Patients arriving for eye surgery at a New Jersey surgery center were given diagnostic tests that duplicated scans they had already received, or that were unnecessary for the operation they were about to have, according to a federal indictment unsealed July 29.
The indictment alleges that in most cases nobody looked at the results. Not the surgeon who performed the operation, and not the optometrist who ordered them.
E. Bruce DiDonato, 71, of Princeton, was charged in a seven-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, two substantive counts of health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to offer and pay health care kickbacks in connection with illegal referrals, and three substantive counts of paying health care kickbacks. He has not been convicted of anything, and his defense counsel is listed in the court record as Thomas H. Barnard.
What the Government Alleges
DiDonato founded Campus Eye LLC and Campus Eye Surgery Center LLC, an optometry practice and ambulatory surgery center in Hamilton Township. In 2021, he sold part of his interest to a private equity firm and became chief executive of a newly formed management company overseeing both.
According to the Justice Department announcement, prosecutors allege DiDonato paid kickbacks and bribes to ophthalmologists in exchange for referring patients who needed eye surgery. Those patients were then given diagnostic tests at the surgery center that were duplicative of tests they had already had, or that were unnecessary for the type of surgery being performed.
The alleged concealment is the detail that makes the scheme legible. Prosecutors say the payments were papered as consulting fees under sham agreements, and paid as monthly flat fees that were in fact calculated as a percentage of what Medicare had reimbursed the optometry practice for diagnostic tests performed on that provider's referred patients the previous year. In that structure, the more testing a referring surgeon generated, the larger the check.
The indictment alleges roughly $3.4 million in fraudulent claims submitted to Medicare, of which Medicare paid about $1 million.
U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer said in the announcement that patients "were subjected to unnecessary diagnostic tests all so the defendant could enrich himself" by billing Medicare. Naomi Gruchacz, special agent in charge at the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, said: "Medicare patients deserve care guided by medical need, not illicit financial arrangements."
If convicted, DiDonato faces statutory maximums of 10 years on the health care fraud conspiracy and substantive fraud counts, five years on the kickback conspiracy count, and 10 years on each substantive kickback count. Statutory maximums are ceilings and rarely describe actual sentences.
The Company Was Not Prosecuted
One element of this case deserves plain description rather than commentary.
The Justice Department separately resolved its criminal investigation into the Campus Eye entities under Part I of the Criminal Division's Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy. It declined to prosecute the companies for the scheme prosecutors attribute to DiDonato and others, and the entities agreed to pay $1 million in disgorgement, an amount matching what the government says Medicare actually paid out.
So the corporate entities that operated the practice face no criminal charges, while the founder faces seven counts. The declination policy exists to encourage companies to self-report misconduct, and prosecutors treat individual accountability as the point. Readers can judge the tradeoff for themselves; the facts of the resolution are on the record.
Why This Matters Even If You Have Never Been to This Practice
Eye imaging is common, largely painless, and almost never explained. Optical coherence tomography, visual field testing, corneal topography, and ocular biometry are routine before cataract and retinal surgery, and most patients have no framework for knowing which were needed.
That combination is what makes the category attractive to fraud. The tests are quick, they are reimbursed, patients rarely question them, and duplication is nearly invisible when a patient sees an optometrist and a surgeon at affiliated locations.
The alleged pattern here is worth recognizing in the abstract: a referral relationship between practices, testing performed at the site the referrer sends patients to, and results that never inform the surgical plan.
Older adults on Medicare carry the most exposure, since cataract surgery is one of the most common procedures in the program. People seeing multiple eye specialists, and people whose optometrist and surgeon are part of the same organization, have more opportunity for duplicative testing without anyone noticing.
How to Check Your Own Records Without Refusing Care
The point of this is not to make anyone suspicious of a test their doctor ordered. Diagnostic imaging before eye surgery is standard and usually necessary, and declining a needed scan is a worse outcome than paying for an unnecessary one.
Reasonable questions before agreeing to repeat imaging: has this test already been done recently, and can the earlier results be obtained instead; will the surgeon actually review this before operating; and is this test specific to the procedure being planned. Asking a surgeon's office to request records from the referring optometrist is ordinary and costs nothing.
Medicare beneficiaries can review the quarterly Medicare Summary Notice, or claims in a MyMedicare account, and look for the same diagnostic code billed twice in a short window or tests on dates when no visit occurred. Commercially insured patients can do the same with an explanation of benefits, which is not a bill and shows what was billed, what was allowed, and what was paid.
