It was a cowardly and shameful final act for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times before the Senate on Wednesday — this despite holding a pre-emptive presidential pardon that already shields him from prosecution.
Only a handful of mob bosses in the annals of Congress have ever claimed the privilege more often.
"On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights, under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution," the calculating career bureaucrat repeated, over and over, throughout the nearly three-hour hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Yet that silence cast Fauci as a villain more decisively than any of his customary evasions ever could.
No less shameful were the Democrats and their media allies who persist in shielding Fauci, extolling his virtues and denying their audiences the truth about a man whose pandemic diary brimmed with self-regard and celebrity fawning while he stayed coldly indifferent to the suffering he had wrought.
On Wednesday, Fauci was buoyed by friendly Democratic senators who celebrated him as a hero, expressed gratitude for his "service to this nation," and cast him as a "scapegoat" hunted by right-wing conspiracy theorists.
New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim went so far as to invoke Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech to lionize Fauci — the longtime chief of US infectious-disease policy who helmed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades.
Like the Black Knight in "Monty Python," still swinging after being hacked to a bloody stump, Fauci's defenders refuse to acknowledge they have nothing left to stand on.
The harm their censorship inflicted during COVID, and their dishonest burnishing of Fauci's reputation, condemns them.
Yet rather than reckon with the mounting evidence of his complicity in one of the deadliest man-made health catastrophes in history, they only dig in deeper.
History will judge them harshly as well.
Admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China. Admit that the risk of this dangerous research exceeded any possible benefits. Ask forgiveness, and pledge to help our government devise safeguards, so a man-made epidemic never happens again.
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
Monstrous Sins
There is no case to be made for Fauci. His sins are simply too vast.
The children barred from classrooms, the grandparents who drew their last breath alone, the families sundered — all of it weighs on his conscience.
We might wish him prison, yet he is unlikely ever to face the punishment he has earned for steering taxpayer money toward hazardous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at a Chinese lab that loosed a pandemic killing millions, and for the cover-up and the ensuing lockdown he helped engineer.
"All he had to do was tell the truth," Paul said afterward, pledging to pursue a contempt-of-Congress charge against Fauci — the very charge that sent Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to jail.
At 85, Fauci may elude earthly justice, but his legacy is irretrievably tainted, and the name Fauci will become "a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples," as the Bible puts it.
Even so, the hearing carried a strange satisfaction. It was a long-overdue public reckoning.
To see Fauci — the sociopath he must be — sit rigidly as Paul and his Senate colleagues recited his sins in cold detail was, in its way, cathartic.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) laid out the human toll of Fauci's deceptions.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) distilled Fauci's legacy as "not as the man who saved America from COVID, but as a man who destroyed the public trust in America's public health institutions in exchange for five minutes of fame [to] fuel your own ego and be the center of attention."
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) delivered the mocking coup de grâce: "Nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?" — and pressed Fauci into the indignity of pleading the Fifth rather than state the color of his own tie, the day of the week, or the shade of the carpet before him.
The gallery erupted in applause when Paul ejected Fauci's imperious defense lawyer, David Schertler, who seemed to believe he could answer for the senators by proxy. Paul pointedly noted that Fauci still had a half-dozen lawyers on hand to represent him. Who is footing that bill?
A Moral Accounting
Watching Fauci's undoing unfold in real time, we catch the echo of every epic reckoning in myth and literature. His diary calls to mind the villainess of the French novel "Dangerous Liaisons," the Marquise de Merteuil, an aristocratic widow whose scheming and true nature are laid bare the moment her private letters circulate through society. It is proof that a moral reckoning awaits us all.
We owe a debt to the Great Barrington Declaration heroes — Doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta — who spoke out when it was perilous to do so, and whom Fauci sought to ruin.
Musk's Open Portal
Elon Musk merits recognition for transforming X into an open conduit that circumvented the dishonest media narrative.
Special thanks are owed to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose persistence surfaced Fauci's diary.
"It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers where they had been sequestered and secreted," he told Laura Ingraham on Fox News.
RFK Jr.'s 2021 bestseller, "The Real Anthony Fauci," the first exposé on Fauci, has stood the test of time.
In those diary pages, Fauci perfunctorily logged death counts alongside lavish accounts of the adulation he drew from celebrities and from political operatives masquerading as journalists, who messaged him privately throughout 2020, goading him to undercut President Trump and feeding his vanity.
Their names are preserved for all to see — and for their lasting shame: 41 mentions of supportive check-ins and "friendship-building" dinners with CNN's Jake Tapper.
Dana Bash, also of CNN, texted Fauci that he was a "better man" than Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). George Stephanopoulos of ABC messaged, "thank you, Tony. So impressive," after Fauci hit back at Trump for calling him a "fraud."
Dr. Scott Atlas is another unheralded hero and a casualty of Fauci's spite. Brought in late during Trump's first term to challenge the groupthink of the COVID-19 Task Force under VP Mike Pence, Atlas was startled to find himself the only one citing actual scientific data. He argued against lockdowns and for focused protection of the elderly, only to be dismissed as a crank.
"I've never worked with such low-level people," he later said of Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield.
The villains and heroes of the pandemic are coming into focus at last. In the end, character is destiny.
