For Sen. Rand Paul, a big swing and a miss.
Again.
Paul, R-Bowling Green, has been waging a vendetta against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for six years, even though Fauci has been retired from the position since 2022. He blames Fauci for the spread of COVID-19, which first came to light in late 2019 and was declared a full-fledged pandemic in March 2020.
Fauci was responsible for overseeing the nation’s response to the plague, which ultimately resulted in more than one million deaths in the U.S. and 7.1 million worldwide as reported by the World Health Organization. Paul offers nothing but derision for the role Fauci played in fighting the spread, going so far as to maintain he may bear some responsibility for the origin of the malady.
Paul has pursued Fauci like a mad dog long after the respected immunologist has left the public stage. Fauci himself noted that Paul maintains an “unhinged obsession’’ with him.
Fauci appeared before Congress on the issue of COVID-19 more than 20 times during his time leading the nation’s response. But Paul, as chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, decided to pull him in one more time this week, issuing a subpoena to force further testimony even though there has been no recent groundbreaking development in the scientific community regarding COVID-19.
It was a trap. Everyone knew it was a trap. It provided Paul with yet another opportunity to publicly express his bile toward Fauci and open up the possibility that Fauci might slip and provide an opportunity to hit him up with a perjury rap. Evidence of a hit job became even more apparent when Paul tossed Fauci’s lawyer from the committee room for seeking to gain recognition and explain his client’s position.
Some old House on Unamerican Activities Committee stuff there, Rand old pal.
At any rate, it didn’t work. The 85-year-old Fauci refused to answer any of the panel’s questions, asserting his rights under the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Now Paul is threatening to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, perhaps an empty gesture since it would require 60 votes in the painfully divided 100 member Senate to do so. He is also looking to determine if Fauci possessed the right to assert the Fifth Amendment since he received a pardon from President Joe Biden for any of the actions he took during the pandemic, a move taken to protect Fauci from vindictive prosecutions.
Paul exposed his nastiness the day before the hearing when he released portions of a diary Fauci kept detailing his experiences handling the pandemic. Its obvious intention was to embarrass Fauci, who goes into some detail gushing about the newfound fame arriving at the end of a long career, including an invitation to appear on Dancing with the Stars, an opportunity he spurned.
Fauci wrote that he may be, “the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world” given his COVID-19 activities.
While Fauci’s self-regard as exposed in the diary may be cause for amusement, it has nothing to do with his handling – good or bad – of the pandemic. Paul also said that in the diary, Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories,” essentially resulting in a “COVID-19 cover-up.’’
So, let’s consider all that. Despite Paul’s spittle and bluster, the diary does not provide the concrete evidence of a Fauci cover-up or any great degree of wrong doing. It pretty much serves to substantiate past statement, particularly as it regards his consideration of COVID-19 origins.
What you generally find in the diary is Fauci trying to navigate around a tense crisis with theories evolving as the situation changed and additional information became available.
There is at least one apparent contradiction to be found in the diary. Shortly before he retired in 2022, Fauci stated he had “nothing to do’’ with a series of school closures in much of the U.S. to during the pandemic intended to halt the spread. But in a March 2020 diary entry, Fauci notes that he “convinced’’ then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the schools “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight…’’
Fauci further wrote that he told de Blasio that he should close the bars and restaurants as well.
The rationale behind Fauci’s apparent contradiction remains unexplained, although he had no real power to order the closure of anything. But the situation points out one of the key issues broached by his critics – an alleged over-reaction to the crisis.
In his opening statement at the hearing, Paul told Fauci:
“The COVID lockdown could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education, small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared, patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care, families were separated from dying relatives, workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs, worship assembly, employment, education, and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.”
The whole claim is a gross overstatement. It doesn’t address the lives potentially saved by the shut downs recommended – but not imposed – by Fauci and there certainly was no “aiding and abetting the crime’’ since no crime was committed.
But there is an argument to be made that, ultimately, Fauci and others overreacted to the pandemic, although there’s a strong caveat that can’t be ignored – Fauci was shooting in the dark. The world was dealing with the largest worldwide health crisis since the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which led to the deaths of 25 million people, perhaps more, including 650,000 Americans at a time when the country’s population was about 106 million – less than a third of what it is today. Fauci didn’t know the origin of COVID-19, we still don’t, or how it spread. There was no vaccine or any idea how to prepare one. It was and is a unique virus. At one point, COVID-19 victims were dying at such an accelerated rate the system couldn’t handle them. In some quarters forklifts were used to move the bodies. Fauci and others were given the task on how to solve it.
It was a crisis that merited great caution. Would conditions have been improved if he had approached the issue more recklessly?
Despite Fauci’s overcaution, the fight against COVID-19, which still exists, by the way, wasn’t a great success. The United States ranked 16th in mortality rate related tp COVID-19, the highest among the most economically developed nations. A lot of that has to do with population density and freedom to travel elsewhere. But it also has to do with the number of people who simply ignored the precautions advised by Fauci and others.
Wearing a mask might have been a pain but it saved lives.
But the differences between Paul and Fauci have always revolved around the COVID-19 origin and Fauci’s approval of funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied viruses and is located in the city where COVID-19 was first detected.
Paul asserts that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab and seems to feel anyone who argues otherwise is either stupid or corrupt, an attitude he maintains when approaching most issues where anyone might disagree with him. Furthermore, he claims Fauci approved what is characterized as gain-of-function research, defined as “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.”
Such was prohibited at the time of COVID-19 and Fauci has consistently denied the U.S. funded gain-of-function. Yet Paul posits that COVID-19 was created through gain-of-function at the Wuhan lab, funded by Fauci, and leaked into the public sphere.
There’s no proof to back that up but don’t tell Rand – his mind is made up and Fauci is a cad and a liar.
Fauci comes from the school of thought that the virus developed in bats that carried it to animals that inhabited a market in Wuhan. The animals then passed the bug on to humans. Regardless, Fauci has proved more open to the concept of a lab leak than Paul has proved willing to consider zoonotic transfer.
Paul, in his renowned genial fashion, dismisses Fauci’s notion and accuses him of engaging in a cover-up, suggesting during a 2021 Senate committee hearing that the U.S. government could be partially responsible for the pandemic if its shown the virus escaped from Wuhan since the nation was involved in funding.
In January 2020, during the early days of COVID-19, Fauci wrote:
“It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from 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.”
That remains consistent with everything Paul has said oi the matter since.
Paul tried to trap Fauci into an inconsistency on his website, noting that a Fauci diary entry in February 2020, detailing a conference call involving Fauci and prominent scientists, stated “there was not total agreement” among the participants on about zoonotic transfer.
But later in the diary, Fauci added that he “is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though … I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak,” and “that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable.” If he was covering something up, why would he write in a diary limited to his viewing and thus not for public consumption something he knew to be a lie?
And it could be, in Rand Paul world, the majority of the scientific community is in on the cover-up.
The World Health Organization, In a report issued in June 2025, the World Health Organization stated, “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover … either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”
Yet, in a post on X on Thursday, Paul wrote, “What Anthony Fauci said in public was the complete opposite of what he wrote in his diary. Not only did he lie to the American people, but those lies led to his decisions that cost people their livelihoods, and in some cases, their lives.’’
It doesn’t add up, Rand. Quit while you’re behind.
As a result of all this, people like Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, a terrible football coach – ask University of Cincinnati fans – and the stupidest man below the Mason-Dixon line, claim Fauci is responsible for nine million deaths. And a load of others want him in jail.
America is a strange place sometimes.