The Fauci Hearings: Fair Questions, Wrong Approach

What did Dr. Anthony Fauci know, when did he know it and what did he hide from the American people?

These were the questions at the center of a three-hour hearing served up last Wednesday by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs . Chaired by Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, the committee grilled the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases over newly revealed discrepancies between his public and private statements about the origins of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, Fauci was adamant that expert opinion overwhelmingly aligned with the theory of zoonotic spillover — which held that the virus leapt the species barrier at the open wet market in Wuhan, China, where the first cases were detected in December of 2019. At the same time, he aggressively downplayed the possibility that the virus had accidentally “leaked” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where controversial gain-of-function research had been conducted in part with NIAID grants dispersed with Fauci’s knowledge.

“Just conspiracy theories,” Fauci said in a typical dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis during a 2020 podcast with Newt Gingrich .

And yet, evidence presented by the committee captures Fauci musing on the subject with an uncertainty that more closely tracked with what he was hearing from experts at the time. Writing in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020 — just two weeks before his interview with Gingrich — Fauci wrote, “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” A later diary entry reveals that in a conference call of 11 virologists organized to discuss the competing theories of origin, only two defended natural spillover; the other nine were either uncertain, or openly suspected a lab leak. This did not stop Fauci from publicly promoting the idea that the spillover theory reflected a consensus of “serious” opinion. A fuller picture of Fauci’s Slack messages , also released last week, shows Fauci strategizing with the authors of a pro-spillover article to help shut down conversation.

Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times.

When pressed by the committee about these and related matters, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times.

As the symbol and lightning rod of America’s pandemic response, it is not surprising that the spectacle of Fauci’s return to Capitol Hill would inspire reunions of fanatically pro- and rabidly anti-Fauci forces that solidified in 2020. Four years after his retirement, Fauci’s beatification remains unquestioned among much of the broad center-left, for whom he will forever be the embodiment of public service and rationality in a time of chaos and madness. In the last week, Fauci’s most fervent defenders have reemerged to argue that inquiries into the virus’ origins are a witch hunt, a dangerous distraction from our terrifying nosedive in pandemic prevention and preparedness at the national and international levels.

New York Times contributing writer Rachel Bedard compared Paul to “a contemporary Joe McCarthy” whose “show trials are bad for democracy and do nothing to get us closer to either truth or consensus.” Republicans, she wrote, were “projecting all of a difficult era’s conflicts onto Dr. Fauci” in order to “evade the harder work of figuring out what we actually should learn from his, and our, mistakes.” In the same vein, Thomas K. Lew suggested in USA Today that Paul had (future) blood on his hands: “Politicizing a public health response to a public health emergency is not only dangerous — it can be deadly.” Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association , told National Public Radio that the hearing would have a chilling effect, if not scare away the next generation of public health civil servants. “If you’re going to be threatened by members of Congress, you’re going to be a lot less willing to be frank and speak truth to power and give people the information that they desperately need to make decisions,” he said. “We can’t be tainted by a fear that if we say something, they’ll do something to destroy our careers and maybe put our lives at risk.”

Not every center-left media institution was willing to run 2020-style cover for Fauci over the revelations. “Fauci’s silence was a loss,” wrote Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker , the magazine that broke liberal ranks in the debate over COVID-19’s origins with a judicious 2021 report on the lab leak theory. “Paul may have come at the matter with theatrics and ill will,” she wrote,

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. … 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.)

But where Davidson argues for focusing on the lessons for future policy — and is generally sympathetic to Fauci, noting his “laudable, lifesaving” career spanning 38 years — MAGA is less interested in the dangers of “gain of function” research than in the spectacle of pursuing individual criminal charges. Following the hearing, Trump -aligned attorneys general in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana initiated state-level investigations into the retired octogenarian.

Waging anti-Fauci culture war will not solve the mystery of COVID-19’s origins, or assist a constructive public conversation about gain-of-function research ongoing around the world, with or without U.S. funding. Some of Fauci’s harshest critics do argue for blue-ribbon commissions into these broader issues. But let’s not stop there. Anyone truly interested in reducing the likelihood of the next pandemic should view these investigations as a start. Let’s also have official inquiries in which developers and agency chiefs are subpoenaed over their role in exacerbating biodiversity loss and ecological “ edge erosion ,” factors known to heighten the risk of viral spillover. We need attorneys general crusading on the pandemic threats posed by factory farming, antibiotics overuse and deep funding cuts to agencies responsible for disease tracking and agricultural inspection. Nothing any U.S. official may have done in 2020 is more urgent than waking up to the dangers toward which we are hurtling, ever more blindly, six years later.

The post The Fauci Hearings: Fair Questions, Wrong Approach appeared first on Truthdig .