Key events
Fauci to face questions from Senate Republicans over pandemic origins
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Senators are expected to question Anthony Fauci, the former veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), about whether the Covid-19 virus began as a “lab leak” in a high-profile hearing later today.
Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the Covid-19 pandemic, will give testimony as part of a longtime Republican investigation into the origins of the pandemic, led by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Fauci will likely be quizzed about whether the Covid-19 virus began as a “lab leak”, a claim virologists have argued is unlikely.
While Republicans have characterized their work as investigating “the origins of Covid-19 and risky taxpayer-funded life science research”, scientists have characterized Paul’s investigation as “vilification and harassment” of Fauci, who led Niaid for 38 years before retiring in 2022.
“For years, Americans were told a lab origin wasn’t just unlikely – it was dismissed outright by the very people funding and reviewing this research,” Paul, who chairs the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, where Fauci is scheduled to testify, said last week.
Fauci, who is 85, served under seven US presidents and through numerous health crises, including the HIV crisis, Ebola outbreaks and the first coronavirus outbreak, called Sars-CoV-1. He became a household name overnight when the Covid-19 pandemic halted social life in 2020.
The “lab leak” theory has since gained significant traction in Republican circles. In just one example, the White House published a treatise on the theory in April 2025 that served as a rationale for defunding the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
-
Donald Trump met Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, before giving the eulogy at the funeral of Lindsey Graham.
-
The US Senate voted to confirm Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence, installing Donald Trump’s pick in the role despite his lack of prior experience with intelligence and concerns that he will be “Trump’s election conspiracy wingman”.
-
With Volodymyr Zelenskyy watching from the Senate gallery, the US Senate voted 86 to 12 to advance the “Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act”.
-
Democratic senators said that they would work to eliminate the expansive tariff authority the sanctions bill would give Trump.
-
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told Fox News on Tuesday that Donald Trump had, again, agreed to allow Ukraine to manufacture its own Patriot air defense interceptors to defend against Russian ballistic missile attacks.
