Does Fauci Deserve This?
Covid politics roil onward.
Newly released diary entries Republican lawmakers say were written by Dr. Anthony Fauci – the country’s leading infectious disease specialist during the COVID-19 pandemic – chronicle Fauci’s daily life between December 2019 and December 2022.
The over 1,100 pages of entries span the final years of his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He retired in December 2022.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., posted the documents over the weekend, took them down on Monday evening and reposted them by Tuesday morning with redactions. Paul also released a 465-page “prequel,” a collection of Fauci documents including records and email exchanges from 2001 to 2015.
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In a thread on X over the weekend, Paul wrote that the diary entries show what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
As best I can tell, this is about the questions about the origins of the virus.
On Paul’s website, he points to Fauci’s entry from Feb. 1, 2020, detailing a conference call between Fauci and prominent scientists.
In his notes, Fauci writes “there was not total agreement” about the virus’ origins during the call.
Later in his entries, however, Fauci writes he “is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though… I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak,” and “that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable.”
Many scientists say this thought process reflects how their consensus changed as the understanding of COVID-19 evolved.
Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College who spoke to NPR on Monday from the American Society for Virology meeting in Minneapolis, says the questions in the early days of the pandemic about the lab leak were “normal scientific questioning,” when scientists knew very little about how the virus spread.
“I think that’s what we acknowledge that Fauci was doing, that there’s of course a plethora of unanswered questions,” she said of the early days of the pandemic. Now, though, she says those questions are presented as “some sort of signal of guilt that they knew that this was happening.”
Without any doubt, the origin of the virus is a legitimate scientific question. But, of course, the whole thing was, and remains, a major political debate.
The Trump administration advanced the theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus escaping the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Leaked cables from the State Department raised concerns about safety protocols at the Wuhan lab.
But as information evolved, scientists cast doubt on what came to be known as the lab leak theory. NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel and Emily Kwong spoke to 10 leading scientists in 2020 who all believed the virus spread from animals to humans. They said their analyses of the virus showed no signs of human genetic modification, and that it infected people in a way scientists had never seen before — making laboratory engineering unlikely.
The piece goes on to provide further information about the debate.
Fauci’s notes also include ruminations on the fame that was thrust upon him as the face of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. It seems likely this will be used to try and embarass Fauci at the hearing.
Quite frankly, basing any of this on personal notes made in the moment strikes me as unfair.
More on Fauci from The Atlantic: The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci.
Once famed for being America’s consummate nonpartisan scientist, Fauci is now a far more polarizing kind of public figure: beloved and reviled for what he’s said to represent; targeted by threats to end his life. The more he talks, the more he stands to lose.
Objectively, Fauci’s career ought to be the kind of thing that can be admired without any partisan lenses being applied.
For decades, he has been one of the nation’s best-known and most-respected scientists. In the late 1960s, Fauci helped lead a team at the National Institutes of Health that repurposed cancer therapies as cures for several once-fatal rheumatological conditions. His later partnerships with AIDS activists and his push to accelerate experimental-drug trials for HIV helped transform the infection into a survivable condition. He went on to serve as a chief architect of PEPFAR, a global HIV-prevention-and-care program that has prevented an estimated 25 million deaths since 2003. And over the course of his nearly 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he turned one of the NIH’s quietest branches into a $6 billion research juggernaut. Fauci has “saved more lives, created more amazing infrastructures for developing research opportunities, cured more people, provided health care to more people both in the United States and abroad, probably, than any single scientist in his lifetime,” Larry Corey, an infectious-disease expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, told me.
Do I think that Fauci was perfect in his time managing the COVID-19 pandemic? Clearly not, but I don’t think any human would have been. He did cause confusion over the masking issue. I think that we can look back and question any number of ways public policy was made to combat the spread of the disease. I do not think Fauci should be beatified, but I do think that he did a pretty good job, especially given the administration he was working with.
We also can’t ignore the degree to which Trump and his allies made the whole thing a partisan issue from the very beginning (here’s an early example from February 2020).
And now we have stuff like this:
For my own part, I knew people who died from the disease, but know of no one personally who had complications from the vaccine (apart from some immediate, short-term reaction). Indeed, given the millions of people who received the shot, we have a pretty good amount of data that has demonstrated its safety. And yet, people in power like Marshall can go on TV and spot this nonsense with no pushback or consequences.
Update: Here’s Fauci’s opening statement. I understand why he did it from a self-protection POV, but I hate that this will just super-charge the conspiracy theories.
Anthony Fauci, the former veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), invoked the Fifth Amendment during a hearing before the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. During his long history in the government, he many times appeared before committee’s for hearings and respects the value of oversight. “However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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, quote, behind bars, unquote,” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
