Dr. Fauci declined to comment on how he would approach the hearing. He has been combative in the past. In 2021, when Mr. Paul accused him of lying while testifying before the Senate, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” He also berated Mr. Paul for seeking campaign contributions by attacking him.
Over the weekend, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s typewritten diary, without saying how he got them. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he gave the documents to Mr. Paul and another Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, “so they could see the light of day.”
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy said that the entries “were not personal journals.”
“They were government records created on a government computer by a federal employee during one of the most consequential public health emergencies in history,” he wrote, adding that “under federal law, these documents belong to the American people.”
At the center of Mr. Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, jumping from animals to humans, as Dr. Fauci and many scientists believe, or was created in a laboratory in the Chinese city where the pandemic began. Mr. Paul insists that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022, funded dangerous research on viruses in China that spun out of control. Dr. Fauci says that is not true.
That research, called gain-of-function, involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses so that scientists can better understand how they evolve, and so that they can use that knowledge to prevent pandemics. The government places tight controls on it. On Tuesday, President Trump announced new restrictions on such work.
