Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment, declines to answer at Senate hearing

WASHINGTON \u2014 Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert, declined to answer questions at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and accusing Republican Sen. \u200bRand Paul of an "unhinged" campaign to see him imprisoned."Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions," Fauci told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs, in his opening statement.The Kentucky Republican has \u200cfor years called for Fauci to be indicted and accused him of lying to Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health funded "gain-of-function" research in Wuhan, China, and of helping cover up the origins of COVID-19.Fauci denies both \u2060claims and says he has testified truthfully multiple times before Congress on these \u200bissues.Gain-of-function research"Given Sen. Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous \u2060comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me," said Fauci, "the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole \u200creason he is calling me before this committee \u200cis to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars.'""Any reasonable \u2060person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion," said Fauci, \u2060who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years and became the face of the pandemic response.Gain-of-function research is, broadly, work that modifies a pathogen in ways that could make it more transmissible or dangerous, though scientists disagree over how narrowly the term should be defined. Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and medical advisor to several U.S. presidents, attends a U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing to testify under subpoena about his role in the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Wednesday. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters) That disagreement is the crux of the Paul-Fauci dispute: Paul says the NIH funded such work in Wuhan and that Fauci lied when he denied it, while Fauci says the research did not meet the gov