Hiltzik: Senate Republicans try to smear Fauci over COVID, but he refuses to play their game
Senate Republicans hauled Anthony Fauci back to Capitol Hill for a COVID reckoning, but the former NIAID director declined to give them the confrontation they craved.
Senate Republicans thought they had Anthony Fauci cornered. On a sweltering July day, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee expecting the ritual public flaying over pandemic decisions that have defined his legacy and theirs.
Instead Fauci refused the part written for him. Where Rand Paul and his colleagues sought dramatic admissions of error, overreach or deception, the 84-year-old scientist delivered measured, evidence-based answers that denied them their viral clip. Columnist Michael Hiltzik described the encounter as Republicans deprived of the show trial they had scripted.
The hearing, convened more than a year after Fauci left government, recycled familiar Republican grievances: lab-leak hypotheses presented as settled fact, accusations of suppressed dissent, and claims that public health guidance had been more political than scientific. Fauci parried each thrust with the same calm he showed throughout the pandemic, citing data, studies and the evolving nature of a novel virus that no one fully understood in early 2020.
Paul, long Fauci’s most persistent antagonist, pressed on gain-of-function research funding and alleged conflicts with EcoHealth Alliance. Fauci rejected the framing, reiterating that the research in question did not meet the formal definition of gain-of-function as defined by federal guidelines at the time. The exchange produced no concession, no raised voice, no headline-grabbing moment.
That absence of fireworks may be the real story. Five years after COVID-19 upended American life, the impulse to assign singular blame to one scientist persists in one political camp while the scientific community continues to treat the pandemic as a complex systems failure involving multiple governments, agencies and unknowns. Fauci’s refusal to perform contrition denied Republicans the catharsis they sought.
The larger question left hanging is whether these revived inquiries are meant to illuminate policy mistakes for the future or simply to keep a familiar villain in the public square. So far, the hearings have produced more political theater than fresh insight.
Original reporting: LA Times.
Original reporting: LA Times, Business.
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