Welcome back to Citizen Jack’s Mud Creek Chronicles. If you are new to the group, thank you for joining in. For some time, I’ve been reading and following the Congressional actions toward Dr. Anthony Fauci. In my 2022 book, The Trump Files, a long section deals with America’s experience with the COVID pandemic. More than a million people died, and many of these deaths can be attributed to President Trump. Now, Republicans are out to vilify a scientist who tried to provide the public with advice. Most of his advice was rejected by Trump. In this essay, I have investigated the inquisition. To do this, I have assembled information on the origins of COVID and the connection to Dr. Fauci, as well as the opinions of people such as Rand Paul and Robert Kennedy. It’s a long essay, but I hope you find it informative.
Rand Paul and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have spent years arguing that Anthony Fauci helped finance the research that created SARS-CoV-2—and then helped conceal the truth. The accusation is politically explosive. But after six years of investigations, congressional hearings, intelligence assessments, and scientific research, what can actually be proved?
On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill.
For nearly four decades, from 1984 until 2022, Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He had advised presidents of both parties and had testified or briefed Congress more than 200 times. During COVID-19, however, he became something else: a symbol.
To millions of Americans, he was the physician standing beside a president who routinely contradicted his own scientists. To a substantial part of the Republican movement, Fauci became the embodiment of everything they believed had gone wrong during the pandemic—lockdowns, masks, vaccines, federal bureaucracy and, eventually, the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
This time Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Paul had spent years accusing Fauci of misleading Congress and calling for his prosecution. Fauci arrived under subpoena.
And then he refused to answer Paul’s questions.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, Fauci said Paul’s repeated demands that he be prosecuted convinced him that the proceeding was designed not simply to discover facts but to produce evidence that could be used against him. The hearing quickly became extraordinarily contentious.
That spectacle raises a more important question than whether Fauci should have answered Rand Paul:
What does the evidence actually show?
On August 6, the Senate committee voted to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The Accusation
Paul’s case against Fauci contains several propositions that are often blended together as though proving one proves all the others.
They don’t.
The argument goes roughly like this: Fauci’s agency funded EcoHealth Alliance; EcoHealth sent some of that money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; researchers there conducted experiments involving bat coronaviruses; some of those experiments can be described broadly as “gain-of-function” research; SARS-CoV-2 therefore may have been created or altered at Wuhan; it escaped from the laboratory; and Fauci subsequently participated in concealing the laboratory origin because disclosure would expose the government’s role in financing the research.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. goes considerably further. He has promoted the claim that there is overwhelming evidence COVID-19 was a bioweapon that escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.
There is an important lesson in that chain of reasoning.
Some links are factual. Others remain hypotheses. And still others have not been demonstrated at all.
That distinction has largely disappeared from the political debate. The debate is being driven by Rand Paul and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. They have set their sights on Dr. Anthony Fauci. The committee Paul heads voted along party lines to charge Fauci with failing to answer their questions and, as a result, with contempt of Congress.
Biographies
Here are brief biographies of each of these persons.
Anthony Fauci, M.D., is an immunologist and infectious-disease physician who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until his retirement in 2022. He advised seven presidents and became the federal government’s most visible scientific spokesman during COVID-19. In this case, Fauci is central because NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance research involving bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Critics contend that this amounted to dangerous gain-of-function research and that Fauci misled Congress about it; Fauci has disputed those claims and denied that the funded research created SARS-CoV-2.
Rand Paul, M.D., Republican senator from Kentucky since 2011, is an ophthalmologist and currently chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Paul has become Fauci’s most persistent congressional antagonist. Since 2021, he has argued that NIH-supported research in Wuhan constituted gain-of-function experimentation and has accused Fauci of misleading Congress about federal funding. He now leads an ongoing Senate investigation into COVID-19’s origins and federal oversight of high-risk biological research.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an environmental lawyer, author, and, since February 2025, Secretary of Health and Human Services, giving him authority over NIH, CDC, and other federal health agencies. Long before joining the Trump administration, Kennedy was a prominent critic of vaccines and the federal public-health establishment. His 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci portrayed Fauci as a central figure in a corrupt relationship among government health agencies and pharmaceutical companies. In the COVID-origins controversy, Kennedy has gone beyond Paul in portraying Fauci’s role as part of a much broader failure—and alleged corruption—of the American public-health system.
