Anthony Fauci’s high-profile Senate hearing: what we learned

Six years on from Covid crisis, Republicans still politicizing science – and Fauci remains a political punching bag A US Senate committee hearing featuring Dr Anthony Fauci revealed at least one certainty: six years after the pandemic, politicizing science remains a vital political tactic. The high-profile hearing was pitched by its Republican chair, Rand Paul of Kentucky, as an investigation into the origins of the Covid pandemic. It quickly became a forum for recrimination of a once-leading US government scientist by Republican senators. Fauci, a career civil servant who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (Niaid), declined throughout the hearing to answer questions. Here are five takeaways from Wednesday’s hearing. The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely. This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire