What We Really Learned From the Fauci Hearing

Opinion|What We Really Learned From the Fauci Hearing

Senate hearings are always theatrical. Even still, Wednesday morning’s Senate committee hearing to interrogate Dr. Anthony Fauci on, among other things, the origins of Covid-19 was a shocking performance: Dr. Fauci barely spoke, while everyone else spent some three hours projecting their emotions onto him.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthy intent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country. The Covid lockdown “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime,” he said to Dr. Fauci during his opening statement. And “you have for years avoided responsibility.”

Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon covering all of his activities from 2014 to early 2025. This pardon would not protect against new accusations of perjury if Dr. Fauci were found to have lied during sworn testimony after Mr. Biden left office in 2025. On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth Amendment. As Republican senators peppered him with often hostile questions, he repeated over and over again that he respectfully declined to answer.

By doing so, Dr. Fauci became the speechless cipher to whom committee Republicans and Democrats argued their irreconcilable stories — about the pandemic, but also more broadly about science and public health in America. The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.

Mr. Paul personally and directly accuses Dr. Fauci of: funding dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, that may have resulted in a lab leak, releasing SARS-CoV-2 into the world (which Dr. Fauci denies); promoting mitigation policies that infringed on civil liberties; profiting off his pandemic-era fame; and hiding the truth about what he knew about the virus’s origins and when.

Dr. Fauci has faced congressional grilling numerous times, before both the House and the Senate. In the days before this event, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s diary entries. (Dr. Fauci apparently wrote them on computers associated with his government account; they were retrieved by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his staff, who provided them to Senator Paul.)