Fauci is yesterday’s fight. Medical freedom is today’s.

I’m tired of the “exposing the left” phase of conservative politics. I’m ready for the “implement what’s right” phase. Anyone want to join me?

For the past two weeks, President Trump, congressional Republicans, and conservative media have focused relentlessly on Anthony Fauci and the damage done during COVID. Fine. Fauci deserves scrutiny.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

But Fauci is no longer in charge. Republicans are.

That’s why it is maddening to watch the same party denounce Fauci while refusing to confront the policies and products that defined his era. Trump continues to praise the COVID shots. Republican senators confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz, who disciplined soldiers in the military for not getting the COVID shots. And the Trump FDA is moving forward with Moderna’s dangerous mRNA influenza vaccine for adults 50 and older.

If the lesson of COVID is merely that Fauci was bad, then we learned almost nothing.

The real question is whether government will once again approve and promote a novel platform without demanding the kind of evidence skeptics were told not to ask for last time.

Respiratory viruses present a difficult vaccine target because they mutate rapidly and immunity can wane. Critics of the COVID vaccination campaign have argued for years that these characteristics can produce disappointing or even counterproductive results under some conditions — concerns I have written about again and again.

Even Fauci acknowledged part of the underlying problem. In a 2023 paper, he wrote that current vaccines against respiratory viruses often produce “incomplete and short-lived protection” and that genuinely better vaccines would require “outside the box” thinking.

That should have prompted humility. Instead, the federal government is now considering another mRNA respiratory vaccine, this time for influenza.

The problem is not that every vaccine is bad. The problem is that after COVID, regulators should be demanding unusually strong evidence before expanding the platform into another mass-market respiratory product.

The evidence deserves scrutiny.

A 2025 Cleveland Clinic preprint, which I highlighted, reported that employees who received that season’s influenza vaccine experienced a higher cumulative incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza during the study period. The preprint was observational, not a randomized trial, and it should not be treated as the final word. But its findings are exactly the kind that should trigger more investigation, not less.

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A Canadian study of the 2018-2019 flu season likewise found negative vaccine effectiveness in certain age groups and discussed the possibility that vaccine mismatch interacted with pre-existing immune imprinting.

And a 2005 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis questioned whether rising influenza vaccination coverage among the elderly could explain the decline in influenza-related mortality over previous decades.

None of those papers, standing alone, proves that influenza vaccination is harmful. Together, they underscore a simpler point: The science of respiratory virus vaccination is complicated, and regulators should stop pretending otherwise.

That is especially true for mRNA.

Newly released material from Fauci’s files shows that Nobel laureate Drew Weissman warned Fauci in February 2021 about mouse data showing lipid nanoparticles reaching the placenta and fetus after administration during pregnancy.

Animal data does not automatically predict human harm. But it does raise obvious questions about biodistribution — questions that should have been answered aggressively before officials demanded public confidence in the platform.

Now the FDA’s briefing document for Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine shows another reason for scrutiny. In the agency’s review, grade 3 systemic reactions were substantially more common among mRNA vaccine recipients than among recipients of a conventional influenza vaccine.

That does not establish that the product is broadly unsafe. It does establish that the newer platform is more reactogenic in the trial population, and it makes the quality and duration of the safety database more important, not less.

The FDA document also acknowledges that the available safety database is too small to detect rare adverse events such as myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other neurological events.

That is not an accusation. It is the limitation of the evidence the FDA itself describes.

And this is where the political hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

RELATED: My son’s disease progressed while the FDA waited

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Republicans cannot spend one week demanding accountability for Fauci and the next tell Americans to trust the same institutional habits that made the COVID era so destructive: compressed debate, zero transparency, contempt for dissent, and an assumption that uncertainty should be managed through public relations campaigns rather than openly discussed.

Myocarditis after mRNA COVID vaccination is a recognized adverse event, although public health agencies continue to describe it as “rare” and concentrated most heavily among adolescent and young adult males. Whatever one believes about the overall risk-benefit calculation, that experience alone should have permanently raised the evidentiary bar for another mRNA product intended for broad use.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

It also requires conservatives to stop treating Fauci as a substitute for governing.

Fauci is yesterday’s issue. Trump and congressional Republicans have the controls now. If they believe the COVID era was a catastrophe, then prove it by changing the rules that made it possible. Demand stronger safety evidence. Protect informed consent. End coercive vaccination policy. Force regulators to disclose uncertainty rather than bury it. Otherwise, all the hearings, subpoenas, and Fauci outrage amount to nothing more than political theater.

The point of exposing past mistakes is to stop repeating them.