Front Burner - Republican revenge against Anthony Fauci

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

As the face of America's COVID-19 response, Anthony Fauci was a nearly constant presence in American life throughout the pandemic. To some, he was revered, reaching a sort of celebrity status. But to a movement on the American right, he eventually became a villain, accused not simply of mishandling the pandemic, but of misleading the public about its origins, and even bearing some responsibility for COVID-19 itself.This week, Fauci testified before the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security Committee, to answer for his response to the pandemic. But the proceedings took a strange turn, as he refused to answer questions, repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment. Daniel Engber is a senior editor at The Atlantic who co-wrote the piece, "What Anthony Fauci Didn't Say." He joins us to talk about why some Americans were so eager to put Anthony Fauci on trial.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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Hi, I'm Aaron Wary, in for Jamie. Six years ago, Anthony Fauci was probably the most famous doctor in the world. As the face of America's COVID response, he became an almost constant presence in American life, and in some corners a revered figure. But to a growing movement on the American right, he eventually became a villain, accused not simply of mishandling the pandemic, but of misleading the public about its origins and even bearing some responsibility for COVID itself. I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean, 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. This week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs after receiving a subpoena. And with the threat of possible criminal proceedings hanging over the testimony, the hearings took an unusual turn. Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Years after the pandemic ended, why is part of America so eager to put Anthony Fauci on trial? Daniel Engber is a senior editor at the Atlantic. He co-wrote the piece, What Anthony Fauci didn't say. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We should begin with what happened on Wednesday because it was a pretty extraordinary scene. Anthony Fauci, as I said, was brought before a Senate committee investigating the COVID response. And rather than answer senators' questions, Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution more than 100 times in all.

Why did he do that? What did Fauci and his legal team believe he risks if he had answered those questions? Well, to understand this, we really have to go back to the beginning of last year, President Biden's really final hours in office. President Biden has just issued preemptive pardons saying, quote, these public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be targets of unjustified and politically motivated processes. So again, this is Anthony Fauci. This is the committee members and staff of the January 6th committee. He gave Fauci, among others, a blanket pardon for any offenses committed against the United States for Fauci since the start of 2014 in association with his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and infectious diseases or any of the various roles he had in the White House coronavirus pandemic response. So Fauci has this blanket pardon covering anything that might have gone wrong during that time, but only up until the moment that presidential pardon was signed, which is in late January of 2025. So any new crimes he commits associated with, again, his involvement, with the pandemic response, he could be prosecuted for it.

So that possibility was apparently on his mind and on the mind. of his attorneys going into that hearing. And in particular, if he was deemed to have lied to Congress during the hearing this week, he could be prosecuted for that, pardon notwithstanding. For those who look at Anthony Fauci as some kind of guilty party or with general skepticism and suspicion, and we're going to get to why that might be the case shortly. But I guess the risk for Fauci is that critics can now say, first Joe Biden pardoned him, now he's pleading the fifth. If he did nothing wrong, what is he afraid of? Legally, that isn't necessarily how either a pardon or the Fifth Amendment works, but politically or reputationally, I guess,

do you think there are implications for him in deciding to take this route? I mean, I think implications for his public image, implications for his legacy, you know, this question of of legal implications is a little bit complicated as far as we could tell from our reporting. But in terms of, yeah, how does it look? Senator Paul makes the point that, you know, leaving aside the question of what he might have done wrong during the pandemic, he was that no legal risk, says Paul, if he just answered every question truthfully. You know, there's only this risk of prosecution for lying to Congress with, you know,

a fresh lie if he lies. So why not tell the truth? But I think, you know, there's just such a track record of these calls for his prosecution. And, you know, one could easily have the sense that, you know, there was a plan here to find some excuse to prosecute him. And that's certainly how Fauci himself put it in his opening statement. The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public. pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars. Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come

to the same conclusion. That's the setup for the hearing, but I agree with you for someone who's just coming to this fresh and hasn't followed this whole back and forth over many months and even years now. It does seem weird. Why is Anthony Fauci, you know, refusing to answer any questions? Why does he have this part in? And we should work through what the committee or certain members of the committee, I guess, are alleging here.

