Joe Biden knew just what he was doing when he issued the former chief medical adviser to the White House, Anthony Fauci, with a pre-emptive pardon at the end of his presidency in 2025.
Fauci, a renowned immunologist and the former head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has long been a hate figure of the American right for his role in the response to the Covid pandemic. Sure enough, in late July, Fauci’s reckoning came when he was grilled for hours by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, led by Fauci’s arch-enemy, senator Rand Paul.
It was a grotesque affair wholly comparable to the show trials of officials in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Fauci incurred right wing ire for advocating lockdowns (at the discretion of state governors), masks and vaccines, all of them regarded as symbols of oppression by conspiracy-deranged Republicans. Famously, he couldn’t conceal his despair as he stood behind Trump in 2020 while the president made lunatic suggestions about how to deal with the virus.
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But what really makes the Republicans truly frenzied is their conviction that Fauci greenlit US involvement in research on viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which many of them now believe created the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Some of them consider the 85-year-old Fauci directly responsible for the million-plus deaths in the US during the pandemic.
It is not worth asking whether they truly believe this or adopt it as just another tribal position to appease their devotees. All we need know is that most scientific experts consider such views absurd.
There is no evidence that the Covid virus came from a Chinese lab, and while that possibility still cannot be discounted, current evidence strongly suggests the virus had a natural origin in an animal population. One can ask legitimate questions about the wisdom or value of some of the gain-of-function research (which can enhance the transmission or virulence of viruses) supported by both the US and China, but the idea that Fauci personally approved and then covered up work that could have led to a Covid-like virus is nuts (he himself called it “preposterous” in a previous Senate hearing in 2024).
On the contrary, Fauci is widely admired for the calm and reasonable way he tried, in the face of Trump’s flailing antics, to guide the pandemic response and accelerate work on the vaccines. He was certainly not infallible – he was initially too dismissive, for example, of the idea that the virus was airborne. But the US was lucky to have him in charge, moderating Trump’s irrationality.
In light of this, the Senate hearing was ugly in the extreme, as Republicans lined up to finally vent their ire. Senator Josh Hawley told Fauci “you got rich while people were dying”; Paul took the opportunity to flog his lab-leak obsession once more.
Fauci, meanwhile, said nothing in response. On legal advice, he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times to avoid all the traps set for him. This inevitably incensed his accusers even more, and the committee (with a Republican majority) has now voted him in contempt of Congress. Whether this can lead to any prosecution remains to be seen.
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Trump predictably laid into Fauci before the hearing. “His ideas were CRAZY!” he posted on Truth Social. “Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China.”
Biden, says Trump, “made Fauci a ‘King!” He has removed security protection from Fauci, who has been inundated with death threats. Meanwhile, Fauci’s former position heading NIAID now looks likely to be taken by pharma executive Steven Quay, a lab-leak conspiracist.
This unedifying spectacle presents a test to the scientific community, who should condemn it in the strongest terms – not just for Fauci’s sake, but also to push back on what seems to be a growing tendency to rewrite the history of the pandemic.