Unrecognized claims can be reported to Medicare at 1-800-MEDICARE. Suspected fraud can be reported to the HHS Office of Inspector General hotline at 1-800-HHS-TIPS. State Senior Medicare Patrol programs help beneficiaries read their statements at no cost. Reporting a claim does not affect eligibility or care.
What Happens Next
The case proceeds in federal court in New Jersey. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Criminal Division's Fraud Section are handling it, with investigation by the FBI's Newark field office and HHS-OIG. No trial date has been reported, and the indictment remains unproven.
What is unknown is how many patients received tests prosecutors consider unnecessary, whether any patient experienced clinical harm rather than billing harm, whether the referring ophthalmologists will face charges, and whether patients will be notified individually.
The bottom line: a federal indictment alleges a New Jersey eye care founder paid surgeons for referrals and billed Medicare roughly $3.4 million for duplicative or unnecessary diagnostic tests. Medicare beneficiaries having eye surgery are the group most affected. The reasonable action is to review benefit statements and ask whether a repeat scan is needed and who will read it, not to decline recommended testing. The central uncertainty is that none of the allegations has been proven.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is alleged in this case? That the founder of a New Jersey eye care group paid ophthalmologists kickbacks for surgical referrals and then billed Medicare for diagnostic tests that were duplicative or unnecessary, totaling about $3.4 million in claims.
Has anyone been convicted? No. These are charges only, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Was the company charged too? No. The Justice Department declined to prosecute the corporate entities under its voluntary self-disclosure policy, and they agreed to pay $1 million in disgorgement.
Should I refuse eye imaging my doctor orders? No. Imaging before eye surgery is usually necessary. Ask whether the test was done recently, whether earlier results can be used, and whether the surgeon will review it.
How do I tell if I was billed for a test I did not need? Review your Medicare Summary Notice or explanation of benefits for the same test billed twice in a short period, or tests on dates you had no appointment.
Where do I report suspected fraud? Call 1-800-MEDICARE for unrecognized claims, or the HHS Office of Inspector General hotline at 1-800-HHS-TIPS. Your state Senior Medicare Patrol can help review statements for free.
Will reporting affect my coverage? No. Reporting a suspicious claim does not affect your eligibility or your care.
Article 9
Fauci Declines to Answer Senate Questions on COVID Origins, Citing the Fifth Amendment
By: Dorothy Brooks
Meta Description: Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing on COVID origins. What the hearing covered and what it does not change.
URL Slug: fauci-senate-hearing-fifth-amendment-covid-origins-2026
SEO Keywords: Fauci Senate hearing, COVID origins investigation, Rand Paul Fauci, lab leak evidence, WHO COVID origins report, Fifth Amendment testimony
Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the morning of July 29 and declined to answer questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment," Fauci told the committee, saying he did so on the advice of his attorneys and noting that it pained him given his record of cooperating with Congress. He had been subpoenaed by the committee's chairman, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
For readers, the most useful thing to establish immediately is what the hearing was and was not. It was a congressional oversight proceeding about events from 2019 through 2022. It was not a review of any current medical recommendation, and no CDC or FDA guidance changed as a result of it. Hearings are not the mechanism through which clinical guidance is issued or withdrawn.
What Happened at the Hearing
Fauci directed the committee to his prior testimony, saying he has answered similar questions before, and accused Paul of being fixated on seeing him imprisoned.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right available to any witness, and it is not evidence of wrongdoing. Fauci has not been charged with any crime. Courts have long held that no adverse inference may be drawn from a criminal defendant's silence, and readers should not treat the invocation as an answer to the underlying question.
The hearing followed Paul's release of more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's private diary entries covering December 2019 through 2022, the final years of his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He retired in December 2022. Paul posted the documents, removed them, and reposted them with redactions. He also released a 465 page collection of related records and emails from 2001 to 2015.
Paul argues the entries show a gap between Fauci's private thinking and his public statements, writing that what Fauci "wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories." He has pointed to a February 2020 entry describing a call with scientists in which Fauci noted there was not total agreement about the virus's origins.
Later entries in the same set record Fauci writing that he was almost certain the virus evolved naturally through a species jump while keeping an open mind about a lab leak, and that two possible alternatives are not necessarily equally probable.