Senator Rand Paul has accused Fauci of misleading Congress about research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Verology and about his role in discussions concerning the origin of COVID-19. The Trump administration has gone considerably further, the office of the director of national intelligence, now alleges Fauci helped manipulate intelligence assessments, lied to Congress, and that U.S. funded research ultimately produced the virus that caused the pandemic. Those are obviously pretty extraordinary allegations. What evidence actually exists for them? Yeah, that's a very complicated and many-layered question.

Let me start with as clearly as I can say what is actually known to have happened. Okay. So the U.S. government through the institute that Anthony Fauci led did give money through a third-party organization called EcoHealth, two researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were studying bat coronaviruses somewhat similar to the one that eventually caused the pandemic. That is known. That is true. Now everything else is disputed to one degree or another, and the allegations against Fauci are many. One of the things that Fauci and Paul have sparred over in the past is this question of, well, what was the nature of that research that received U.S. funding in Wuhan? Senator Paul has said it's gain-of-function research. These are experiments that were making bat coronaviruses potentially more dangerous to humans. And there is some evidence that research of that type was being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

and was connected to this grant support from EcoHealth, which in turn can be traced back to the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. So there was this kind of semantic question in 2021 when Fauci was first testifying before Paul's committee. did you fund gain of function research in Wuhan? And Dr. Fauci said, no, I didn't. And Senator Paul said this was a lie. They later had a very heated exchange where Senator Paul invited Fauci to retract that statement. And Fauci said, you know, I'm not the one who's lying. You are the one who's lying.

And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. Okay. get one person. Let's read from the NIH. Can I answer the question? This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increased their transmissibility to humans.

How you can say that is not gain of function. It is not. It's a dance and you're dancing around this because you're trying to obscure responsibility for four. million people dying around the world from a pandemic. It seems to come down to, you know, what's your definition of gain of function research? My assessment of it is that that Fauci was kind of splitting hairs in the definition of the term. So a lot of this, of everything that's followed, has flowed from this one moment. But this is like a very, very minor technical point in a sense.

And it only becomes very important if you also believe. that the research that was going on in Wuhan did actually lead to the creation of the virus that caused the pandemic. And so there's kind of this two-step process. Like, are we fixated on almost this technicality of whether Daochi lied about this grant? Or are we implying that actually the U.S. government

caused the pandemic through this multi-step process? And so that's just, that whole thing is hanging over all of this. And one of the things that happened in the hearing is that you saw, especially the Republican members, just kind of stipulating that we know how the pandemic started, and it started with the release of the virus from a lab in Wuhan. And then it's this question of like, okay, whose fault is that?

And now we can connect the dots and make the case. So that was actually Anthony Fauci's fault. Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally. While privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab, the American people deserve answers. But even that is so tendentious because it is not the case that everyone agrees this is how the pandemic starts. This is sort of the official position of the White House at this moment. But, you know, it's certainly not the case that this is the consensus view among virologists.

In fact, I'd say the opposite is true. Most phorologists I talk to think there's a natural origin. And if you look at the intelligence assessments conducted by various component agencies in the U.S. government, there's kind of a split. But how one chooses to resolve that uncertainty in one's own mind colors what you think of this whole question of like what Fauci did wrong and what it paints. Adding to all this is that Rand Paul has made public Fauci's pandemic diary entries authored between 2019. in 2022, a diary that was apparently provided to Paul by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary. These diary entries are Fauci writing contemporaneously about Trump, the media, COVID's origins, his own public profile, and the extraordinary political world he suddenly inhabited.

Paul and others have seized on portions about the origins of COVID-19 and whether or not it originated in a laboratory. Can you explain what they're latching onto and what they say at demonstration? rates? I mean, I think that a lot of what is being latched onto by everyone is just how embarrassing these diaries are, separate from the question of what did Fauci write about his own thinking on, you know, salient points about the source of the pandemic. There's just a lot of really cringe-inducing material in there where he's essentially preening over all the attention he's getting. To me, that is the substance, in quotes, of the diary. And what? what role they played both in the public reaction to the hearing and the lead-up to it,

and also it even played out in some of the questions that he was asked. He was taken to task for his tone and focus on the issues that really mattered. There are a few things in the diary that were picked out, I think, and used to justify the release of the diary and claimed to be spoken gun evidence about what Fauci really thought. I didn't find any of that evidence convincing in any way. One of them that you alluded to, I think in January of 2020, so very early on there's a line about how the outbreak of COVID at this wet market in Wuhan was not the start of the pandemic, but an amplifying event.

