Senator Rand Paul may have approached the matter with theatrics and ill will, but Dr. Anthony Fauci’s decision not to testify was a loss.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty
About an hour into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance before a Senate committee last week, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, expressed skepticism about a passage in Fauci’s personal diary regarding the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “Did you literally lie to your own diary?” Johnson asked. For a second, Fauci almost seemed to laugh, and there was a glimpse of the public-health official who had charmed much of the country during the pandemic, with his air of amiable competence. But the moment passed. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” he said. He repeated that line dozens of times in the course of three hours, looking more sombre and reserved and—at the age of eighty-five—notably older than he had six and a half years ago, when the world first became acquainted with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Fauci’s decision to take the Fifth was understandable. The hearing was engineered by Senator Rand Paul, who has accused the doctor of lying about the origins of COVID-19 in order to cover up his own supposed culpability and misdeeds. Fauci, in a brief opening statement, said that the senator had an “unhinged obsession with me,” and had made “slanderous comments.” It was Paul’s office that released Fauci’s diary—more than a thousand pages of notes, articles, and internet memes—which was apparently retrieved from a government computer at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who now oversees the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where Fauci worked until 2022. A measure of Paul’s approach is the title he gave the entries: “Tony’s Diary!,” in Barbie-pink script, with a heart dotting the letter “i.”
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