In an interview with The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells in 2023, Mr. Wallace-Wells pushed Dr. Fauci on the lab leak hypothesis and his role in funding research in Wuhan. When Mr. Wallace-Wells suggested more thorough responses that Dr. Fauci could’ve offered when questioned on the subject, he became irritated. “David, have you ever testified before a congressional committee?” he snapped.
Dr. Fauci seems to have concluded years ago that the more he says, the more his character and actions become subject to debate. And so, on Wednesday, he took abuse — and some praise — and stayed silent. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, in a particularly aggressive performance, accused him of wanting “to be the sun god of science.” Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, demanded to know, using an expletive, who Dr. Fauci thought he was for doing what he did.
Democratic senators, including Gary Peters from Michigan and Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, commiserated with Dr. Fauci over his ordeal, and used much of their time to argue that the committee ought to be discussing all of the ways President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have ruined public health.
Only Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, said anything insightful — and that was about what the hearing represented about the state of politics in America, and the implications for trust and a functioning democracy. “Right now, I feel the hyper-partisanship growing in this country in dangerous ways,” Mr. Kim said. “People calling our public servants criminals,” he lamented, is “undermining the very nature of the work of governance.”
He’s right, of course; show trials are bad for democracy and do nothing to get us closer to either truth or consensus. Hanging over every conversation about what happened during the pandemic of the recent past is anxiety about what might happen should we face a pandemic in the near future. In projecting all of a difficult era’s conflicts onto Dr. Fauci, Republicans evade the harder work of figuring out what we actually should learn from his, and our, mistakes.