And then he was saying something different later on more in line with the conventional hypothesis, that in fact, this spillover event did happen at the market. So does that mean that he was spilling his true thoughts directly onto the page in January and then lying to the American public later on? I mean, maybe, or maybe everyone was just trying to figure out what was going on in January of 2020 and hadn't landed on a more considered opinion. Opinions were changing every week, every day during that period and continue to do so for months.

So I don't know. There's a lot of stuff like that that has been pulled out of the diary. Look, this is what he wrote here, and this is what he said there. And it could be, you know, a difference between what he was willing to say in public and in private, or it could be just, you know, time passes, opinions change. We've talked about it a bit already here, but the lab leak theory. Early on, that theory became entangled with, you know, genuinely conspiratorial claims and Trump's rhetoric about China,

major platforms and media organizations sometimes treated it as a fringe idea. But subsequently, it does feel like, you know, as you say, some American intelligence agencies themselves have arrived at different assessments about the plausibility of a laboratory-associated incident. You've written extensively about this debate. Is there credible evidence, would you say,

to back up the theory that COVID was or could have been a lab leak? There's arguments over what should count as evidence in quotes. But yes, I think there is a reasonable debate to be had. I don't think this is 100% resolved. More to the point of the Fauci hearings. There was a lot of reason to be uncertain at that time in 2020. Again, if we can all agree it was most likely a natural origin now, then all this stuff seems sort of silly like who cares what Fauci was saying back then. But to, me, one of the things that is alarming that comes out in the evidence, not just of, you know, the questions asked of Fauci that he refused to answer, but some of the documentary evidence that Paul has released is you can see that, you know, in this group of kind of elite virologists that were consulting with Fauci at the time in the spring of 2020 and on into the summer, there was a lot of concern that there was a laboratory experiment gone wrong had been the source of this. And I really do think that this concern was sort of buried, might be too strong a word, but it might not be too strong a word.

I mean, it was just happening behind the scenes, and then there was a public message being presented to the American people. I think that part of, you know, the Rand Paul narrative, ringed. true to me when you look at the private messages being exchanged among these virologists and perhaps even some of the entries from Fauci's Diary. So the question becomes, first of all, is this a crime? Second of all, why did it happen? There was a lot of stuff was happening in public health at that time where there was uncertainty behind the scenes, but kind of a single, simplified, more coherent message was presented to the public. An example of this is masking. And a lot of people are very angry at Fauci about his advice on face masks in the

beginning of the pandemic. At first, he said, no one should be wearing a mask. And then all of a sudden, he flipped around and he said, everyone should be wearing a mask. It's not like the evidence that the public health experts had behind the scenes went from, this is a bad idea to this is a good idea. And there was a sense. And I think this is often the case with public health. You want to have a simple message that you can tell everyone, and then if such time comes that you need to change the message, you change it. But you don't show your hand if you're having doubts. So on that level, you can understand why, well, maybe there's some debate behind the scenes about what really caused the pandemic, but you're going to get this simplified message presented to the public. On the other

hand, if they really were concerned that NIH-funded research may have led to a laboratory accident that started the pandemic, I mean, it does make sense that there'd be some very serious reputational damage, or maybe there are practical considerations. Like, if we come out and say, blame a Chinese researcher for having started the pandemic, it's going to make it really hard to do further research on exactly how this started. We'll lose any hope of cooperation with the Chinese on this. So again, there's many explanations for why this might have happened, but I do think there is reason to believe that Fauci and others had doubts that they didn't share. On that last point, the last sort of extension of the idea or the narrative that's

being pushed in some cases, based on what we know right now, how much of it is a leap still to say that Anthony Fauci is somehow responsible for the leak or for the pandemic? I mean, it's a huge leap. Again, it's first, there's multiple steps. First, you have to believe that you know that actually this was a lab leak caused pandemic. I think that's a huge leap. No one knows that for sure. And I think there's a very good reason to think that that is unlikely. Okay, so that's leap number one.

