Unless Fauci Is Held Accountable, America Will Never Recover From His Lies
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter@johnddavidson
Because of Fauci, the U.S. government’s disastrous pandemic response was based on a tangled web of lies and subterfuge.
The trove of Covid-related documents Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released in recent days has revived the question of accountability for the government’s Covid response — specifically for those who crafted that response, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose pandemic policies were based on a web of lies.
Portions of Fauci’s personal diary and emails released by Paul reveal what can only be described as a pattern of deliberate deception — about Covid’s origins, its fatality, Fauci’s role in school closures, the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine and adverse reactions to it, and U.S. funding for gain-of-function research in China that may have led to the pandemic.
There’s almost nothing, it seems, Fauci didn’t lie about. But his lies about Covid’s origins and U.S. funding for gain-of-function research stand out because they’re closely related, and they might give federal prosecutors a chance finally to indict him for lying to Congress — if he repeats those lies when he appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Fauci of course received a legally dubious preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden the day before he left office in 2025, covering a period stretching back to 2014. That pardon likely dissuaded Trump’s Justice Department from pursuing perjury charges against Fauci, but in any case the statute of limitations for those crimes expired on May 11 of this year.
As Hans Mahncke has argued in these pages, Wednesday’s Senate hearing offers an opportunity for lawmakers to elicit from Fauci the same false responses he’s given in the past about the origins of Covid and the role of the National Institutes of Health in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. Republican lawmakers have said that Fauci’s presidential pardon will not shield him from prosecution if he once again perjures himself in Wednesday’s hearing.
To understand the gravity of Fauci’s deceptions and why he should be criminally charged for them, we need a bit of historical context. When Covid first appeared in China at the end of 2019, the most plausible explanation was that it escaped from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting dangerous “gain-of-function” research, combining viruses to create hybrids for the supposed purpose of understanding future diseases. Part of this work was funded by EcoHealth Alliance, which had subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
Yet Fauci has testified multiple times under oath that the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran, never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. During a tense exchange with Sen. Paul in May 2021, Fauci stated this categorically. When Sen. Paul asserted that the NIH had indeed funded such research, Fauci snapped at him, “You are entirely and completely incorrect,” he said. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing two months later Fauci declined to retract that statement, angrily pointing a finger at Sen. Paul and shouting, “if anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”