Last week, an 85-year-old physician sat before a Senate committee and, for the first time in more than 250 congressional appearances spanning five decades of public service, declined to answer. Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination over one hundred times, telling the panel that its chairman’s “evident obsession with calling for my prosecution” left him with no other reasonable choice. He was invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, not because he believed he had committed a crime, but because he no longer trusted that anything he said would be treated as testimony rather than ammunition. It was a stunning scene, and it should trouble anyone who cares about how this country treats its public servants once the politics of a crisis outlast the crisis itself.
Fauci’s career is, by any fair measure, one of the most consequential in the history of American medicine. He joined the National Institutes of Health in 1968 and led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in 2022, advising seven presidents from Reagan to Biden. He was, for two decades, among the most cited scientists on earth. He helped transform HIV/AIDS from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic condition, and his work undergirded PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which is credited with saving more than 25 million lives worldwide. For that work, President George W. Bush — a Republican — awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. Doctor Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, has called Dr. Fauci “a national treasure” and has stated that “Dr Fauci is the most dedicated public servant I have ever known. His contributions have saved countless lives from HIV/AIDS, Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, and will stand as a profoundly significant gift to humanity.” None of that is in dispute even by his fiercest critics.
What is in dispute is his conduct during COVID-19, when he became the public face of a federal response that asked Americans to accept school closures, business shutdowns, masking, and eventually vaccine mandates. Senator Rand Paul, who now chairs the Senate committee investigating him, has spent years arguing that the National Institutes of Health funded research in Wuhan China contributed to the virus’s emergence, and that Fauci misled Congress about it under oath.
Ahead of last week’s hearing, Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries, obtained after an eight-month search led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Paul argued that what Fauci wrote privately differs from what he told the public. Paul has now pledged to seek a contempt-of-Congress vote, which he says could open the door to Justice Department prosecution. Neither Paul nor Kennedy seems to understand that a diary entry is a statement fixed in time and may involve personal musing and speculation and that opinion and public statements can evolve as new knowledge becomes available. Or perhaps they don’t care.
Reasonable people can criticize specific decisions made during the pandemic. Some restrictions may have lasted too long. Officials could have communicated uncertainty more clearly. Public health agencies sometimes failed to explain why recommendations changed, allowing confusion and mistrust to spread. The shifting public health guidance that so many Americans remember as evidence of dishonesty is, to most working scientists, simply what science looks like in real time: recommendations changed because the evidence changed, not because anyone was hiding the truth. But that is not to say those criticisms don’t deserve serious discussion.
What deserves equal recognition, however, is the unprecedented uncertainty confronting public health officials. They faced a rapidly evolving virus, incomplete data, overloaded hospitals, political polarization, and an information environment saturated with misinformation. Perfect decisions were impossible.
The main issue in contention is Senator Paul’s accusation that Dr. Fauci falsely testified that NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab. The element of funding is a technical issue. NIH did not directly fund research at the Wuhan lab; they provided a grant to a group known as EchoHealth who in turn funded research at Wuhan. The second element requires a brief explanation of gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function is laboratory research that deliberately alters a virus or other pathogen to give it new or enhanced biological properties—such as increased transmissibility, infectivity, or the ability to infect a new host—in order to better understand disease mechanisms, improve surveillance, or develop vaccines and treatments. Senator Paul contends that the research did meet the gain-of-function definition while Dr. Fauci contends that it did not meet the federal guidelines in effect at that time and further that the research was not conducted on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and did not result in COVID-19. He continues to maintain that his testimony accurately reflected NIH policy and definitions. Federal reviews, including one commissioned by the National Institutes of Health, have concluded that the specific EcoHealth-funded research did not meet the technical definition of gain-of-function in place at the time, a conclusion Fauci’s critics dispute but have not conclusively rebutted.
As these hearings have pointed out, there is not a single definition of gain-of-function among virologists or microbiologists. Some argue for a tighter definition while others do not. To further add confusion to the question, the American Society for Microbiology has called for a more precise, evidence-based definition of the term gain-of-function.
It is worth being precise about what has and has not been shown. No evidence has emerged that the coronavirus was engineered or leaked from a laboratory; the scientific consensus still points toward a natural spillover event from a wild source.
The elements of perjury require two things: the person knowingly gave false testimony and did so with intention to deceive. Testifying to something that is believed to be true but is later proven to be false does not make the previous testimony perjury. Because the underlying definitions in this charge are under intense debate in the scientific community, the basis for a perjury charge is extremely weak. But we know from recent experience with the reflecting pool that the lack of evidence does not stop the Trump administration from making unfounded criminal charges.
The perjury allegations remain only allegations, litigated in hearing rooms, press conferences, and cable news segments rather than in courts. And Fauci already received a preemptive pardon from President Biden before leaving office specifically to protect him from prosecution over pandemic-era statements — a fact Paul acknowledged, raising the question of exactly what additional legal jeopardy this pursuit is meant to produce.
That question points toward the real story here, which is less about virology than about power. Since President Trump’s return to the White House, several of Fauci’s most vocal critics — Kennedy chief among them — occupy positions from which they can direct the machinery of government at a single retired scientist. A congressional hearing that features senators trying to provoke Fauci by asking about tie colors and the day of the week, his attorney forcibly removed from the room, and a gallery of Trump-aligned activists standing by to testify about vaccine mandates is not a forum for discovering facts.
It is a stage for finishing an old argument by other means. They are attempting to turn a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, into the fault of one man rather than a shared national failure, much of which occurred on Trump’s watch. And part of it may be personal, given how frequently Fauci found himself publicly correcting a president who does not forget being corrected.
This seems to me to be a case of selective persecution and part of the Trump revenge program.
Fauci may have been an imperfect messenger, and reasonable people can fault his early missteps on masking guidance or his sometimes brusque certainty in front of cameras. But there is a meaningful difference between legitimate oversight of pandemic policy — which Congress should absolutely conduct — and a years-long campaign whose stated goal, in Fauci’s own paraphrase of his chief antagonist, is to see him “behind bars.” When a senator with subpoena power spends a hearing pursuing a scientist’s diary rather than debating the substance of research policy, the effort looks less like accountability and more like retribution dressed up as investigation. It is incredible to me that any reasonable person would believe that a man who spent his entire professional career trying to protect the American public from viral diseases would suddenly and intentionally try to trick them into wearing face masks and closing schools.
The American public deserves a legitimate, evidence-based scrutiny of pandemic-era policies . What the country has gotten instead, at least in the current hearings, looks less like accountability than theater, and neither a scientist’s record nor the public’s understanding of what actually happened is served by a proceeding that produced a great deal of heat and, by most independent accounts, no new facts.
Public servants who make consequential decisions under uncertain conditions deserve scrutiny, not immunity from criticism. But they also deserve a process that seeks truth rather than a scalp. A man who spent fifty years fighting AIDS, Ebola, and a novel coronavirus should not have to plead the Fifth to protect himself from the country he served. That he felt compelled to do so says less about Anthony Fauci than it does about the politics that have consumed the men now pursuing him. This is just one more in a string of embarrassments caused by the Trump administration that have brought shame to the American people in the eyes of the world.
Image generated by author using ChatGPT.
Sources:
1. NBC News, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at GOP-led Covid hearing” (July 29, 2026): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/anthony-fauci-5th-amendment-testify-covid-hearing-rand-paul-rcna589793
2. NewsNation, “Republican COVID-19 allegations against Dr. Anthony Fauci explained”: https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/what-fauci-is-accused-of/
3. The Washington Post, “Fauci’s critics have power. They’re coming after his pandemic record.” (August 2, 2026): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/08/02/faucis-critics-have-power-theyre-coming-after-his-pandemic-record/
4. TIME, “Fauci Pleads the Fifth at Senate Hearing on COVID, Escalating Long-Running Clash With Republicans” (July 29, 2026): https://time.com/article/2026/07/29/fauci-fifth-amendment-senate-hearing-covid-rand-paul-republicans/
5. The Washington Post, “Rand Paul threatens to hold Fauci in contempt after he declines to answer questions” (July 29, 2026): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/29/fauci-set-face-rand-paul-senate-gop-after-release-his-covid-diary/
6. AOL News, “Republicans ramp up attacks on Fauci”: https://aol.com/republicans-ramp-attacks-fauci-100000419.html
7. NIH MedlinePlus Magazine, “Meet Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., former Director of NIAID”: https://magazine.medlineplus.gov/article/meet-anthony-s-fauci-m.d-former-director-of-the-national-institute-of-allergy-and-infectious-diseases
8. Academy of Achievement, “Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.” (career timeline): https://achievement.org/achiever/anthony-s-fauci-m-d/
9. PBS American Masters, “Anthony Fauci biography and career timeline”: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/anthony-fauci-biography-and-career-timeline/26116
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Anthony Fauci”: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-Fauci
Critical Thinking
By John Turley
On January 30, 2023
In Commentary, Medicine
Recently I have been reading about the significant increase in childhood diseases that previously had been well controlled with vaccines. There are a number of factors at play here. One is the pandemic which has reduced doctor’s visits and with it some routine vaccinations. But the most significant factor is the resistance among the vaccine deniers not just the COVID vaccine, but vaccines in general.
