WATCH: Anthony Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment, Declines To Answer at Rand Paul Hearing | N18G

Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert, declined to answer questions at a Senate hearing on Wednesday (July 29), invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and accusing Republican Senator Rand Paul of an "unhinged" campaign to see him imprisoned.

"Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th 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 for 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 claims and says he has testified truthfully multiple times before Congress on these issues.
"Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments 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 reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars.'"

"Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion," said Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years and became the face of the U.S. 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.

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 government's formal regulatory definition.

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