For years, Paul has been unrelenting in his efforts to force more answers from Fauci, whom he has accused of lying about the likely origins of COVID-19. Paul told reporters in Washington the diary entries show Fauci painted a false picture surrounding the evidence and suppressed the so-called "lab leak" hypothesis.
"For years, he's been telling... if you interviewed him last week, he's probably still telling you... (that) the reason we think it came from nature is because they had these exotic animals, and that's where SARS came from previously. But he knew, he already knew," Paul said.
Paul is referring to entries Fauci penned early in the crisis. In a note marked February 1, 2020, Fauci recounts a conference call with researchers discussing the possible origins of the virus. The notes say, at that stage, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin, with the rest suggesting an engineered virus was possible.
Robert Gary, a virologist at Tulane University, was on that call. He told NPR that it was simply too early to rule out potential explanations.
"This is where people are not dealing with all the necessary cards that you might have to have to make a valid judgment," he said. "So I think let's collect more data and figure things out and keep all the possibilities on the table. That's what a scientist is supposed to do."
Wednesday's hearing isn't likely to resolve the long-running dispute between Paul and Fauci.
A 2024 survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a nonpartisan U.S.-based think tank, showed most scientists in the virology community share the view that genetic data map all initial cases to the Wuhan wet market, with others assigning a lower probability to a man made origin. Roughly one fifth of the experts stated that an accident was the more likely origin.