Then leap number two is, you know, somehow specifically this work that was funded by NIH led to the construction of the pathogen. there's just a lot of steps. I mean, there's other versions of the theory out there. One of them is that the virus was actually created in a lab in North Carolina and then aerosolized in Montana and then shipped to Wuhan. I mean, I don't, I'm not bringing that up to say that, you know, our listeners should believe it. I'm just saying there's many leaps can be made and are made. And it's sort of, it's like where do you choose to hop on this?

moving train, that is the Lab League theory. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience.

world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. What's beneath the surface of true crime? Uncover brings you there with premium investigations that demand justice. Each season delves into a distinct case, from the inner workings of a cult, to the disturbing legacy of residential schools. Promising new content year-round, Uncover will take you on a journey through explosive revelations with hosts dedicated to revealing the truth.

Uncover, the best and true crime. Find it on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. Just to go back in the Anthony Fauci story, he had gained real prominence as a public health official during the AIDS epidemic. The Public Health Service has received reports of about 5,800 cases of AIDS with the case fatality ratio of 45%. Dr. Anthony Fauci is hopeful,

that the answer to this dreaded disease may be in sight. I believe now that we have the agent in hand that the amount of effort and energy that's being put into it by biomedical sciences, that within a reasonable period of time we'll have a lot of these answers. But he wasn't quite a household name in America, I don't think, before the pandemic. He served presidents of both parties, going back many decades.

Then COVID happens, and almost overnight, he becomes one of the most famous people in America. there was a time when people were wearing Fauci T-shirts, selling Fauci prayer candles. Brad Pitt played him on Saturday Night Live. Good evening. I'm Dr. Anthony Fauci. First, I'd like to thank all the older women in America who have sent me supportive, inspiring,

and sometimes graphic emails. There was a real celebrity constructed around a public health bureaucrat. Do you think in a way that lionization contributed to the best, backlash that came? Yeah, I mean, definitely. It's interesting to think back. There's no particular reason ahead of time why if we were faced with a pandemic, Anthony Fauci would be marched on stage as the face of the U.S. public health response, right?

Like, typically, you might expect the head of the Centers for Disease Control to be in that position, or maybe the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But instead, this is not the person who runs the National Institutes of Health, but someone who runs one institute within the National Institutes of Health. So kind of in some ways an unlikely choice. But that's the choice that was made. And Fauci does love the spotlight. So I think he, you know, embraced the role.

But having embraced the role, he was in this weird position. Because as time went on, a lot of people, got really angry about the pandemic public health response. And that became politically polarized where Republicans were much more angry than Democrats. Democrats were kind of, this is broad strokes here, but Democrats were kind of signed on with the pro-establishment, institutionalists like public health is great. I'm going to put on my mask and do whatever I'm told. And Republicans were more likely to be in this kind of anti-establishment mindset of don't tell me to put on a mask. Don't tell me to take a vaccine. You've destroyed the economy by, you know, putting restrictions on what

businesses can be open. So you had this politicization of the response to what measures had been taken. And then that created, I think, a kind of cognitive dissonance. Because if you were, let's say, a MAGA Republican who was really mad about the initial response to COVID, well, who was running the country at the time that happened, it was Donald Trump. So you couldn't just blame the administration because you were very supportive of the administration. So, okay, well, no, it was the conniving deep state scientists who caused the problem. And who was on stage representing that, you know, part of government. It was all being channeled through Anthony Fauci. So I think, in a way, not only was he, you know, the face of the coronavirus response, but he also became a way to

be furious at the government when you were supportive of the president and I think that dynamic was really important and then you had this kind of ironic outcome ironic in the sense that Fauci had spent his entire career trying to be non-political

a completely non-political person is how he would put it and then all of a sudden he became one of the most political people in America where there could be polling that could show that would show based on the response its political affiliation, they either treated Fauci as a saint or as a demon.

I think it's fair to say, you know, more than six years after the pandemic began, COVID remains a kind of an enormous sort of unresolved trauma. More than a million Americans died. More than seven million people died worldwide. Children had their schooling interrupted. People lost their jobs. Families were separated from dying relatives, the government imposed extraordinary restrictions on everyday life, and Americans still profoundly disagree about which of these sacrifices were necessary. Is it possible that a catastrophe of that magnitude was always going to produce a search for individual culpability, that there was always going to be a desire for a singular villain?

I mean, I would have hoped not. And to be clear, I don't think it is a singular villain. Fauci is the best known, but it seems to me that there's actually a broader effort within the government to go after not just Fauci, but his various associates and other people who are thought to have been associated with the alleged lab leak. One of Fauci's advisors is under federal indictment. Another virologist associated with NIH is under federal indictment. There's a virologist in North Carolina. I mentioned that aspect of the lab leak theory before. He's been fired and barred from getting any government grants.

So there's like a broader effort at what I've called lab leak payback. So it's not just Fauci. But yeah, it's being directed at individuals. And I think part of that is just filling the gap of any kind of more comprehensive institutional response. You know, when we were in the midst of the pandemic, I assumed that when it was over, we would get some kind of, almost like, if anything, an over response to like, how can, let's throw all our money at the possibility of another coronavirus outbreak. at the expense of thinking about what other kinds of viruses might cause a pandemic or what other kinds of surprises could upend the global economy and cause great harm and suffering. It's not at all what's happened in the U.S.

I mean, if anything, there's been the idea of pandemic preparedness is now just in shadows. A whole team was brought in to health and human services, almost like it, with a mission to dismantle anything associated with responding to a pandemic, with vigorous public health response to anything. So it's kind of just this, like, shocking reality that just after sustaining those million deaths in the U.S. and 7 million overall, we're running away from any kind of big thinking. Like, instead, we're focusing on prosecuting individuals. It's a lot harder to do the complicated policy work and figure out the time.

tradeoffs that come with regulating this kind of research. I mean, this research isn't done for fun. The research is done because someone thinks it has a better chance of helping protect us from the next pandemic than causing the next pandemic. So it's tough to figure out what kinds of studies should be done and how to oversee them. But that's not where we are. Where we are is, you know, going after individuals. You know, even beyond sort of a response that is aimed at preventing the next pandemic, do you think that essentially putting Anthony Fauci on trial is happening in lieu of a real reckoning with the mistakes and the handling of the pandemic in the United States by, you know,

multiple layers of government and political actors, you know, has this sort of pursuit of Anthony Fochian? And as you say, others sort of come in place of that sort of backwards-looking reckoning with what exactly happened there? Yeah. I mean, I do think it has been, it has come in place. I don't think it has to be in place of it, right? If it is true that U.S. funded research caused the pandemic, I do think there should be. consequences. If I put my mind in the place of someone who is absolutely certain about how the pandemic started and Anthony Fauci's a role in it, I can understand how infuriating and upsetting it must be to watch this guy skate on having done that and just continue to go around the

country giving lectures. I mean, he still has to travel with private security. He still gets death threats, but the impunity with which he is living in his retirement from government service, I can see how that would just drive people crazy, again, if they are certain of what happened. So I guess I just want to leave open that I think it does matter. I've heard some people say, who cares how the pandemic started? Who cares who's responsible? I think it does matter. I think we ought to know.

I wish we did know. And, you know, I think, you know, it's reasonable to hold people to account in one way or another if we know they actually are responsible. But that can happen while also doing all the other things that one might want to do to address systemic failings in 2020 and before that might have led to that predicament. Right. I'm imagining that you might have imagined instead of what we're seeing with Anthony Fauci, some kind of commission or bipartisan, you know, a review of America's handling of the pandemic and the lessons learned. Yeah. And I mean, there have been bipartisan efforts to do just

that. There have been bipartisan investigations into COVID origins. So, you know, I guess there's a question of, have we gone as far as we can go in that kind of work? Is there anything new to find out, I think, you know, the generous interpretation of what happened this week was, okay, We're going to force Anthony Fauci to testify. Since he has the pardon, maybe he'll be able to just really say everything he knows. Again, I think that's the generous interpretation. But from what I'm seeing, we're not making a lot of progress. In fact, I thought the hearing this week was almost like negative progress because

Fauci wasn't saying anything. The senators were saying a lot. Some of what they were saying was untrue. And there was no one to correct them because Fauci himself kept bleeding the fifth. So he couldn't, even when there were clear distortions of fact, he just said his one line. All right. Thanks very much, Daniel, for joining us. Yeah, thank you. That's all for today. Frontburner was produced this week by Joytha Schengupta, Matthew Umha, Kevin Sexton, Sam McNulty, Dev Modi, and McKenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee.

Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producers are Elaine Chow, and Imogen Burchard. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. I'm Aaron Wary. Jason Markisoff will be hosting next week. Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca