What We Know About Dr. Fauci Pleading the Fifth in Senate Hearing on Covid Origins

After Dr. Anthony S. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself at the start of a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Republicans spent the next three hours battering him with questions and allegations as he sat in silence. Citing thousands of pages of government records, they held Dr. Fauci, the government’s top Covid adviser during the pandemic, responsible for school closures and lockdowns; accused him of enriching himself as people died; and even mocked his interactions with celebrities. Most significantly, they accused him of funding research that led…

Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame

The world was just awakening to the novel coronavirus, and a full-fledged pandemic was still in the future, when Dr. Anthony S. Fauci jotted a note in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020, musing about whether the virus might have originated in an open-air “wet market,” where live animals were sold, in Wuhan, China. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Dr. Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease expert, wrote. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” Those private…

Hearing on Covid’s Origins Promises Politics Mixed With Substance

WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Wednesday will dig into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in a hearing that promises to be filled with political theater alongside substantive questions about laboratory safety and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the worst public health crisis in a century. The hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is expected to focus largely on the intensifying debate over whether Covid-19 was the result of a laboratory leak. In advance of the session, Republicans issued a memorandum critical of…

Zero-Covid Protests in China Shake Global Markets

Crypto investors see trouble ahead Crypto asset prices sank again on Monday even as Binance, the industry’s biggest exchange, tried to restore investor trust by pushing for greater transparency across its exchange following the collapse of its rival, FTX, earlier this month. How bad could it get? Mark Mobius, a co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, told Bloomberg this morning that his new price target for Bitcoin is $10,000, implying a further drop of nearly 40 percent. Binance sought to calm investor nerves. This weekend, Changpeng Zhao, its founder, said that…

Fauci Says Senator Rand Paul Is Fueling Threats Against Him

A Senate hearing on the federal government’s Covid response briefly turned into a fierce back-and-forth between Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, the latest in a series of heated exchanges between the two men stretching back to the early days of the pandemic. Mr. Paul accused Dr. Fauci of plotting with colleagues to undermine scientists with opposing views on the virus, something Dr. Fauci denied doing. The senator cited an email exchange between Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, a former director of the National Institutes…