Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Covid debate that never ended

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Surely Anthony Fauci has earned the right to party with Robert De Niro in peace. But instead, America’s embattled former Covid-19 czar was hauled before the Senate today to defend five-year-old diary entries.

Senate Republicans subpoenaed Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as part of a broader effort to dispute the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci is the longtime face of American infectious disease research and has appeared in front of Congress more than 250 times. But this morning — in a tense, highly partisan spectacle — he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify.

Fauci accused Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who’s leading this circus, of nursing an “unhinged” and “obvious obsession” with him. Paul recently released Fauci’s unredacted diary, which includes lots of deeply cringe tidbits about the immunologist’s celebrity hobnobbing…but nothing that materially alters our understanding of the pandemic or Fauci’s handling of it.

“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, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

Why we’re still arguing about Covid-19

Fauci occupies an uneasy spot in American politics. To some people, he’s a hero who helped steer the country through a terrifying pandemic. To others, he’s a villain who imposed damaging policies, concealed inconvenient facts, and never answered for his various missteps.

The evidence doesn’t back that darker story. But Fauci’s vilification points to one possibility that is worth taking seriously: As a country, we never adequately reckoned with the mistakes and uncertainties of Covid-19.

Consider the narrative trajectory of the lab-leak theory, which is central to Paul’s vendetta against Fauci. Early in the pandemic, Paul and other proponents argued that the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Some people went even further, claiming that Fauci had funded the lab’s research and then covered it up. Both theories were treated as ridiculous.

To be clear, the second theory is ridiculous. (There’s absolutely no evidence that Fauci was somehow, improbably involved in the making of Covid-19.) But the consensus around the lab-leak theory has changed. While most researchers still believe the virus spread naturally from animals to humans, a laboratory accident has never been definitively ruled out — and many now allow for the possibility in a way that they didn’t four or five years ago.

The same is true of other pandemic controversies, too. Reasonable people can now debate whether lengthy school closures did more harm than good. Guidance on masks and other measures changed repeatedly, sometimes without a ton of explanation.

None of that means officials acted in bad faith. But we’ve arguably never had the kind of serious, bipartisan examination of the pandemic’s missteps that a once-in-a-century public health crisis deserved. And in the absence of that (naive? impossible?) shared reckoning…we’re getting Fauci’s leaked journals.

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