The Failures of the Fauci Hearing
About an hour into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance before a Senate committee last week, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, expressed skepticism about a passage in Fauci’s personal diary regarding the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “Did you literally lie to your own diary?” Johnson asked. For a second, Fauci almost seemed to laugh, and there was a glimpse of the public-health official who had charmed much of the country during the pandemic, with his air of amiable competence. But the moment passed. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” he said. He repeated that line dozens of times in the course of three hours, looking more sombre and reserved and—at the age of eighty-five—notably older than he had six and a half years ago, when the world first became acquainted with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Fauci’s decision to take the Fifth was understandable. The hearing was engineered by Senator Rand Paul, who has accused the doctor of lying about the origins of COVID-19 in order to cover up his own supposed culpability and misdeeds. Fauci, in a brief opening statement, said that the senator had an “unhinged obsession with me,” and had made “slanderous comments.” It was Paul’s office that released Fauci’s diary—more than a thousand pages of notes, articles, and internet memes—which was apparently retrieved from a government computer at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who now oversees the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where Fauci worked until 2022. A measure of Paul’s approach is the title he gave the entries: “Tony’s Diary!,” in Barbie-pink script, with a heart dotting the letter “i.”
Fauci led NIAID for thirty-eight years and played a laudable, lifesaving role in combatting both H.I.V./AIDS and COVID-19, but since his retirement he has had to live with not only mockery—President Trump has called him an “idiot,” a “phony,” and a “terrible ‘athlete’ ”—but with death threats. In January, 2025, President Biden preëmptively pardoned Fauci for any federal crimes related to his public service during the prior eleven years, citing the possibility of “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.” But the pardon wouldn’t protect him from a state prosecution or from any perjury charge that could be drummed up from his testimony now. In any event, Paul said that he would try to get Fauci charged with contempt of Congress.
Yet Fauci’s silence was a loss. Paul may have come at the matter with theatrics and ill will, but some of his questions, in their most basic forms, are worth exploring, because the debate about where the novel coronavirus came from is ongoing, divisive, and important. One scenario, which Fauci has favored, involves a naturally occurring jump from bats to humans, probably via some other species; another postulates a lab leak, most likely from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the Chinese city where COVID-19 first emerged. Some of the Wuhan lab’s work involved developing new variants of coronaviruses. (Embedded in the Fauci-Paul conflict is a genuine dispute over the definition and risks of what is called “gain of function” research.) The institute also received funding from NIAID, via a sub-grant from a nonprofit. According to NIAID, however, the coronaviruses that were the subject of that grant were not closely related to the one that caused the pandemic.
Fauci, in his opening statement, noted that he had testified before or briefed Congress “well over two hundred times” in his long career, including on COVID-19 and its origins. When he was confronted by Paul at a 2021 hearing, Fauci gave as good as he got. He may feel that he doesn’t have much left to say—asked and answered. But he had a unique role in a traumatic mass experience that is still being felt and assessed. Paul isn’t the only one who’d like to hear more.
From the beginning, after all, Fauci was an influential voice in the government response to the pandemic, and in some ways served as its anchor. There are many aspects of the early days that seem surreal now: the mobile morgues in New York City, the daily banging of pots and pans, and the juncture in which Donald Trump treated Fauci as his brainy sidekick. That relationship inevitably turned bad, as the President became impatient with the pandemic and demanded politicized boosterism from Fauci.
If the diary entries are any indication, Fauci, in the midst of the pandemic, also savored his own press coverage and lionization. There are too many mentions of Julia Roberts and of Fauci bobblehead dolls. In the hearing, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, accused Fauci of being on a narcissistic “power trip” (which is the kind of journey that Hawley himself seems to relish). In Fauci’s defense, idolatry is a group effort. Thousands of Americans were buying those bobbleheads, and someone had to publish the flattering articles he read with pleasure. Particularly after his split with Trump, Fauci became something of a politicized totem, for better and worse.
Despite the near-miracle of the vaccine, which became available in December, 2020, there was much about the pandemic response that was far from perfect, in both blue and red states. Why, for example, wasn’t there an all-government effort to get schools reopened sooner and more consistently? There were reasonable concerns about infection and the impact on teachers and on vulnerable family members. Still, the costs of those closures have become more clear with each passing year.
In the hearing, Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, observed that “it’s tempting to turn one person into the scapegoat” in a crisis for which “hundreds of officials” across two Administrations were responsible. Paul and his Republican colleagues did not resist that temptation. Paul ejected one of Fauci’s lawyers. Senator Bernie Moreno, of Ohio, told a story about a woman who he said had been arrested for watching a middle-school football game, from mostly empty bleachers, without a mask, and punctuated it by snapping at Fauci, “Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?”
Watching Fauci as he sat listening was a reminder of how little anyone really knew back in 2020. Most of the world was fumbling and scared, and Fauci seemed to have some idea of what to do. But, even acting on the best evidence available, and with the best of intentions, there were times when he, too, must have been guessing. Realizing that truth would be a route toward not only better preparedness going forward but also a more general granting of grace. If Fauci has regrets about the pandemic, he wouldn’t be alone. ♦