A few weeks ago, I published a piece examining the curious case of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal journals and, more importantly, the enormous distance between what some officials were privately writing and what the American public was being told publicly.
The reaction was spectacular.
My inbox and digital channels lit up with the sort of righteous fury usually reserved for someone kicking a puppy or suggesting Congress might occasionally be less than perfect. Much of it came from the political left, although, to be fair, partisan outrage has never been the exclusive property of either party.
Apparently, asking questions had become the real public-health emergency.
So let me revisit the questions that caused all that heartburn.
Why did Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times during congressional questioning? What exactly did officials know, and when did they know it, about the origins of COVID-19? And perhaps most importantly, how much of what Americans were told was settled scientific fact was actually still being investigated behind closed doors?
Those aren’t conspiracy questions.
They’re accountability questions.
And after everything we’ve learned, I refuse to apologize for asking them.
Now there is another reason to ask them.
Federal prosecutors have secured a guilty plea from Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Morens admitted to a felony conspiracy charge involving efforts to evade public-records requirements and conceal official communications concerning COVID research and the origins of the virus.
That is not a Substack rumor.
That is not something somebody whispered into a microphone at three o’clock in the morning.
It is a matter of federal court record.
And that distinction matters enormously.
According to the case, Morens used personal email and other communications channels in an effort to keep official business outside the government’s searchable records. The communications involved COVID-related research funding, including controversial work connected to bat coronaviruses and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Stop there.
Just stop.
Because this is where the conversation should become considerably less partisan and considerably more uncomfortable.
I don’t care whether the person involved voted Republican, Democrat, DSA or for the guy whose campaign consisted entirely of standing outside the polling place holding a sign that said, “I’m running because everyone else is terrible.”
If a government official deliberately tries to circumvent transparency laws, Americans have every right to know why.
And if those communications concern research connected to one of the most consequential public-health catastrophes in modern history, that right becomes even more important.
For years, Americans were effectively divided into two camps.
There were the people who accepted the prevailing narrative without question, and there were those who questioned it and were frequently dismissed as whiners, conspiracy theorists, science deniers or worse.
I never believed that was intellectually honest.
There is a massive difference between saying, “I know exactly what happened,” and saying, “I don’t know what happened, but I want the evidence.”
The second position is not anti-science.
It is science.
Science is supposed to survive questioning. In fact, questioning is the engine that makes science work.
What doesn’t work is telling citizens to trust the experts while simultaneously making it harder for those citizens to see what the experts were actually saying to one another.
That’s where trust begins to collapse.
And once trust collapses, no government press conference can magically rebuild it.
Think about the pattern.
We had Fauci before Congress invoking the Fifth Amendment repeatedly.
We now have a former senior adviser pleading guilty in a case involving efforts to conceal official communications.
We have years of disputes over COVID’s origins, government-funded research, Wuhan, gain-of-function allegations and what various officials knew at different points in time.
And we have millions of Americans who lived through extraordinary government restrictions that affected their jobs, businesses, schools, families, churches, travel and personal medical decisions.
Yet somehow the most controversial question became whether we were even allowed to ask questions.
That is backwards.
I don’t believe every theory about COVID is true. I don’t believe every allegation deserves equal credibility. And I certainly don’t believe that skepticism automatically makes someone smarter than an expert.
But I also don’t believe expertise should function as a diplomatic immunity card against scrutiny.
Experts can be wrong.
Officials can lie.
Institutions can protect themselves.
And bureaucracies can become remarkably creative when somebody starts asking uncomfortable questions.
Anyone who has spent even five minutes around Washington understands that the federal government is perfectly capable of producing 900 pages of paperwork to explain why it cannot locate the one page you actually requested.
So forgive me if I’m not stunned when someone discovers that private email accounts can be remarkably convenient places to conduct inconvenient government business.
The most troubling part isn’t merely what may have happened.
It’s what the American public was denied while it was happening.
During COVID, ordinary citizens were repeatedly told that the debate was over. Follow the science. Trust the experts. Don’t question the consensus.
But consensus isn’t evidence.
And authority isn’t truth.
If anything, the events of the last several years should have taught conservatives, liberals and everyone in between the same lesson: never surrender your capacity to question government simply because the government says it has good intentions.
Today it may be a Republican administration demanding obedience in the name of national security.
Tomorrow it may be a Democratic administration demanding obedience in the name of public health.
The political jersey changes.
The danger doesn’t.
That is why I don’t see this as a partisan issue.
I see it as an American issue.
The government works for us.
Not the other way around.
We pay the salaries. We fund the agencies. We elect the politicians. And when officials exercise extraordinary power over our lives, we have every right to demand an extraordinary level of transparency in return.
I don’t expect government officials to be perfect.
I do expect them to tell the truth.
And when someone inside the system is accused; and now, in Morens’ case, has admitted wrongdoing, there should be no reflexive instinct to protect the institution simply because the institution once told us to trust it.
Trust is earned.
It isn’t inherited.
It isn’t printed on a government letterhead.
And it certainly isn’t established by shouting “misinformation” loud enough.
The critics who attacked my previous article seemed far more interested in defending a narrative than examining the evidence.
That’s precisely why I intend to keep asking questions.
Not because I have every answer.
Because I don’t.
And neither does anyone else.
Maybe the ultimate lesson of COVID isn’t that we should trust one political party over another, or one government agency over another, or one television pundit over another.
Maybe the lesson is much simpler.
Question everybody.
Read the documents.
Follow the money.
Follow the emails.
Follow the paper trail.
And when somebody tells you there is nothing to see, perhaps that’s exactly when you should look a little harder.
Because if the people who told us to “follow the science” were simultaneously trying to make sure we couldn’t follow the records, then the American people have every right to ask one brutally simple question:
What, exactly, were they so afraid we would find?
I don’t know the answer.
But after everything we’ve learned, I’m certainly not going to stop looking.
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