Fauci's representatives distributed a document disputing Paul's characterizations along with a letter from his lawyers describing the senator's efforts as a "years-long public crusade." Paul did not respond to NPR's requests for comment before publication. It is not publicly established how Paul obtained the diary documents.
Where the Scientific Evidence Actually Stands
This is the part with genuine substance, and it is more unsettled than either side's framing suggests.
The prevailing scientific assessment is that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose naturally. A World Health Organization scientific advisory group, drawing on three years of work by 27 members, concluded in a report issued in June 2025that the weight of available evidence points toward zoonotic spillover, either directly from bats or through an intermediate host. Peer reviewed analysis published in Cell has mapped the concentration of susceptible wildlife and the virus within a specific section of the Wuhan market.
That is not unanimity. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said "all hypotheses must remain on the table," including both zoonotic spillover and a laboratory incident, and has repeatedly asked China to share information it has not released. Supporters of a laboratory origin note that published analyses depend on incomplete data supplied by the Chinese government.
U.S. intelligence agencies are themselves split. Some lean toward natural origin. The Department of Energy and the FBI have assessed a laboratory origin, with the Department of Energy holding that view at low confidence, a term the government uses when information is scant, fragmented, or questionable.
On the specific question of whether early private uncertainty indicates concealment, working scientists interviewed about the diary entries described that uncertainty as ordinary. Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College, characterized the early questions about a lab leak as "normal scientific questioning" at a time when very little was known. Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert and immunologist at Johns Hopkins, said entertaining multiple theories and looking for holes in them is "kind of what science is all about."
What This Does Not Tell You About Current Health Guidance
Trust in institutions is a real and legitimate consideration, and it is not this article's place to tell anyone how to resolve it. What can be said factually is narrower: the 2026 hearing produced no new information bearing on whether any specific current recommendation is sound.
Current guidance rests on its own evidence base, which is separate from the origins question and separate from any individual's conduct six years ago. Whether a particular vaccine is recommended for a particular age group, whether a screening interval is appropriate, whether a treatment is indicated, these rest on trial data and review processes that this hearing did not examine or alter.
Readers who want to evaluate a recommendation directly can do so without relying on anyone's characterization of it. CDC recommendation pages carry a last reviewed date, and the advisory committee that sets vaccine recommendations publishes its meeting materials, votes, and the evidence frameworks behind them. FDA approval documents include the review memos and the data submitted. Reading a recommendation's stated evidence and date is a more reliable way to assess it than inferring anything from a hearing.
Anyone weighing a specific decision, a vaccine for a child, a test, a treatment, is better served by a conversation with a clinician who knows their history than by any news coverage, including this article.
What Happens Next
Paul has not said publicly whether he will seek further action, and any referral or contempt proceeding would require committee and chamber steps that have not been announced. Fauci's legal team has disputed the substance of the allegations. The committee has not posted written testimony.
On the science, the WHO advisory group has stated that its assessment could change if China releases additional data, which it has not. Absent that, the origins question is likely to remain unresolved.
The bottom line: Fauci declined to answer the committee's questions, citing a constitutional right, and has not been charged with any crime. The audience most affected is anyone trying to sort a political dispute from a medical one. The reasonable step for a reader weighing a health decision is to check the current recommendation and its date directly, or ask a clinician. The central uncertainty, six years on, is the origin of the virus itself.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What happened at the hearing? Anthony Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena on July 29, 2026, and declined to answer questions about pandemic origins, invoking his Fifth Amendment right.
Does invoking the Fifth mean he did something wrong? No. It is a constitutional right available to any witness, and no adverse inference should be drawn from it. Fauci has not been charged with any crime.
What is Senator Paul alleging? That diary entries he released show a difference between what Fauci said privately and publicly about whether the virus could have come from a laboratory. Fauci's representatives dispute that characterization.
What do scientists say about COVID's origin? A WHO advisory group concluded in June 2025 that the weight of evidence points to natural spillover from animals. The WHO director-general has said all hypotheses remain open, and U.S. intelligence agencies are divided.
Did any CDC or FDA guidance change because of the hearing? No. Congressional hearings do not issue or withdraw clinical guidance.
How can I check what current guidance actually says? CDC recommendation pages show a last reviewed date, the vaccine advisory committee publishes its meeting materials and votes, and FDA approval packages include review documents.
Who should I ask about my own health decisions? A clinician who knows your medical history. General news coverage cannot account for individual circumstances.
