NewzA 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 longtime 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, the right to remain silent, 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 Jr 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.
Both men blame Fauci and have written books criticizing him. Democrats introduced five motions to postpone the vote, all of which failed along party lines. One, offered by the committee's top Democrat, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, sought to have Paul commit not to bypass a full Senate vote by referring the matter directly to the Justice Department.
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