Today, May 11, 2026, the statute of limitations expires for indicting Anthony Fauci for lying under oath about gain-of-function research.
On May 11, 2021, Fauci testified before the Senate that the NIH "categorically" did not fund gain-of-function research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. Senator Rand Paul filed a criminal referral to the DOJ, re-referred it in July 2025, and spent the last week publicly counting down the days until today's deadline.
The federal statute of limitations for making false statements to Congress is five years. That clock runs out today. The DOJ under the Biden administration took no action on the referral. The DOJ under the Trump administration, despite having months to act, has not indicted either.
Since Fauci's testimony, internal NIH documents and emails have shown that the agency was aware the research it funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology met the definition of gain-of-function under its own policies. A House select subcommittee concluded that the pandemic was "most likely the result of a research-related incident" in Wuhan. Fauci himself acknowledged in closed-door testimony that the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory.
None of it mattered. Five years of evidence, congressional hearings, criminal referrals, and public pressure, and the clock simply ran out. No charges. No indictment. No accountability.
(SenRandPaul) posted today: "Today, the statute of limitations expires on the possibility of indicting Anthony Fauci for denying under oath that he funded gain-of-function research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, the origin city of the pandemic."
