Senate Republicans try to smear Fauci over COVID, but he refuses to play their game
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- Dr. Anthony Fauci deprived Rand Paul of a chance to hold a show trial over COVID
There’s a comic trope beloved by playwrights, novelists and screenwriters about the fighters all suited up for battle, only to discover that their adversary refuses to play.
A real-life example of this stratagem unfolded Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) convened a committee hearing aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into saying something under oath that Paul could use to prosecute him for perjury.
Fauci, who was appearing before Paul’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena, took the weapon out of Paul’s hands by simply refusing to answer a single question other than to state — 116 times by my count — “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution.”
What day of the week is it today? What color tie are you wearing?
— Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), tries to trap Anthony Fauci into abandoning his 5th Amendment defense
During the nearly three-hour hearing, Fauci’s response left Paul and his seven GOP colleagues on the panel confronting a brick wall. They resorted to the common, if infantile tactic of asking repeated simple but irrelevant questions in an attempt to embarrass their target.
“What day of the week is it today?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked. “What color tie are you wearing?” He elicited the same boilerplate response.
Presumably most of the senators were aware that protocol requires a witness pleading the Fifth to plead it to all questions. Certainly Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who participated in this performative charade, knew that. During a 2000 civil deposition in a lawsuit related to the healthcare firm Columbia/HCA, of which he was chief executive until 1997, he pleaded the Fifth at least 55 times, using phraseology almost identical to Fauci’s.
(Scott left his post after it was learned that his company was under investigation for filing false claims with Medicare and other government healthcare programs. By 2000, it had paid $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and restitution, which the Justice Department called “by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a healthcare fraud investigation.” Scott wasn’t charged personally with wrongdoing.)
Trump knows too. At a civil deposition in 2022, he invoked the Fifth more than 440 times.
They all know too that the Supreme Court has upheld the idea that the Fifth protects not only the guilty but also the innocent. So their shtick about how Fauci wouldn’t be pleading the Fifth unless he had something to hide is sheer duplicity.
Fauci, 85, and his lawyers presumably knew they had no choice but to turn away all questions. Experience told him that engaging with Paul would merely feed what Fauci, in a brief opening statement, labeled Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic.
For months, adherents of the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese government laboratory have hoped that an assessment President Biden ordered from the nation’s intelligence agencies would validate their suspicions. Their hopes are now dashed.
It was left to the Republicans to fulminate into the wind about how Fauci is a “megalomaniac” (Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio) or “a villain” (Scott), or worse. Early in the proceedings, Paul ordered Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, from the hearing room for trying to make a statement on his client’s behalf.
Let’s examine the backdrop to Wednesday’s farce.
As I have documented many times over the last five years, Republicans and right-wingers are fixated on the notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, escaped from a Chinese lab to infect the rest of the world.
There is not a speck of evidence to validate that theory. Rather, it’s the overwhelming consensus of epidemiologists and virologists that COVID originated in wildlife, probably bats, and migrated to humankind via the illicit trade in wildlife in China and other south Asian territories, a process known as zoonosis.
The case against Fauci, who retired in 2022, rests on several false claims. One is that as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he manipulated scientists into downplaying the lab-leak theory in favor of zoonosis.
His accusers base this idea on questions raised by the first scientists who examined the virus in early 2020, literally days and weeks after it appeared and it was a pathogen new to everybody. Some hadn’t seen some features of the virus in the wild, so they pondered whether it was man-made.
But they were wrong — the features were familiar to virologists, just not to the ones examining SARS-CoV-2. Following the science, they came to discard the lab-leak theory as nothing more than an exceptionally remote possibility; that conclusion has held up over time. Fauci didn’t downplay the possibility of a lab leak in his discussions with scientists, as his enemies claim, but instead urged them repeatedly to follow their research wherever it took them.
Paul’s particular hobby horse in this debate is the claim that Fauci downplayed the lab-leak theory because NIAID had provided funding for “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same teeming city where COVID was first seen, which made it complicit in the pandemic. For Paul’s purposes, “gain-of-function” is a shibboleth, akin to conservative attacks on “DEI” and “critical race theory”—useful because laypersons don’t know what it is but it sure sounds sinister.
How should we think about anti-vaccine activists who die from COVID?
Generically, the term refers to laboratory work that augments natural qualities of a microbe to facilitate experimental scrutiny or achieve a necessary goal, such as allowing microbes to produce a flu vaccine or bacteria to produce artificial insulin.
From 2014 to 2017, the U.S. suspended gain-of-function experiments to develop a standard identifying research that might produce “potential pandemic pathogens.”
The lab-leak camp asserts that NIAID-funded experiments created a virus in the Chinese lab with features making it infectious for humans.
Professional virologists say that nothing like that is possible given the state of science. A declassified report issued in 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the U.S. had no evidence that any genetic engineering at the Wuhan lab “involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.”
NIAID examined the work it funded in China against the post-2017 standard and determined it did not breach that standard. Paul raised that very issue with Fauci at a contentious July 2021 hearing, but Fauci rejected it forthrightly.
“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci told him.
The other brief against Fauci aired by the GOP majority on Paul’s committee is that Fauci is somehow responsible for the anti-pandemic steps undertaken by states and localities across the U.S. in the heat of the pandemic. The absurdity of this contention is manifest, since Fauci never had any authority to impose any regulations on anybody.
No, the damage was done by the virus, not Fauci, and it unquestionably was mitigated by the measures he recommended. Even so, some 1.2 million Americans have died from the disease — many of them succumbing because anti-vaccine agitators have discouraged them from getting COVID shots.
For the right wing, “Fauci” is just a slogan. Here’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, boasting in a 2021 fundraising appeal, “I refused to blindly follow Dr. Fauci ... and allow him to strip Floridians of their God-given freedoms” by resisting lockdowns and school closures. Never mind that Florida emerged from the pandemic with one of the worst COVID mortality rates in the country.
The House GOP attacks Anthony Fauci, one of America’s most accomplished public health officials, labeling him a ‘criminal’ and worse without a speck of substantiation
The truth is that while school closures wreaked damage on children’s learning opportunities, they almost certainly saved the lives of thousands of children and their family members.
“What would have happened had schools remained open without any mitigation measures?” New York neurologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has asked.
The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pegged at about 2,000, “would have been higher had 60-70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months’ time in 2020,” Howard reckoned. “It’s reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died.”
Fauci plainly understood that anything he said at the hearing would only be weaponized against him through selective disclosure — as happened when Paul this week released about 1,000 pages from Fauci’s personal diary dating from the pandemic era.
None of it validated Paul’s accusations. And nothing at Wednesday’s hearing told us anything new about COVID’s origins or the course of the pandemic. That’s a dangerous shame, because the GOP’s obsession with falsely blaming Fauci for a tragic global natural event for purely partisan purposes will only make it harder to fight the next pandemic, which inevitably will arrive, someday.
While they’re distracted with their witch hunt, important work will have to be done to stave it off. But doing it while the GOP goes off on its malevolent persecution of Fauci and other scientists will be like trying to swim upstream against a torrent of slime.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that the Senate hearing chaired by Sen. Rand Paul was a staged political spectacle designed to entrap Anthony Fauci into a perjury charge rather than a genuine effort to understand the origins of COVID-19 or improve future pandemic response.[1][2][3]
It contends that Fauci’s blanket decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the advice of counsel was a rational legal strategy, given years of hostile questioning and repeated accusations from Paul and other Republicans that he lied about the pandemic’s origins and federal research funding.[2][5][7][8][18]
The piece suggests Republican senators’ mocking questions — such as asking what day of the week it was or the color of Fauci’s tie — were meant to humiliate rather than inform, underscoring that the hearing was performative rather than substantive.[1][2][18]
It emphasizes that the Fifth Amendment protects innocent as well as guilty parties, and argues that GOP claims that only someone with “something to hide” would invoke it are politically opportunistic and legally misleading.[5][20]
The article maintains that there is no credible evidence supporting the claim that U.S.-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology created or released SARS‑CoV‑2, pointing to official assessments and expert analyses that have found no link between NIH/NIAID grants and the pandemic.[4][13][16][18]
