly across the United States.
Trump announced at a White House news briefing on March 19, 2020, that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was a potential game-changer in the treatment of COVID, claiming early test results had been promising. The next day, at a briefing in the same room, reporters asked Fauci, with Trump at his side, if that was true.
“Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work,” he responded, adding the evidence cited by those touting the drug was anecdotal and not backed by science.
At the same briefing, Trump referred to the State Department as “the Deep State Department,” and Fauci covered his face with the palm of his hand to hide his reaction. A photo of the moment went viral, quickly became an internet meme – and Fauci noticed everything for him started to change.
He had been a trusted authority for Americans. He gave updates on television, answered reporters’ tough questions and served as the voice for the latest science on stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
But after he publicly contradicted Trump, Fauci sensed a change in how some people perceived him.
“While millions of Americans appreciated or admired me, a hard-core group saw me as a nay-saying bureaucrat who deliberately, even maliciously, was undermining President Trump,” he wrote. “They loved and supported the president and regarded me as the enemy. To them, my hand to my forehead moment proved it.”
He and his family were bombarded with angry emails, texts and phone calls. They received death threats.
In Congress, Republicans aimed at Fauci more frequently and pushed the unproven theory that the coronavirus was created at a lab in Wuhan, China, instead of spreading from animal to human, as Fauci believed.
At a contentious Senate hearing in July 2021, Paul repeatedly clashed with Fauci and accused him of lying about the government funding research in Wuhan. “If anybody is lying here, senator,” Fauci shot back, “it is you.”
The bitter exchange set the stage for Paul’s Senate hearing last week.
Many of Fauci’s allies in the scientific community rallied to his defense.
Fauci got some things wrong as he and other scientists tried to contain a virus they knew nothing about, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
But “I think he was the right man for the job,” said Offit, who had raised doubts about the reliability of early data on the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine and questioned some public health recommendations on booster shots. “I think he really did try and explain things clearly. I think he’s a voice of reason.”
Far from suggesting that Fauci was duplicitous – saying one thing about the virus’ origin in private and something else in public – his diary instead shows him shifting his opinion as new information became available, his defenders argue.
“It’s perfectly reasonable to change the way you think about a complex topic such as an emerging virus if you receive new insights that justify doing so,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell. “Indeed, it would be professional malpractice to not do so.”
People who have spoken to Fauci say he is in good spirits and is holding up despite the stress he is under. “He is fully ready to finish this fight,” Staley said. “I think I might crumble if this were happening to me. He hasn’t.”
If anything, Staley said, Fauci has gone back to the thing he loves most: Being a doctor.
Two days after he pleaded the Fifth, Fauci was back at Georgetown University Medical Center, where he has worked since retiring four years ago.
There, away from the chaos and the cameras, he quietly made his rounds and tended to patients.
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. A veteran reporter, he has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS