COVID-19: America Needs Closure, But Fauci Says No

Victor Davis Hanson nailed it: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s dramatic fall from grace–rooted in his own flaws–is a modern play in the style of an ancient Greek Tragedy.  

Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top adviser to Presidents Biden and Trump, pleaded his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times during a July 29 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee inquiry into his pivotal role in the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The man who claimed to “represent science” and boasted that he would be happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee remains defiantly silent.

On Aug. 6, during a second contentious committee session, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced a resolution to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal to respond to their questions. The committee then voted by a margin of 8 to 7 along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress thus setting the stage for possible federal criminal prosecution.

Following the contempt citation, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, invited Fauci to appear before the panel for a transcribed interview under oath. But on Aug. 14, Fauci’s lawyers denied the request.

Johnson is pondering options to compel Fauci’s testimony.

Meanwhile, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is launching an investigation into Fauci and has already issued a subpoena for records relating to his pandemic guidance and financial transactions.

West Virginia and Louisiana prosecutors have also joined the probe into Fauci’s role in the pandemic response. Another high-profile Fifth Amendment performance–a refusal to answer serious and outstanding questions on matters that have directly affected the public–will only further tarnish Fauci’s reputation.

President Joe Biden is partially to blame for this mess.

Biden pardoned Fauci for “any offenses” which he “may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014 through Jan. 19, 2025, Biden’s last full day in the White House. As we have previously noted, Biden’s pardon was not only a disservice to the American people but also Fauci himself.

Such a blanket, pre-emptive pardon for undisclosed or imagined “offenses” for which Fauci had neither been charged nor convicted only further clouded his already damaged reputation.

Given such a blanket presidential pardon covering 11 years of public service, Paul argues that Fauci cannot and should not have access to a Fifth Amendment protection of self-incrimination for any actions over that period for which he cannot be held criminally liable. Expect the federal courts to settle the case.

Biden’s pre-emptive Jan. 19 pardon only reinforced the growing suspicion that Fauci’s previous congressional testimony on the crucial issue of federal funding of “gain of function” research in Communist China–experimentation designed to enhance the virulence and lethality of pathogens–was untruthful.

It is a fact that under the broad or generic definition of “gain of function” research, American taxpayers did indeed fund such research.

It is a fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a center of coronavirus research, had a substandard safety record.

It is also a fact that the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services reported that Fauci’s agency did a poor job in monitoring research grants to the notorious Eco Health Alliance, which subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute.

It is not surprising then, that the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic formally concluded in 2024 that Fauci’s sworn testimony was, in the language of their report, “misleading.”

Document Dump

There is more to come. Senate Republicans have secured a massive trove of documents and internal communications, including more than 34,000 messages and texts on Fauci’s government-issued cell phone, plus over 1,000 pages of his diary, including his unfiltered private thoughts between 2019 and 2022, or the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The diary material was retrieved from government computers, and thus appropriately in the public domain.

“What he wrote privately,” Paul reported, “and what he told the country are two different stories.”

For example:

COVID-19 Origins. On Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci hosted a crucial telephone conference among top virologists to discuss the origins of COVID-19.

As we detailed in the Daily Signal, the initial assessment of most of the virologists–notably Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and Robert Garry of Tulane University–was that the novel coronavirus had certain features that made a “natural” origin, either from a bat or an intermediate animal host, unlikely.

An entry in Fauci’s diary for Feb. 1, 2020 confirms that only 2 of the 12 participants on the call held that the novel coronavirus was a “natural” product; and, he wrote, “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-li Shi (sic) at the University of Wuhan has been working for years on GoF in coronaviruses to allow adaption of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

Fauci’s reference to the “insertion” is to the addition of a “furin cleavage site,” a genetic modification of the coronavirus to make it infectious to humans.

Nonetheless, participants in that teleconference agreed to write and quickly publish “The Proximal Origin of SARS-COV2,” a highly influential piece that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.

The authors concluded that COVID-19 was not a “laboratory construct” or “purposely manipulated” but a pathogen of natural origins.

House congressional investigators have since concluded that Fauci “prompted” the article.

The striking fact is that the authors who had initially expressed skepticism of COVID-19’s natural origins changed their tune entirely, if not persuasively.

Meanwhile, prominent scientists who disagreed with their conclusion–the position adopted by the National Institutes of Health leadership–were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” or worse.

If the novel coronavirus emerged from nature, and there was no direct evidence of bat transmission, what animal was the intermediate host that enabled the viral transmission to humans?

Many proponents of the “natural origins” theory pointed to the Huanan Seafood Market, where sometimes exotic animals were sold for food. Though several potential hosts have been suggested, such as pangolins or raccoon dogs, more than six years after the outbreak, no proponents of the “natural origins” theory have identified such an intermediate host.

In his Jan. 26, 2020 diary entry, Fauci noted that COVID-19 infection in “early December” 2019 was not connected to the market: “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Again, after all these years, Fauci’s mysterious animal source remains a mystery.

School Closures. In an Oct. 16, 2022 interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Fauci stated: “If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip.”

Fauci’s diary entries, however, show that in March 2020 he personally advised New York and California officials to close schools, and in July characterized President Donald Trump’s interest in reopening schools as a cavalier indifference to the “safety of the children.”

Vaccine Effectiveness. In 2021 Biden launched an unprecedented program of mandatory vaccination for COVID-19.

Biden assured the country that the pandemic was a pandemic of the “unvaccinated.”

This was, of course, pure nonsense.

Vaccinated people were routinely getting infected. On Nov. 17, 2021, according to his diary entry, Fauci, then Biden’s chief “medical adviser,” wrote that he was “well aware” that many vaccinated people were coming down with COVID-19.   

Much of official Washington would be happy to see the COVID-era controversies simply “go away” and they insist that “relitigating the past” is a waste of precious time.

But far too many unanswered questions remain. So no, Americans still do not have closure on COVID -19, the most deadly pandemic since the 1918 flu.

And no, the curtain is not yet coming down on Fauci’s self-destructive drama.