It highlights the scientific consensus that a natural zoonotic spillover from wildlife to humans remains the most likely explanation for COVID‑19’s origin, noting that numerous virologists and epidemiologists continue to judge a lab leak as a remote possibility lacking supporting evidence.[1][13][19]
The column contends that Fauci did not pressure researchers to abandon the lab‑leak hypothesis, but instead encouraged scientists to follow the data wherever it led, a stance consistent with his recent testimony in which he called claims of a cover‑up “preposterous.”[13][17][19]
It argues that Republicans have turned “gain-of-function” into a political buzzword that sounds ominous to laypeople but often refers to routine laboratory work, while independent reviews and congressional inquiries have found no evidence that Fauci approved experiments that could plausibly have produced SARS‑CoV‑2.[4][13][16][18]
The piece asserts that blaming Fauci for lockdowns, mask mandates and school closures misstates his role, noting he had no legal authority to impose restrictions and instead offered public health recommendations that state and local officials adopted to reduce deaths.[2][8][15]
It stresses that, despite the social and educational costs of school closures, those measures likely saved thousands of lives, reflecting a wider body of expert opinion that early mitigation slowed transmission among children and families at a time when vaccines were unavailable.[10][15]
The article argues that “Fauci” has become a political symbol for the right, useful in fundraising and mobilizing anger, citing long‑running campaigns to “fire” or prosecute him that have continued despite bipartisan investigations finding no evidence he funded the creation of the virus or lied to Congress.[10][13][16][17]
Finally, it warns that the continuing partisan campaign to depict Fauci and other scientists as villains will make it harder to confront the next pandemic, because it erodes trust in public health expertise and diverts congressional attention from substantive preparedness work.[2][3][16][18]
Different views on the topic
Republican senators at the hearing framed Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment as proof that the former official has “something to hide,” arguing that someone who had acted properly would have welcomed the chance to defend a record on COVID‑19 rather than refuse to answer more than 100 questions.[2][5][6][8]
Sen. Rand Paul and allies have long contended that Fauci misled Congress and the public about the origins of the pandemic, insisting that he downplayed or concealed evidence pointing to a possible lab leak in Wuhan and gave more weight to zoonotic explanations because U.S. agencies helped fund related research.[1][4][7][11][12]
These critics argue that NIH and NIAID grants routed through organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance supported “gain-of-function” work that enhanced coronavirus traits, and they assert that Fauci either minimized those risks or misrepresented the nature of the research when testifying in earlier hearings.[4][12][18]
Paul and other Republican lawmakers point to thousands of pages from Fauci’s pandemic-era diary and emails, claiming that private comments about uncertainties in the virus’s origin and internal debates over research funding contradict his public statements, and therefore suggest that Fauci was not fully candid with Americans.[2][4][11]
Several GOP senators used the hearing to denounce Fauci’s guidance on masking, social distancing, business restrictions and school closures, arguing that these measures caused severe economic, educational and psychological harm that outweighed their health benefits and that Fauci has never adequately acknowledged that damage.[2][6][8][15]
Critics on the right frequently portray Fauci as a “villain” or “megalomaniac,” alleging that he relished media attention, prioritized celebrity interactions and personal status, and helped enforce what they view as heavy‑handed federal and state responses that infringed on civil liberties in the name of public health.[6][9][12]
Some Republicans call for Fauci to face criminal consequences, including perjury or contempt of Congress charges, arguing that conflicting statements on issues such as mask effectiveness, distancing guidelines, and the likelihood of a lab origin demonstrate that he lied or at least misled lawmakers during previous testimony.[5][7][8][14]
Conservative commentators and officials also contend that invoking the Fifth Amendment undermines public trust, saying that a public servant with decades of experience has a responsibility to answer questions about decisions that affected millions of people, regardless of political friction or legal risk.[2][6][21]
Opponents have used Fauci as a symbol of broader skepticism toward scientific and public health institutions, arguing that pandemic policies were driven by bureaucrats who were insulated from the consequences and that future crises should rely less on centralized expert advice and more on individual choice and state autonomy.[6][9][12]
At the same time, some Republican-led inquiries continue to press for more access to records from NIH, EcoHealth Alliance and intelligence agencies, asserting that key questions about the Wuhan lab, U.S. oversight of risky research, and the internal handling of competing origin theories remain unanswered and warrant further scrutiny.[4][7][12][18]
