What's True And What's False About Anthony Fauci

What people tell you about Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute For Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID), often tells you more about them than him. Passionate as the comments and claims have been, both his enemies and his defenders routinely praise or blame him in ways that are untrue.

Anthony Fauci swearing an oath to give honest testimony as he appeared at the U.S. Capitol last week. He then repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions.

Take Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his recent remarks following the release of Fauci’s diaries. Kennedy was right in pointing out that Fauci was treated in June 2021 for a pulmonary infarction, and that Fauci concealed this. Kennedy is also correct in saying that this is dubious in itself as pulmonary infarction can be caused by Covid vaccines, and for Fauci to cover this up when he was promoting the vaccines — and for years afterwards — surely leaves him open to reproach.

But Kennedy also said that Fauci had a myocardial infarction. In laymen’s terms, that’s a heart attack. But it was Fauci’s lungs, not his heart, that were affected. Moreover, while some vaccines did induce pulmonary embolisms and some pulmonary embolisms cause tissue death, which is what an infarction is, this was typical of non-RNA vaccines. Pulmonary infarction does not appear to be associated with the Moderna vaccine, which is an m-RNA vaccine, and that is what Fauci was given. In addition, Fauci’s infarction appeared five months after he received his Covid shot, and that’s not consistent with the claim that the injection prompted his infarction.

In other words, Kennedy was half-right. Fauci’s behavior was questionable, but the facts don’t quite align with what Kennedy alleged.

That brings us back to where we started. Nearly everyone commenting on Fauci is partisan, and we need to be absolutely specific about the facts in order to assess his record.

With that in mind, here is a review of some of Fauci’s key decisions, especially including those that have been most criticized:

Fauci was in charge of the United States government agency that provided funds for the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. That’s where it’s now generally agreed that Covid was accidentally spawned. So Fauci bears at least some responsibility for the pandemic.

Nonetheless, he repeatedly testified under oath before Congress that the NAID never funded "gain-of-function" research—modifying viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal—at the Wuhan lab. Whether Fauci recognized the extent of the gain-of-function research that took place there and knew that what he was saying was false is unclear. At a minimum he appears to have been shading the truth. This may have been based upon the belief that what he was asserting was defensible since the NAID funds first passed through a New York-based non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance, and they were not made directly to the Wuhan Institute.

Still more troublingly, even after Covid made its appearance and it was revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had delayed in telling the U.S. government that the viruses Wuhan was studying were more lethal than had been expected, Fauci did not cut off their funding.

Fauci was also slow in favoring a ban on travel from China. On January 24, 2020, Fauci told a group of senators that this was unwise. However, he reversed himself a week later, possibly under pressure from President Trump, expressing his support for a ban. As he later noted, the ban may have prevented “seeding” of the virus, giving the country more time to prepare for its emergence here.

Fauci has often been blamed for the extended school closures of 2020-2021…