Dr. Fauci’s disgrace
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 27/100
The disgrace this week of Dr. Anthony Fauci allows America to look back on the awful COVID year of 2020, aptly with 20/20 hindsight. His stonewalling of Sen. Rand Paul ’s (R-KY) homeland security panel — he “pled the Fifth” 111 times — and the release of his diaries allow us to revisit and assess the arrogance and smug narcissism that was instrumental in inflicting such a huge moral and economic cost on the nation.
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden , the octogenarian Fauci became poster boy for the pandemic response. He loved, craved, and documented all the attention he received; Hollywood swooned ; leftist news outlets and lapdog pundits abused anyone who questioned his multitudinous falsehoods.
Fauci, more than anyone, conned the nation into delegating its biggest political decisions to “experts,” primarily himself. He lured America into insane, dictatorial overreaction. Under his pressure, the origin of the virus was hidden, effective therapies were contemptuously dismissed and their advocates anathematized; experimental genetic “vaccines” were foisted on millions, making many sick, some fatally; the lockdown crushed businesses and robbed children of education; baptism, marriages, and funerals were banned; the lonely were isolated, and the ailing were left on their own to die.
Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Fauci declined to testify in a Senate committee hearing on his role in the US response to Covid-19, invoking his 5th Amendment rights. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
We were all in this back in 2020, but fewer of us were able to see through it. Like the proverbial frog in heating water, most kept adjusting to the increasing discomfort until it was too late. Some recognized early that most of the lockdown was not merely unnecessary but deeply damaging and deliberately authoritarian. But the social, financial, and reputational price of stepping out of line meant most went with the flow of the tsunami as it swept our norms away.
Aside from the long-term damage to childhood education, and aside from the psychological injuries inflicted on millions of people, particularly the young, the Fauci-orchestrated response to the pandemic undermined trust in institutions long-term. Six years later, we live in a society that, substantially because of the lies and oppressions of the COVID year, is more divided, less courteous, and more abrasive.
The horror of what we went through at the urging or insistence of Fauci and his ilk has largely been dropped down the memory hole. Like people on the morning after a debauch, America flinches at the effort of recollection. Our society has found it easier to forget, or pretend to forget. It is much harder to look directly at horror and to hold the perpetrators accountable, especially when the perpetrators are, to some extent, ourselves.
But Fauci’s disgrace has had the salutary effect of dredging up the memories of 2020 from the obscurity in which we buried them. It has allowed us, indeed obliged us, to look again and to see those events and the long comet trail of their consequences with a clarity they have hitherto lacked.
It is uncomfortable but necessary. Republican senators were right to keep asking Fauci for answers even though he refused more than a hundred times to give them. Democrats, most of whom boycotted the congressional hearing, fatuously dismissed it as biased and backward-looking. But all government oversight looks backward. That’s how accountability works. If the Fauci hearing helps us resolve “never again,” it will have been effective oversight indeed.
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