This is especially troubling to me. These are people, many of whom are well educated, who have chosen not to vaccinate their children or themselves. The majority of these decisions are based on misinformation which has resulted in faulty decision making. I’ve addressed this in a previous post entitled Fake News. However, I would like to address some additional issues related to what is commonly called “critical thinking”. The ability to apply critical thinking would most likely have resulted in a far smaller vaccine denial movement and fewer deaths and disabilities.
Just to start, I’m going to repeat the definition of critical thinking I used in that post. “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”
That post was principally geared to critical thinking in adults. I wanted to discuss how to gather information, evaluate it and make a rational decision. I’ve come to realize, that by the time we are adults our method of thinking is very close to being set in stone. If we are to make a significant impact on the way our population evaluates data and makes decisions, it must start with the children.
I believe that the two pillars of early education should be reading and critical thinking. Admittedly, I am not an educator, but I believe if you can read you can teach yourself anything. But you also need the ability to decide what you should believe. The framework for being able to make these decisions is critical thinking.
In some ways critical thinking has been taught in the past, often as the Socratic method. Elements of it have been in specific courses such as philosophy, logic, and scientific investigation. These courses are usually designed for older, advanced students who most likely have already developed these skills or have a natural inclination to pursue such inquiry and evaluation.
For most students, if they haven’t learned how to gather information, evaluate competing ideas and draw coherent, fact based conclusions by the time they are in high school, it may be difficult for them to do so. Critical thinking must be a substantial part of education from the beginning. It cannot be a separate course. It must be integrated into the way every subject is taught. Students should not just be given rote information to be memorized. They should be taught how to think and evaluate and then they should be provided with all the information necessary to make their own informed decisions.
What does this mean? It means that all sides of a topic should be covered. There should be no forbidden subjects. There cannot be an effective analysis of competing information if only one side is presented. This needs to begin in the very first years of education. After all, as Americans we want education not indoctrination.
The ability to develop critical thinking and to make informed decisions requires the exposure to all varying ideas without any value judgment being attached by the teacher. The idea of an academic “safe space” where students are insulated from hurt feelings presupposes that they are unable to evaluate competing ideas and must be protected. This is the very essence of indoctrination and should be an anathema to education.
Children need to learn that the world is not a safe place. If they are not exposed to the competing ideas, how can they be expected to evaluate and recognize the harmful ones? If they are only exposed to one side, they will come to believe that side is the only true side regardless of its value.
I will use myself as an example. There were no efforts to teach critical thinking when I was a student. We were taught that everything presented in class was the right thing, and we were not to question it. Well, this might be true in math and many science classes, but it is not true anywhere else. It was not until well into my adult years that I recognized many of the things I had been taught were the result of societal prejudices and in some cases even ignorance. As a result, like many people, I tended to defend my long-held opinions even after I recognized their weakness.
I was very slow to adopt new ideas. Many of the opinions I now hold are far different from those with which I grew up. Critical thinking was not easy for me; challenging your core values never is. We don’t want our children and grandchildren to have to suffer through the same weakness of thought that we did.
Would the evaluation of competing information that is part of critical thinking have helped prevent the wide scale vaccine denial that we are currently experiencing? Many rumors are being spread about COVID and about the COVID vaccine, just as they have been about other vaccines in the past. There were many rumors that the disease did not exist and that the deaths were faked. These rumors are still on the Internet. They never had any verifiable source and anyone taking the effort to view the data would know that there was a significant death toll early in the pandemic.
The effectiveness of COVID vaccination can easily be checked on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website www.COVID.cdc.gov. A study in November 2022 shows unvaccinated Americans had a 16 times (not percent) higher rate of hospitalization compared to the fully vaccinated and a study from January 2022 shows the unvaccinated had a 12.7 times higher COVID related death rate.
There were many reports about side effects of the vaccine. Checking available medical sources, it is easy to discover that while there are some side effects, there are many misstatements or exaggerations about the COVID vaccines. The side effects are similar in frequency to other vaccines and medications in general. Vaccine side effects tend to diminish as the vaccine is improved in subsequent versions. A detailed review of COVID vaccine side effects can be found on www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines21.
Social media were quick to jump on every alternative to vaccination. It took very little research to realize that none of these alternatives (think Clorox) had documented medical justification and had never been effectively studied. The supposed studies that were cited were either significantly flawed or could never be duplicated or even be found. Because they had no experiencing in critical thinking, many people accepted the unsupported statements that most satisfied their desires, either politically, socially or medically and adopted them as truth. Unfortunately, this failure in critical thinking resulted in hundreds of unnecessary deaths and severe illnesses.