Dr. Anthony Fauci: Sinner or Saint?

In love, include me,

Jeff

That’s how many times, last week, an eighty-five-year-old Anthony Fauci sat under subpoena in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and uttered the same sentence: I decline to answer, on the advice of counsel, on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

Taking the 5th is often redolent of confession. It smells like a man cornered by his own guilt, finally run to ground after five years of dodging. Rand Paul certainly wants you to read the headline that way. And the senate just voted to hold Fauci in contempt.

Today’s essay is part of the Middle Way: a series of essays on Substack where I try to avoid the extremes of the outrage machine and find a tenuous middle.

This requires doing something that is a little out of fashion in the year 2026, which is holding two thoughts in my head at the same time.

Thought one: Anthony Fauci was not a hero above reproach, and his diaries, which were pulled off eleven different government servers and handed to Rand Paul, by way of RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services, reveal a man who was, at moments, vain, defensive, and too enchanted with his own fame.

Thought two: the attempt to turn those flaws into the central crime of the pandemic is disproportionate, scientifically sloppy and politically convenient timing for a party that would very much like you to be thinking about anything other than the Epstein files, the price of gas or the war its supposedly anti-war president started in the Middle East.

Both of those things are true. Let’s take them one at a time.

On July 29^th, Fauci appeared under subpoena in front of the Senate committee. He invoked the Fifth more than a hundred times. Paul says the precise count is 111. His attorney’s argument (and it’s not a crazy one) is that Paul has spent months publicly promising to prosecute Fauci, which means anything Fauci says under oath now could be used to build a case against him later, even though President Biden’s pardon covers his federal conduct through January of last year. A pardon can’t protect him from a false statement charge for something he says today. So, pleading the Fifth here isn’t an admission of guilt. It’s what a lawyer tells you to do when the person asking the questions has already announced the verdict he’s working backward from.

I want to be careful not to let that turn into a full defense, though. Fauci ran one of the most powerful public health apparatuses on the planet during the most consequential health event of our lifetimes. The public is owed an accounting. A hearing that looks and feels like a show trial doesn’t erase that debt; it just makes it harder to collect honestly.

Eleven hundred and forty-one pages, late 2019 through 2022, and by most accounts released without much redaction. What’s actually in them is less a smoking gun and more a character study, and not always a becoming one.

Fauci tracked his television appearances and noted flattering comments. He seemed pleased by his own ascent into a pandemic celebrity, and he wrote, more than once, with the tone of a man managing his brand rather than a man managing a crisis.

On May 21, he wrote that his fame was “explosive,” calling himself the country’s most famous and talked-about person and observing that Trump seemed enamored of him despite him taking the spotlight.

Lets hover there for a moment because I think it matters and I don’t want to wave it away just because I find the people prosecuting it distasteful. We should want our public health leaders to be humble. We should want them undistracted by the warm soapy bath of their own fame. A man charting his press coverage while the country buries six figures a year of its dead is not a crime, but it’s not inconsequential either. It’s a real flaw in a real person who was, by every account, exhausted and a little drunk on a kind of relevance he’d never had before and would never have again.

But vanity is not a conspiracy. So far, what’s in these pages looks a lot more like evidence of an ego than evidence that Fauci created the virus, funded its creation knowingly or ran a cover-up. Reuters has gone through a lot of the passages Paul is calling contradictions, and found that most of them are broadly consistent with what Fauci was saying publicly at the time: not identical, but consistent. And it’s important to remember that ground conditions were shifting on a daily basis in the pandemic’s early days – so timing is important.

This is the part I want to get exactly right, because it’s the part where both sides tend to lie to you with confidence.

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 is still unresolved. The FBI leans toward a lab incident. The CIA later said a lab-related origin was more likely, but with low confidence, which is a very different sentence than “the CIA confirmed it came from a lab.” Other American intelligence agencies still lean toward natural spillover. China’s refusal to hand over full records has made this, maybe permanently, a mystery.

Fauci, and a good chunk of the scientific establishment around him, spoke about the natural-origin theory with more certainty than the evidence supported, while treating the lab-leak question, which was always scientifically plausible, like it belonged exclusively to the tinfoil-hat crowd. That was a real failure, and an instructive one, because it’s the kind of malfunction that happens whenever institutions decide a question is too politically radioactive to be asked out loud by respectable people.

But I want to put a date stamp on that failure, because context changes the shape of it without excusing it. This is 2020. This is the year QAnon goes from a message-board curiosity to mainstream fever dream. This is Pizzagate’s sequel season: a sitting president’s supporters convinced that a Democratic pedophile ring is being run out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor that, incidentally, does not have a basement. This is the run-up to Stop the Steal, to fantasies of military tribunals, of mass executions, of Trump getting quietly reinstated by the Space Force. I could keep going. There’s a whole cinematic universe of 2020 conspiracism and the lab-leak theory did not arrive on a dispassionate stage. It arrived in the same news cycle, sometimes the same sentence, as Bill Gates microchipping the vaccine and 5G towers playing a role in transmission of the virus. If you were a public health official in the spring of 2020, watching a scientifically plausible hypothesis get discussed in the same breath as satanic tunnels under a pizza shop, it’s understandable why your instinct was to lump it in with the rest of the swampland and wave it off.

That’s context, not absolution. Here’s the inconvenient part: every so often, a conspiracy theory turns out to be true. Not often. But often enough that “this sounds like a conspiracy theory” is not, on its own, a rebuttal. And when a fringe idea does turn out to hold water (even partially) or as an unresolved possibility, it does something corrosive to the whole information ecosystem. It hands a small trophy to 4chan and to the swampiest corners of the internet, and lets them say: “see, we told you, the mainstream lies to you, trust us instead.”

That is a real cost. It’s arguably a higher cost than the original error, because it doesn’t just misinform people about one virus; it teaches millions of people that the differential diagnosis for “things institutions dismiss” should default to “probably true.” That’s a dangerous penchant for an undereducated country, and Fauci’s blanket dismissiveness, understandable in its moment, gave it momentum. The result is that it’s become quite fashionable now to “not trust the experts.” Of course, unless you board a plane and you want to land safely. But the damage to institutional trust is real, and the responsibility for that erosion should be shared by all sides.

There’s one more layer of context worth adding here, and I want to be precise about the sequence, because it’s a two-step move and both steps matter.

1. Step one, back in 2020: a real and vocal contingent on the left, journalists, public health voices, some scientists, didn’t just dismiss the lab-leak theory as unproven. Many of them actively labeled it racist or xenophobic, on the theory that entertaining a Chinese-lab origin was really just laundering anti-Asian sentiment through a science question. That framing helped push the hypothesis to the fringe faster and harder than the evidence alone ever would have.

2. Step two, now, in 2026: Republicans have taken that history and repackaged it into a tidy indictment: see, the left called this racist, and it turned out to be plausible all along, so the whole thing was just more woke overreach, more evidence that they’ll smear any inconvenient question as bigotry to protect a narrative.

I don’t think that’s an unfair reading of what occurred on the left in 2020. It was a mistake to conflate a question about a virus’s origin with a question about people’s putative racism. But I want to lay the other half of the context right next to it, because the same spring and summer, the president of the United States is standing at campaign rallies in Tulsa and Phoenix calling the virus “Kung Flu,” and his own press secretary is at the White House podium defending it as merely “linking it to its place of origin.” So, whatever you think about the left’s racism framing, it wasn’t invented from nothing. It was responding, badly and too broadly, to something that was actually happening in real time, at the highest level of government, on camera. Both of those things are true at once: the left overcorrected into calling a legitimate scientific question racist, and the right was, simultaneously, actually being racist about it. Neither fact cancels the other out. That’s just what 2020 was.

And look, hindsight is 20/20. Literally, in this case, since so much of what we’re now re-litigating happened in 2020. It is very easy, five years, sitting in a quiet room with the full transcript in front of you, to draw a clean line from what someone said in March to what turned out to be true in December. It is much harder to remember that the ground itself was moving underneath everyone’s feet on something close to a daily basis: the case-fatality estimates revised, the transmission models revised, the guidance on surfaces, then droplets, then aerosols, revised again. We are building tidy narratives of villainy out of a year that, as it was actually lived, had almost no straight lines in it at all.

That Fauci called the lab-leak theory impossible in public while privately believing it was certain. What the diaries seem to show is closer to a man privately entertaining a possibility he publicly minimized, which is squishier and less cinematic than “he lied,” but it’s also just... true. He eventually said publicly that he kept an open mind. His public emphasis, though, leaned hard toward the spillover story, harder than the state of the evidence ever justified.

For what it’s worth, I’ve investigated this one deeply, more deeply than is probably healthy, and I’ll tell you where I personally land, with the appropriate hedge that I am a citizen scientist and not a virologist. There’s a real cluster of circumstantial evidence for a lab origin. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology reportedly fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the official case count begins. The Institute took its entire database of more than twenty thousand virus samples offline in September of 2019, without explanation, months before anyone outside China had heard the word coronavirus. And this was, unambiguously, a lab doing gain-of-function-adjacent research on bat coronaviruses; that much isn’t in dispute. Then there’s the furin cleavage site, a small string of amino acids on the spike protein that makes the virus dramatically better at infecting human cells, and which doesn’t show up in any of its closest known relatives in bats.

None of that is proof.

Furin sites do occur naturally in other coronaviruses, and nature is a much better engineer than we tend to give it credit for. But if you made me put a number on it, and I want to be honest that this is a gut-level synthesis, not a laboratory finding, I’d land somewhere around 65/35 in favor of a lab origin over a natural spillover. I’d also tell you, in the very next breath, that anyone who claims to know this with 100 percent certainty, in either direction, is telling you more about their politics than about the virus. I don’t think we will ever know for certain.

The nonprofit is EcoHealth Alliance, run by a scientist named Peter Daszak. The headline NIAID grant was roughly three point seven million dollars over five years, for research into bat coronaviruses. Of that, something in the neighborhood of six hundred thousand dollars eventually flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over several years, for sampling and lab work. A broader government accounting found that, across several different sub-awards from different American recipients, the Wuhan lab received something closer to one point four million dollars total between 2014 and 2021. So, the number moves depending on whether you’re counting one grant or every dollar traced from every source. HHS’s inspector general later found that NIH and EcoHealth simply failed to monitor this money properly, and that EcoHealth didn’t get, or didn’t hand over, information NIH had actually asked for from the Wuhan lab. HHS eventually debarred EcoHealth and Daszak entirely.

That’s a real, documented failure of federal oversight. I’m not interested in soft-pedaling it. But notice: the failure isn’t really about the dollar figure. Six hundred thousand dollars is a rounding error against NIH’s budget. The real question was never “how much,” it was “what experiments, under what safety conditions, classified how, reported to whom.” A small grant can still fund a genuinely dangerous experiment. The number is a distraction from the substance, in exactly the same way “111 times” is a distraction from what Fauci actually said and didn’t say.

Which brings us to gain-of-function, a phrase that gets thrown around like it has one meaning, when it actually has at least two.

In the broadest scientific sense, gain-of-function just means you’ve modified an organism so it acquires or strengthens some trait. That’s an enormous category. It covers a huge amount of ordinary virology, getting a virus to grow better in a lab dish, building an animal model of a disease, tracking how a virus might dodge the immune system. Most of that research is uncontroversial and, frankly, essential. It’s how we get vaccines and treatments before a threat fully arrives.

The controversial subset, the part people are actually scared of, is research specifically aimed at making a potential pandemic pathogen more transmissible, more lethal or better at evading immunity.

• The argument for doing that kind of work is real: you learn which mutations to watch for, you build better surveillance, you get ahead of nature.

• The argument against it is also real, and it’s the scarier one: the odds of a lab accident or a security failure are low, but the ceiling on the downside is a global pandemic.

Small probability with a planetary consequence. That asymmetry is the whole debate.

A good chunk of the Fauci-Paul fight is really just two men using two different definitions of the same phrase and shouting past each other. Paul means the broad version. Fauci, testifying under the federal regulatory definition, said the funded work didn’t qualify as gain-of-function research of concern under that narrow policy definition. Both of those statements can be technically true and still leave you with the uneasy sense that Fauci reached for the definition that let him say no rather than the one that best described what actually happened in that lab.

I’ve said before, casually, that masks didn’t do much to protect the wearer because the virus could get in through the eyes or because people wore them wrong. That’s true as far as it goes, but it understates the actual evidence, and I want to be more precise here than I have been in the past.

Cloth masks and loose surgical masks are a very different animal from a properly fitted N95. A well-fitted N95 does two separate jobs: it reduces what an infected person breathes out into a room, and it reduces what an uninfected person breathes in. Real-world CDC data found consistently lower infection odds among people who wore masks or respirators, and the effect was strongest, by a wide margin, for N95S and KN95s specifically. This was an aerosol-spreading virus. An N95’s electrostatic weave was built for exactly that kind of particle.

So, the sharper, fairer critique of the mask era isn’t “masks don’t work.” It’s that public health authorities collapsed a bandana, a blue surgical mask, and a properly fitted N95 into one word, “mask,” and then delivered that word as a moral command instead of what it actually was: a dose-reduction tool whose effectiveness depended entirely on filtration, fit, the setting you were in, how long you were in it and how well the room was ventilated. That’s a communication failure, not a scientific one. And communication failures, when you’re asking an entire country to change its behavior for two years, are not small.

Fauci sat on Trump’s task force. Trump held the actual executive authority the entire time. In February of 2020, Trump told Bob Woodward, on tape, that the virus was airborne and more dangerous than the flu, and then spent the next month telling the country it was nothing, it would disappear, it would be gone by April. He later admitted to Woodward that he’d played it down on purpose.

He pushed hydroxychloroquine hard, with essentially no evidentiary basis. He didn’t literally tell people to drink bleach (let’s be precise, because precision is the whole point of this episode), but he did publicly wonder aloud whether disinfectant could somehow be used inside the body, live, on camera, prompting doctors everywhere to issue emergency warnings that people should not do the thing the president had just mused about.

He wants credit for Operation Warp Speed. At the same time, he’s spent the years since distancing himself from the vaccine it produced, because there’s a political constituency he needs that has gone fully anti-vaccine. And when RFK Jr. rebuilt the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, he put Robert Malone in as vice chair, the same Malone who has claimed, without a shred of supporting evidence, that the COVID vaccine killed seventeen million people. Malone resigned this past March, amid a legal fight over the committee’s legitimacy. But he sat on that panel, shaping American vaccine policy, for the better part of a year.

It’s not just Trump’s failure on COVID. There is some serious “outrage” asymmetry happening on the right. I can’t possibly catalog all of Trump’s peccadilloes here but let’s just enumerate a couple of them:

• Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, in a scheme to conceal a hush-money payment to an adult-film performer who said she’d had a sexual encounter with him shortly after his wife gave birth.

• A civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her afterward, the jury stopped short of the word “rape” only because of a narrow technicality in New York’s penal code, and the judge who oversaw the case wrote, in his own ruling, that what the jury found Trump did was rape “as commonly understood,” whatever the statute’s fine print required. That verdict has now survived appeal all the way up through the Supreme Court, declining to hear it.

• Trump’s own financial disclosures show he personally made more than two billion dollars in 2025 off cryptocurrency ventures carrying his name, a meme coin launched three days before he took office and a token-sale operation called World Liberty Financial run in part by his sons, while sitting in the Oval Office with the actual regulatory authority over how that industry gets policed. Nearly a million people who bought into his meme coin lost a combined 3.8 billion dollars. He kept 636 million of it personally, on that coin alone. A sitting president used the platform of the presidency to launch a financial product, collect the winnings, and let the retail buyers absorb the loss. If you’re looking for self-dealing, that’s not a rounding error. That’s the whole business model.

• Epstein.

I’m not enumerating these to say “well, your guy is worse than my guy, so nobody’s guy is guilty.” I’m cataloging it because the arithmetic of outrage in this country has become completely detached from the size of the offense. Fauci may have been vain. He may have leaned on a narrow legal definition to dodge an uncomfortable truth. He may have spoken with more certainty about viral origins than the evidence ever supported. Those are real, legitimate, documentable failures, and I’m not here to launder them.

But we are being asked to accept that those failures are the central crime of the pandemic, while a man who privately knew the danger and publicly lied about it, who floated injecting disinfectant, who wants sole credit for the vaccine and no blame for the backlash against it, who installed vaccine skeptics into the very body that approves vaccines for American children, and who is a convicted felon for an entirely unrelated act of hush-money fraud, that man is treated, by the same people demanding Fauci’s head, as basically a bystander in all of this.

That’s not accountability. That’s a magic trick. You compress an entire national catastrophe into one aging bureaucrat, and while everyone’s staring at him, the actual architecture of power gets to walk out of the room clean.

If I have to boil five thousand words down to one sentence: Fauci deserves scrutiny, real scrutiny, not the theater we got this week, for his overconfidence, for the government’s genuinely sloppy oversight of dangerous research, and for a diary that reveals a man a little too in love with his own celebrity. And the Republican effort to turn those specific, real failings into the singular defining crime of COVID is wildly disproportionate, and it happens to arrive at the exact moment this same party would rather not discuss the Epstein files, or inflation or the war in Iran or the denuding of Medicaid.

I don’t think that’s actually the right question and I think our compulsion to keep asking it that way is a symptom of something bigger than this one hearing. We’ve lost our tolerance for holding two truths about the same person at once.

Fauci was not a saint.

He was also not the author of the plague.

He was a man with real faults: vanity, overconfidence, a taste for the spotlight that got the better of his judgment more than once, who also spent a long career, decades before any of us had heard of Wuhan, doing work that saved a meaningful number of lives. And he was hardly the only official who got things wrong during COVID.

The lab-origin question, the muddled mask guidance, the sloppy grant oversight, those were institutional failures, distributed across agencies and administrations and both political parties, not the private sins of one aging immunologist.

What we need isn’t a tribunal. We need to sit down, honestly, without the cameras rolling and the fundraising emails going out, and study what worked and what didn’t, so that next time a pandemic rears its head, we’re a little better prepared. We don’t need a witch hunt. We need an honest postmortem.

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