Key points
- Critics said a 2021 book showed Fauci knew more about a cancelled grant than he told Congress in 2020.
- Fauci denied lying; no charges were brought, and he received a pre-emptive pardon in January 2025.
In June 2021 Republican critics of Dr Anthony Fauci, then director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), accused him of misleading Congress. The accusation followed reporting on a new book. Fauci denied lying. This page sets out the claim, the response and the later record.
The book and the grant
Nightmare Scenario, by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, was published on 29 June 2021. Among other things it described how, in April 2020, the Trump administration ordered the National Institutes of Health to cancel a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit that had funded coronavirus research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. According to the book, Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins doubted the legality of ending a peer-reviewed grant mid-cycle but reluctantly complied.
The allegation
In a June 2020 House hearing, Fauci had said the grant was cancelled because NIH was told to cancel it and that he did not know the reason. Critics argued that the book showed he knew more about the decision than he had told lawmakers, and some Republican members and commentators said he had lied. Separately, Senator Rand Paul repeatedly accused Fauci of misleading Congress about whether NIH had funded "gain-of-function" research in Wuhan, and referred him to the Justice Department in July 2021.
Fauci's response
Fauci consistently denied lying to Congress. In heated Senate exchanges in 2021 he told Senator Paul that he did not know what he was talking about, and argued that the research in question did not meet the government's regulatory definition of gain-of-function research. The Justice Department did not bring charges.
The later record
In October 2021 an NIH official told Congress that EcoHealth had failed to report promptly an experiment in which a modified bat coronavirus grew more in mice, a disclosure critics said undercut earlier assurances. Debate over the origins of Covid-19 continued, with US agencies reaching different assessments, several of them held with low confidence. In January 2025, on his last day in office, President Biden granted Fauci a pre-emptive pardon covering his public service since 2014. Fauci said he had committed no crime.
How to read the claim
Whether Fauci "lied" depends on contested questions of definition and knowledge. No court or official body has found that he committed perjury. Readers should treat the accusation as an accusation, and the defence as a defence.