Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable. In the meantime, though, Johnson has shared just a single set of texts: a Fauci group chat that he considered so explosive in its implications that it had to be released forthwith. “This is a blockbuster revelation,” the senator said on Tuesday. The public had to know.

The texts in question were from a short exchange that Fauci had with two other public-health officials—former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky—in January 2021. Murthy had asked whether either of them knew of “any data or theoretical reason” why an expectant mother might choose to vaccinate early versus late in pregnancy. Walensky answered no, that this was all “data free.”

Fauci agreed, but a couple of hours later, he followed up. After asking around, he’d heard about a theoretical concern: A second dose of the vaccine could lead to fever and cytokine storm—an overactivation of the immune system, also linked to COVID itself—which in turn might lead to early-term miscarriage. In an interview that Fauci gave just one week later, he alluded to the need for balanced thinking on vaccination during pregnancy, given the lack of clinical-trial data. But he noted that thousands of expectant mothers had already gotten shots by then, and no issues had arisen. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said, but “I would rather take my chances with a vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant.”

Fauci’s critics now assert that this was tantamount to murder. Fauci knew that COVID shots were killing babies, they argue—he said so in a private text—and then he went out and pretended that the shots were safe. Representative Anna Paulina Luna called this “a crime against humanity and the most evil thing that could’ve ever been done.” Meghan McCain demanded that the 85-year-old be handcuffed, perp-walked, and put in a jail cell for the rest of his life. (“This is not hyperbole,” she noted, rather unconvincingly.) Senator Roger Marshall called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the matter—either that, he said, or “a full 9/11-style commission.”

Even a cursory reading of the context at the time suggests that Fauci’s group chat doesn’t quite reach the level of a “crime against humanity.” In fact, the new material is unremarkable, unrevealing, and—worst of all—maddeningly irrelevant to the many, far more interesting questions that still surround one of our most important public-health leader’s behavior and decision making during the pandemic.

Despite this week’s operatic calls for justice, there wasn’t really any gap between what Fauci typed into his phone and what he said in public at the time. Indeed, according to the messages released this week, Fauci sent another text to the same two colleagues just one day after he’d voiced his “theoretical” concern about the risks of vaccination. In that message, he gave essentially the same assessment that he’d offer to the public shortly after. He even used similar language: “No red flags” had yet emerged from real-world use, but even so, in the absence of clinical-trial data, “one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits.” (Senator Johnson’s office told me that the records show that “Dr. Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know,” and in doing so he robbed them of informed consent. Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky did not respond to requests for comment.)

That logic still applies. The safety and efficacy of the COVID shot during pregnancy were never tested in a full-scale, randomized clinical trial. But observational data—of which we now possess a very large quantity, after many millions of vaccinations—have not identified any reason to believe that any risk of miscarriage, if present, is significant. If the mRNA shots really were abortions in a needle, as some of Fauci’s critics have alleged—if they really caused a loss of pregnancy in 82 percent of cases, as Senator Ted Cruz and many others claim—then this catastrophic harm would surely have caused at least a blip in U.S. birthrates in 2021, when more than 200 million Americans were fully vaccinated. (As it happens, the number of Americans born that year went up.)

More tempered critics acknowledge that the COVID shots never did turn out to be dramatically unsafe for pregnant women—but then, no one could be confident about the risk at the start of 2021. The text message shows that Fauci clearly was aware of the uncertainty, they argue, yet he buried it in public statements; his crime, in other words, was one of clinical duplicity in the first degree. “He essentially told the public that it was safe for pregnant women to take it when he didn’t know that,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said this week.

But Fauci and the public-health establishment did signal their uncertainty. If anything, they were unusually direct about the known unknowns around this topic—at least compared with their messaging on COVID origins, the value of masking, and the importance of school closures, among other squirrelly, scientific questions. When it came to vaccination during pregnancy, no one hid the fact that the most conclusive safety data were lacking. Fauci made this point both in public and in private; he also said repeatedly, both in public and in private, that the systems used to track vaccines’ adverse events had not yet picked up on any reasons for concern—an assessment that more formal analyses would later confirm. In the meantime, the CDC had already found that getting COVID was itself a major threat to pregnant women’s health, associated with a tripled likelihood of going to the ICU and a 70 percent higher risk of death.

What was this, if not transparency? Vaccines had been made available; the CDC’s official advice was that expectant mothers should discuss the matter with their doctors and reach their own conclusions. In the face of all this cautious, careful guidance, many women did decide to skip the shots: By the end of July 2021, fewer than one-quarter of all the pregnant women in the country had been vaccinated, according to CDC data from the time. That lack of uptake may well have had a grave human cost all its own, given that maternal mortality rates doubled in that year.

In other words, this week’s attacks on Fauci haven’t just inflated the importance of his text message; they’ve reversed its meaning altogether, transfiguring a moment of humility into one of arrogance and self-contradiction. The resulting tangle of misinformation has done little more than bring disgrace to the actual work of determining whether, and how, Fauci and other public-health officials might really have misused their power.

The case against Fauci has always been diverse; its most aggressive prosecutors are a big-tent assemblage of anti-vaxxers, libertarians, and lab-leak truthers. Some believe that he lied about the safety of the COVID shots; others say that he was the capo of immoral lockdown measures, or that he played a role in paying for (and then concealing) the research that started the pandemic. So far, the entire spectacle of this investigation—the email dumps, the diary, and now the texts, as well as the Senate hearing where Fauci refused to answer any questions—has only cast a scattered, insufficient light across a range of matters large and small. To choose just one: Do Fauci’s emails really show, as Senator Josh Hawley and others have asserted, that Fauci cajoled his institute’s grantees for help in winning large cash prizes for himself? The documentary evidence doesn’t indicate that he violated any ethics laws, but it is at least suggestive of self-dealing—and it does at least invite further questions about his use of public office. (When pressed on this during his Senate testimony, Fauci responded as he did to every question, by pleading the Fifth.)

And what about the mystery of COVID’s origins? Released emails and private chats do seem to show that virologists in Fauci’s circle took seriously, over many months, the possibility of a lab’s involvement—yet this idea was rarely given credence in the public sphere. Did Fauci help coordinate some sort of message discipline? How much did he really know about the coronavirus work in China that his institute had funded, and what does he think about that sort of research now? The information we have is inconclusive on these points and many others too.

Fauci remains, in the eyes of many experts, a public-health hero whose work on treating and preventing AIDS and other infectious diseases has saved millions of lives. But there are real uncertainties in his pandemic record and questions as to how he and others led the government’s response to COVID—and these points are only getting lost amid the rampant lust for retribution and the wild overreading of his private records. Fauci’s critics say he papered over gaps in knowledge and in doing so misled the public. Now they’re doing just the same.

Even before the push alert about his resignation from the University of Cambridge this week, Jason Arday might well have been the world’s most famous living sociologist. In early 2023, Arday received a professorship at Cambridge; at 37, he was the youngest Black scholar ever to have done so, and his appointment made international headlines. A year later, he set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

But in the past two weeks, Arday’s near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic) tale has disintegrated. In July, a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas published a long Substack post reviewing apparent evidence of plagiarism in Arday’s academic work. Cofnas posted 36 passages from Arday’s 2015 dissertation, about student teaching, which reproduce or closely track text found in a 2009 dissertation from another scholar in the field, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Arday looks to have even copied from and rearranged Zwozdiak-Myers’s title, and in doing so to have misused an apostrophe.

Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing. “A confidential procedure was conducted,” the university told me in a statement. “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.” But some of Arday’s other academic papers had potential problems too—and they seemed much worse than the mere borrowing of language. Quotes from structured interviews that Arday claimed to have performed closely resembled those used by other researchers; parts of some interview responses also reappeared across different studies under Arday’s name, attributed to different people. This duplication, if deliberate, would be something other than plagiarism—it would be academic fraud. (The website Retraction Watch reports that two of Arday’s papers were quietly corrected.)

Yesterday, Cambridge announced that it had “begun an investigation following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments.” By the end of the day, Arday had resigned. “I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life,” he said in a statement. “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

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Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Times last week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”

This much is true: Some of the people who were going after Arday had a political agenda. Cofnas, the philosopher who put Arday’s dissertation through a plagiarism checker last month, argues for a “hereditarian revolution” based on the idea that innate differences in intelligence and other traits exist across racial groups. (He also claims that “the humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI.”) But the challenges to Arday’s credibility quickly went beyond the realm of Cofnas and his fellow white reactionaries, and beyond familiar arguments about diversity hiring. Taken all together, they exposed a broader, self-destructive tendency that has long been present in our universities, and also in the media and publishing: Any failing can be forgiven, as long as it’s packaged in a story that people want to hear.

Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.

The memoir begins with a prophecy. It’s 2006, and Jason Arday, then 21 years old, is installing water pumps in the favelas of Brazil and showing children how to use them. A local aid worker—“a woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, steady way about her”—touches his arm and softly tells him that he is destined to suffer in his life but also to do great things. “After the trip was over, I never saw the woman again, but her words stayed with me,” Arday writes, “and, you might say, her prediction came true.”

The rest of the book is an elaboration on this moment: Arday suffers; Arday overcomes. The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) As a boy, Arday rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls. Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school.

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Tribulations piled up throughout his life. Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic. To make his way through secondary school while—by his own account—illiterate, he needed ample help: support assistants who sat beside him in class and took notes on his behalf.

When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.

His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

As his dissertation deadline approached, Arday started having blurry vision; medical scans revealed a brain tumor. After it was removed, he had a ministroke and lost his short-term memory. “I’d worked on my thesis for over thirty months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he writes. As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book. But Arday, who often likens himself to Rocky Balboa, managed to fight back, and in the end, he passed. (The memoir brings up the fictional boxer in about a dozen different contexts.)

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”

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The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”

When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds,” Arday writes in the book, “it weirdly makes people question your credibility.” Is it weird? I don’t think it’s weird. When you keep succeeding against insurmountable odds, the facts of your surmounting will be bound to get a second look.

Arday’s record of public statements includes plenty that would seem to be exaggerated, if not completely false. He said repeatedly, for instance, that he’d once run 300 miles in three days for a charity event, and that on another occasion he’d run 600 miles in six days. As many people have now pointed out, doing either would be a near-world-record-level feat of endurance athletics. (Neither run is mentioned in his book; he recently told The Guardian that his 600-mile run had actually taken 12 days, including rest periods.) He boasted of having raised millions of pounds for charity—though under questioning from The Times, he conceded that he’d done this as part of a fundraising “syndicate.” In an interview, he claimed that he’d originally been part of the BBC series Up, which began filming before he was born—though this was later said to have been an analogy, not a literal description.

But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

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Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.”

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.

Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”) “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” this town elder asks, before telling him his fate in minute detail. “Every event she described,” Arday writes in the proposal, “has since come to pass.”

I reached out to Arday’s editors—Dawn Davis in the United States, and Kris Doyle, who is publishing the book with Simon & Schuster UK—to ask them why the three-month coma and the shaman woman hadn’t made the cut in the published version of the book, and to find out what they thought of other inconsistencies in Arday’s story and the allegations of misconduct in his academic work. Neither of them chose to answer any questions.

I also tried to reach Eve Claxton, who co-wrote the book with Arday and whom he describes in the acknowledgments as “one of the most important people I have ever met in my life,” by phone and text. She did not respond.

Arday’s book agent, Jennifer Gates, the one who described his life story as “near mythic,” did not respond to multiple emails. A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster would say only that the company “is proceeding with publication” next week.

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Perhaps it’s fitting that the book’s release is still on track and that it has even been designated as an “Editors’ Pick” on Amazon: Once again, Arday is succeeding in the face of many obstacles, uplifted by the many angels in his life and given the opportunity to do great things. This was the true miracle of his career—that the system could be bent to meet his needs, and then it could be bent a little further, and bent and bent until it fit the wild arc of a fairy tale. By his own account, Arday rose to fame as a scholar and a writer despite staggering limitations; he became an academic who can read only a single page of academic text an hour and cannot comprehend what is happening at work 90 percent of the time.

His mission as a scholar had always been to help ensure that other disadvantaged academics could have access to the same allowances that he’d had, and that they’d be empowered to make use of them. He wanted others to succeed the way he had. “Today, in academic circles, that’s what I’m known for,” he writes in his proposal. “Everybody says, ‘Jason is the guy that teaches everyone the tricks.’”

There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?”

What if.

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Sitting in front of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs today, Anthony Fauci twirled his pen. He huffed and straightened his shoulders. He glanced down at a set of papers. He muted and unmuted his microphone.

