2 hours ago

Dr Fauci made mistakes. But his persecution is a travesty | Margaret Sullivan

Like the rest of us, Anthony Fauci is far from perfect. His influential guidance, as the country’s top infectious-disease specialist during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, certainly didn’t get everything right.

A great deal about the deadly disease – where it came from, how it spread, how best to protect the public – was unknown, or was being learned midstream, during a crisis.

Decisions needed to be made in real time, and those decisions had major consequences.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see more clearly. It’s easy to second-guess Fauci, and others who guided policy about masks, research and closures of businesses and schools.

But surely, the 85-year-old physician and immunologist doesn’t deserve what’s happening right now, as a highly politicized Republican-led Senate committee attempted to humiliate him, possibly trap him into perjuring himself, and then voted – along party lines – to hold him in contempt of Congress.

No surprise, really, that Fauci, now retired from his public post, invoked the fifth amendment more than 100 times during last week’s Senate committee hearing.

That’s the action that – though reasonable enough given all the circumstances – is the supposed impetus for holding him in contempt. Now the committee has referred the matter to the justice department for possible criminal prosecution.

Fauci could see the writing on the wall as this trumped-up hearing began. In his opening statement, he singled out the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, the Republican committee chairperson.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars’,” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

Paul has long held that Fauci funded research in China that began the pandemic, and then lied about it. Fauci strongly denies all of that.

Joe Biden saw something like this coming, which is why he pre-emptively pardoned Fauci before leaving the White House in early 2025. Since then, Senate Republicans, led by Rand Paul, have subpoenaed and released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s diary, pointing to inconsistencies in his private beliefs and his public guidance.

Biden’s pardon doesn’t cover anything that happened after January of last year, nor does it protect Fauci from state or local prosecution. He remains vulnerable.

Granted, it’s never ideal for someone so influential or prominent to take the fifth. It can’t help but look like he’s hiding something.

But many legal experts understand exactly why he did it.

Fauci “knew the point of the hearing was to find a basis to prosecute him,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, told PBS. “He found the safest way to minimize that from happening.”

Fauci is far from the only public official to invoke the right not to answer potentially incriminating questions, whether during a trial, a hearing or something else.

In fact, Donald Trump did just that – more than 400 times – during a civil deposition in 2022, run by the New York attorney general’s office during its civil fraud investigation into the Trump organization’s business and financial practices. And so have many other prominent public officials for a whole host of reasons.

This politicized persecution of Fauci goes back years, as rightwing commentators and politicians made him into their supervillain.

Latching on to some of Fauci’s emails as early as 2021, Republican senators and members of Congress called for his immediate firing from his high-level governmental post. And for years, Fauci and his family received repeated and, he felt, credible death threats.

Rightwing media joined right in.

Steve Bannon’s podcast was kicked off Twitter/X (before the Musk era) after he called for Fauci’s beheading, saying of Fauci and the former FBI chief Christopher Wray: “I’d put the heads on pikes.” (A Bannon representative claimed the comments were metaphorical.)

So much craziness. So much dangerous rhetoric. An “unhinged obsession”, in Fauci’s own words.

Not all the criticism of Fauci belongs in that category. The respected academic Zeynep Tufekci has posited that the government’s shifting pandemic guidance – and the failures of transparency by government officials, including Fauci – may have harmed public trust at a crucial time.

“Just when it was needed most, some of the officials in charge of our Covid response undermined it,” she wrote in 2024.

Legitimate debate about what went wrong – and even who was at fault – is reasonable. There may well be something to learn from it.

But that’s a far cry from the travesty of what we’ve just seen take place on Capitol Hill.

And, lamentably, there’s little reason to believe that Trump’s weaponized justice department will put an end to it.