Tricia McLaughlin: Fauci’s Lies Caused Lasting National Security Damage

“Who the f*ck do you think you are?”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno’s blunt cross-examination of Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday captured the seething frustration still felt by millions of Americans six years after COVID-19’s onslaught. The pandemic response — marked by shifting guidance, suppressed debate, cover-ups, draconian mandates, and outright lying — was shaped largely by Fauci and the public-health apparatus he steered.

The human cost was staggering and incalculable. Suicides and overdoses skyrocketed amid forced isolation. Children suffered massive learning loss and stunted development from prolonged school closures. People were forced off empty public beaches at gunpoint. Small-business owners who tried to keep outdoor gyms open were arrested.

Anyone who dared question the orthodoxy — herd immunity, the virus’s origins, mask efficacy, alternative treatments, or vaccine injuries — was systematically silenced, deplatformed, ostracized, or fired.

But never mind the lives and businesses destroyed. Barbra Streisand was calling Fauci.

The mainstream media now insists this is all ancient history and that we should declare a “pandemic amnesty.” All shall be forgiven?

Not so fast.

Fauci’s constant deception and role in facilitating high-risk gain-of-function research created grave and lasting national-security consequences. They offer adversaries a clear blueprint: Western institutions can be pressured into self-censorship and delayed accountability when the stakes are highest.

Fauci oversaw the funding of dangerous coronavirus research in China through EcoHealth Alliance grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — work conducted in labs that did not meet American biosafety standards. He then repeatedly denied that this constituted gain-of-function research. The mainstream press, Democrat politicians, and talking heads quickly branded anyone who raised questions about the virus’s origins as a conspiracy theorist or worse, a racist.

So, what’s to stop an adversary or terrorist group from using a future Fauci wannabe to divert taxpayer dollars into creating or enhancing a pathogen capable of killing Americans, crushing the economy, and psychologically maiming a generation of children?

Well, the national security risks run deeper than a single possible lab incident.

Outsourcing high-risk pathogen research to a communist geopolitical rival is absurd on its face. Adding insult to injury, Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted and funded research that enhances the transmissibility of a virus with diminished safety standards, limited transparency, and reported CCP military connections. Knowledge, techniques, and materials could be retained, replicated, or redirected by a communist government that views the United States as its chief rival. Accidental release was just one danger – intentional exploitation or proliferation was another. The House Select Subcommittee has described NIH procedures for this category of research as deficient and a direct threat to public health and national security.

This is a signal, if not a blueprint, to every hostile actor that American safeguards can easily be gamed.

The suppression of the lab-leak theory itself gamed our national security. By helping shape and amplify the early narrative that a laboratory origin was a fringe conspiracy, Fauci and allied institutions slowed serious investigation into Chinese facilities, reduced pressure for transparency from Beijing, and stifled U.S. intelligence assessments.

In the event of a future biological attack or lab accident, our adversaries will employ the same playbook: protect the preferred narrative first and scapegoat anyone who questions it — evading accountability and stonewalling any proper investigation.

Of course, Fauci’s lying and deception collapsed trust, breeding yet another national-security liability. A country that no longer trusts its public-health authorities or scientific institutions will be inherently slower to respond to the next biological or chemical outbreak. Too, we will be far more susceptible to foreign disinformation campaigns that will exploit that distrust to create chaos and do more harm.

America’s adversaries watched the world’s foremost superpower voluntarily inflict trillions in economic damage, a generational setback in education, and untold social fractures at the whims of a fame-hungry government bureaucrat.

If we don’t digest the damage and hold those who inflicted it accountable, it won’t be long before an American adversary reengineers the calamity. The reckoning is long overdue.

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Tricia McLaughlin served as the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Follow her on X: @TriciaOhio