But other than a brief initial statement, in which he referred to Chairman Rand Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with slandering his reputation and putting him in prison, the only words the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke into the public record—as senators interrogated him about his institute’s funding choices, maligned him as an egomaniacal money-grabber, and accused him of shattering American trust in public health—were these: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

“Nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?” Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, asked him at one point. “Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?”

Fauci consulted the paper in front of him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

“What color tie are you wearing?”

Fauci consulted the paper in front of him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Paul had said he called the hearing—billed simply as “Testimony of Anthony Fauci”— because “the American people deserve answers” about Fauci’s role in the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the American people got something absurd: a three-hour spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts.

That Fauci would stonewall the committee was entirely predictable. Paul has led a yearslong effort to punish him for allowing NIAID to fund research that allegedly enhanced the coronavirus’s ability to harm people, and for allegedly lying to Congress and the American people about that fact. (Some federal intelligence agencies favor the theory that the pandemic started with a virus that leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China; Fauci, in keeping with the consensus among virologists and other infectious-disease experts, has said that the preponderance of biological evidence points instead to the virus having a natural origin, likely spilling over from a wild animal into humans.) In January 2025, during the final hours of Joe Biden’s term, Fauci received a sweeping, preemptive presidential pardon for “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in” over the previous 11 years.

That pardon doesn’t cover Fauci’s actions past the end of Biden’s presidency, or protect him from prosecution over any statements he might have made today. “He could perjure himself now,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this week on Fox News. “If he lies again, then he could be subject to perjury prosecution.”

But the most obvious distortions at the hearing came from the Senate panel. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, “this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth.”

Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times. When Johnson finally ended his remarks with a question—he asked whether Fauci knew about the “dozens of safety signals associated with the COVID injection”—Fauci gave only his standard 21-word response: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Paul claimed on multiple occasions that Fauci had been so dogmatic in his support for dangerous and irresponsible gain-of-function research that he’d written a 2011 op-ed for The Washington Post in support of an experiment that made avian influenza more transmissible in ferrets. According to Paul, Fauci wrote in that op-ed that “even if a scientist is bitten, even if a pandemic should occur, the knowledge is worth the risks.” Fauci did write in the Post that he thought that the benefits of that experiment likely outweighed the risk. But he did not make the preposterous argument that such research would have been worth doing even if it had kicked off a pandemic.

In the past, Fauci could easily have corrected the record and provided a nuanced description of this work. Over decades, he had built a reputation as the nation’s “nonpolitical” spokesperson for public health—the role he stepped into most publicly in early 2020, when the coronavirus was first burning across the U.S. When President Trump touted ineffective drugs as cures and insisted the coronavirus would vanish “like a miracle,” Fauci refuted those claims.

Now Fauci wasn’t talking, and no one else could speak on his behalf. Early on in the hearing, one of his lawyers, David Schertler, spoke up to defend his client against Paul, but was escorted out of the chamber by security at Paul’s request, after the senator repeatedly told him, “You are not recognized!”

Democrats, meanwhile, shied away from asking Fauci questions at all—if they had, he almost certainly would have deferred every question from them, too. Instead, they spent their time scolding Paul for convening the panel at all, thanking Fauci for his service, and criticizing the Trump administration for its attacks on science and public health. The Republicans’ most aggressive allegations went unchallenged in the room.

Fauci seemed to want to say more. At least once, he leaned behind him to consult his panel of lawyers before, once again, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights; at other times, he tensed his shoulders or sighed heavily. In a 2021 Senate hearing, Paul accused him of being responsible, by funding gain-of-function research, for the deaths of millions of people. At the time, Fauci briefly broke his composure. “You are implying that what we did resulted in the deaths of individuals,” Fauci said, pointing his finger at Paul. “I totally resent that, and if anyone is lying here, Senator, it is you.”

Faced with personal attacks this morning, he offered no response. “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” Hawley said. “You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime.” Paul called the hearing the “capstone” to Fauci’s career and said he’d displayed “hubris the likes of which the world has rarely seen.” Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, told Fauci he was a “villain” who had “destroyed the federal government’s credibility when it comes to public health” because he wanted to fuel his own ego. “What would you do differently, knowing what you know today, Dr. Fauci?” Scott asked him.

Fauci consulted the paper in front of him. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”