What Fauci’s critics get right
The strongest part of Paul’s case concerns the meaning of “gain-of-function.”
NIH did fund EcoHealth Alliance research involving bat coronaviruses, and EcoHealth collaborated with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The argument became whether particular experiments met the government’s regulatory definition of “gain-of-function research.”
Fauci repeatedly said they did not.
Paul said they obviously did.
The disagreement was not invented. Even a Republican-led House investigation concluded in 2024 that Fauci had “played semantics” with the term. Earlier fact-checking reached a more cautious conclusion: the experiments could fit broader scientific uses of the phrase “gain of function,” while NIH maintained they did not meet the specific regulatory definition governing the restricted research Fauci was discussing.
That distinction matters.
Fauci’s categorical language gave his opponents an opening. Saying simply that NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology” was much less precise than explaining that NIH funded coronavirus experiments there but did not classify them under the government’s particular regulatory category.
Paul was justified in questioning that distinction.
But that does not establish Paul’s much larger claim.
Showing that American money supported coronavirus research in Wuhan is not evidence that the research produced SARS-CoV-2.
Those are entirely different propositions.
The missing link
This is where the case against Fauci becomes much weaker.
No publicly demonstrated chain of evidence shows that a virus being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.
No publicly established laboratory record shows WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak.
And no scientific evidence demonstrates that the EcoHealth-funded experiments produced the virus responsible for the pandemic.
That distinction appeared in my own research for The Trump Files. I wrote that laboratory accidents certainly happen and that the lab hypothesis should not simply be dismissed. But I also noted that genomic research found SARS-CoV-2 was probably neither a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.
I also warned against certainty. The WHO investigation had serious limitations because China failed to provide investigators with unrestricted access to information from Wuhan.
That caution has aged better than absolute claims from either side.
The Hunan Market evidence became stronger
Something important happened after The Trump Files was published.
The scientific case linking the beginning of the pandemic to Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market has strengthened.
A major 2022 Science study mapped the earliest known December 2019 COVID cases. Even cases with no known connection to the market clustered geographically around it. Researchers also established that live mammals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection were being sold there. Within the market itself, virus-positive environmental samples were concentrated near stalls selling live mammals.
In a study, SARS-CoV-2 infection at the Huanan Seafood Market by Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo &
Francisco A. de Ribera1, the authors focus on how early cases may have been infected at the market. Based on available evidence, we suggest that several early infections at the Huanan market may have occurred via human-to-human transmission in closed spaces such as canteens.
That fits what I reported earlier in The Trump Files: early cases clustered around the Huanan market, particularly in the section where live animals, such as raccoon dogs, were sold.
There have been legitimate methodological disputes over some of the statistical analyses. That is science working as it should: researchers challenge methods, publish criticism and answer one another.
But the market evidence is not merely circumstantial proximity. It combines epidemiology, geography, viral lineages, susceptible animals and environmental sampling.
And then came the WHO’s most recent assessment.
What the WHO says now
In June 2025, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens completed a new assessment after more than three years of work.
Its conclusion deserves careful wording.
The WHO did not announce that the laboratory hypothesis had been disproved.
It concluded that “the weight of available evidence” favors zoonotic spillover, either directly from bats or through an intermediate animal.
But WHO also said the investigation remains unfinished because China has withheld important evidence—including early viral sequences, detailed information about animals sold in Wuhan markets, and information concerning research and biosafety conditions at Wuhan laboratories. Consequently, WHO says both zoonotic spillover and laboratory accident must remain under consideration.
That is a very different position from saying, “We know Fauci caused COVID.”
And what about U.S. intelligence?
Here the story has become more complicated.
My 2022 account described an Intelligence Community divided between the two possibilities. U.S. intelligence agencies split in their judgments and agreed the virus was not a biological weapon. Some analysts favored natural exposure; one agency favored a laboratory-associated incident. This report was ordered by President Biden, soon after he took office in 2021.
Since then the CIA has shifted toward a laboratory origin—but with low confidence.
And in June 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went much further. Her office released documents under the extraordinary headline “Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID.” The ODNI accused Fauci of helping suppress intelligence about a laboratory origin and misleading Congress. However, independent analyses and fact-checks indicate that the files do not provide definitive proof that U.S.-funded research caused the pandemic or that Dr. Fauci manipulated intelligence assessments
That accusation cannot simply be ignored because it comes from the Trump administration.
Neither should it be mistaken for a scientific finding.
The released material and the administration’s interpretation of it deserve independent examination. The crucial question remains the same: Where is the evidence connecting a specific virus in the Wuhan laboratory to SARS-CoV-2?
An intelligence assessment—even one favoring a lab accident—is not the same thing as virological evidence establishing ancestry.
And the WHO’s independent scientific review, published only a year earlier, reached the opposite weighting: the available scientific evidence favored zoonotic emergence.
That conflict should make us more careful, not more certain.
Fauci’s private discussions aren’t the smoking gun either
Paul has also pointed to Fauci’s private discussions and diaries as evidence that he concealed doubts about COVID’s origin.
But scientists discussing a laboratory hypothesis privately in early 2020 is not evidence of a conspiracy.
Here is what I found. Senator Rand Paul published 1,141 pages of personal notes extracted from government servers spanning December 2019 to December 2022. Paul argued these records showed a conflict between Fauci’s private thoughts and his public statements regarding COVID-19 origins and government mandates. Reviewers and independent analyses noted that the private writings largely showed Fauci deliberating new data and tracking closely with his stated public positions.
It is exactly what scientists confronting a mysterious new pathogen ought to have been doing.
The recently released diaries show Fauci knew scientists were considering a laboratory possibility. They also show that he believed the Wuhan market may have amplified transmission rather than necessarily being the precise location of the first human infection. Importantly, reporting on the diaries found that those private observations were broadly consistent with things he was saying publicly at the time.
Changing one’s assessment as evidence accumulates isn’t scientific misconduct.
It is science.
Why Fauci?
Then we reach the political question.
Why has Anthony Fauci become the target?
The answer begins in 2020.
My account in The Trump Files describes Fauci trying to communicate scientific information while Trump repeatedly minimized the pandemic. In a March 2020 interview, Fauci said he kept pressing the White House to follow the evidence: “I’m going to keep pushing.”
The conflict became public.
Trump said testing explained America’s enormous number of cases. Fauci contradicted him. Trump promoted hydroxychloroquine. Fauci said the evidence did not support it. Trump resisted masks. Fauci recommended them.
In other words, Fauci became the visible representative of an institution that Trumpism increasingly distrusted: professional expertise independent of presidential authority. But has Paul, and Kennedy.
COVID then created enormous anger.
People lost parents. Businesses disappeared. Schools closed. Children suffered. Families fought over vaccines and masks. More than a million Americans eventually died.
Political movements search for explanations for catastrophes.
They also search for people to blame.
Fauci offered an almost perfect target: famous, unelected, associated with the federal bureaucracy, identified with vaccines and pandemic restrictions, publicly willing to contradict Trump—and connected, through NIH grants, however indirectly, to coronavirus research conducted in Wuhan.
Rand Paul turned that combination into a prosecution narrative.
RFK Jr. expanded it into a much larger indictment of the public-health establishment.
And Donald Trump’s movement incorporated Fauci into its broader argument that government scientists, intelligence officials, universities and the news media constitute an elite establishment willing to deceive ordinary Americans.
The result is no longer merely an investigation of the origin of a virus.
It is a political trial of science itself.
But Fauci should not be canonized
Defending scientific evidence does not require turning Anthony Fauci into a saint.
Public-health agencies made mistakes during COVID. Scientists sometimes communicated uncertainty poorly. Government officials occasionally spoke with more confidence than the evidence justified. Definitions such as “gain of function” became bureaucratic shields when plain English would have served the public better.
And China bears enormous responsibility for making the origins investigation more difficult by withholding evidence.
A genuine investigation should examine all of this.
Investigate the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Examine EcoHealth Alliance.
It should examine NIH oversight.
It should investigate laboratory safety.
And if new evidence demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a laboratory, science must accept that evidence.
But an investigation begins with evidence and follows it toward a conclusion.
An inquisition begins with the conclusion and searches for evidence that will convict the accused.
Rand Paul’s repeated declarations that Fauci belongs in prison make it difficult to regard his investigation as disinterested congressional oversight. That is why Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment cannot reasonably be treated as proof of guilt. Paul had already publicly announced the verdict he wanted.
More than 150 scientists and public-health professionals made essentially that argument before the latest hearing, describing the campaign against Fauci and other scientists as vilification rather than legitimate scientific inquiry.
The Contempt Vote: From Investigation to Political Judgment
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has now voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times at his July 29 hearing. Fauci argued that Senator Rand Paul’s repeated demands that he be prosecuted created a legitimate risk of self-incrimination. Republicans countered that President Biden’s January 2025 pardon of Fauci—covering federal offenses related to his government service from 2014 through the date of the pardon—removed that danger.
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the committee’s ranking member, denounced Paul’s decision to hold Fauci in contempt.
“If this committee now seeks to punish a witness for asserting their constitutional protected Fifth Amendment rights,” Peters said, “future witnesses will argue that appearing before Congress exposes them to punishment regardless of whether they comply with the subpoena and invoke a constitutional protection.”
Peters also called out Paul’s decision to “bypass” Senate rules and directly refer the decision to the Justice Department.
The contempt vote fits squarely into the larger argument of this essay. Congressional Republicans have moved beyond investigating whether U.S.-funded research contributed to COVID’s emergence toward assigning personal responsibility to Fauci for the catastrophe itself. Yet that extraordinary accusation requires extraordinary evidence. The scientific question—whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged through zoonotic spillover or a laboratory accident—cannot be settled by a party-line congressional vote. It appears that the Republicans on the Committee are no longer interested in the origins story, but only in how to send Dr. Fauci to jail.
American Pandemic
There is also a striking historical inversion. Fauci was not the president directing America’s pandemic response. Donald Trump was. He led the country into a COVID-19 catastrophe, and Trump’s own Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, later testified that the administration’s failures contributed to preventable deaths. In 2021, Birx said that after roughly the first 100,000 U.S. deaths, the subsequent deaths could have been substantially mitigated; in 2022 congressional testimony, she estimated that more than 130,000 deaths before vaccines were available resulted from failures in the Trump administration’s response.
Investigating what scientists knew and did is legitimate. Rewriting who held political power during the pandemic is something else.
Follow the virus, not the politician
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains one of the most important scientific questions of our time. And it should be investigated by those who do not hold political judgments. The U.S. Senate is not the place for such an investigation.
We need to know because another pandemic will come.
If COVID resulted from wildlife trafficking and zoonotic spillover, we need much stronger surveillance of animal markets, wildlife commerce and emerging viruses.
If it resulted from a laboratory accident, the world needs radically stronger oversight of high-risk biological research.
Either conclusion would have profound consequences.
But as of August 2026, the strongest publicly available scientific assessment does not establish that Anthony Fauci funded research that created SARS-CoV-2. Nor does it establish that he orchestrated a conspiracy to conceal the pandemic’s origin.
The WHO’s latest independent assessment says the weight of available evidence favors zoonotic spillover while acknowledging that missing Chinese data prevents the laboratory hypothesis from being eliminated.
That is less satisfying than a conspiracy.
There is no villain in that sentence. No mastermind. No dramatic revelation.
There is uncertainty.
And uncertainty is precisely where science begins.
In The Trump Files, I wrote that the most important lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic was the lesson historian John Barry identified: public officials must tell people the truth. Information must be grounded in facts, because anything less breeds alienation and suspicion.
Six years after COVID arrived, that lesson applies equally to Anthony Fauci’s defenders and his accusers.
- Investigate Fauci.
- Look at Paul.
- Investigate Wuhan
- And investigate NIH.
- Investigate the Chinese government.
- Investigate every credible hypothesis.
But don’t confuse accusation with evidence.
And don’t confuse a political enemy with the origin of a virus.
- Environmental Research (Elsevier), Feb. 14, 2022 ↩︎
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