A US Senate committee voted on Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after the former top US infectious disease official refused to answer questions about his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved a referral pushed by its Republican Chair Rand Paul of Kentucky, a long-time Fauci antagonist, on a party-line vote of 8-7.
The vote followed a hearing last week where Fauci, who is 85 and retired in 2022, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
The vote is the sharpest escalation yet in a broad Republican and Trump administration campaign to re-litigate the pandemic and hold accountable the officials who ran the US response.
Paul has pursued a years-long investigation to try to prove his and other Republicans’ conviction that Fauci orchestrated a cover-up of the coronavirus’ origins.
US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy junior has upended federal health policy around distrust of pandemic-era science, casting his overhaul of the health agencies as a reckoning with what the administration calls the coercive mandates of the Covid-19 response.