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Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. Vendors sold Fauci votive candles and bobbleheads. In April of that year, Kim Kardashian convened three dozen movie stars and athletes on a private video call so he could talk to them about masks and crowds—an hour of his time, he later explained, to reach millions of their fans.

Then it all came apart.

Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.

The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it.

Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health that hands out several billion dollars a year in research grants. One of those grants went to a New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, which over five years passed a total of about $600,000 to a Wuhan, China, lab studying bat coronaviruses. NIAID awards thousands of grants a year; NIH staff signed off on the Wuhan lab as a subrecipient, and an institute director does not personally review such arrangements.

More important, the bat viruses that the grant paid the lab to study are so genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have produced it, a point that independent virologists have made repeatedly. That disposes of the specific charge that research that Fauci’s agency funded produced the virus. It did not.

As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.

However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.  

The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.

[Read: Lab-leak payback has begun]

The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)

The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over. Fauci says that in 2021, he was answering Paul by using the regulatory definition of gain of function—the one that determines what NIH may and may not fund, and the only one that his answer was actually about. By that standard, NIH had reviewed the grant to the Wuhan lab before funding it and had concluded that the research fell outside the framework, on the grounds that the lab was studying wild-collected bat viruses that were not expected to produce severe disease in people. The two men meant different things by the same phrase. And even if you set that aside, perjury requires a knowingly false statement. Five years later, there’s still no evidence that Fauci said anything he believed to be untrue.

What was new last week was the discovery of a diary. Fauci kept one throughout the pandemic, and Paul—working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, which located the files on a government server—released more than 1,100 pages of it, in entries spanning from December 2019 through Fauci’s retirement, in December 2022. Paul posted on X about Fauci, “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”

But two analyses—one by FactCheck.org, the other by PolitiFact—show that in the entries Paul highlighted, Fauci’s private notes did not substantially differ from his public statements.

The senator from Kentucky has been at this for six years now, pursuing a man who led his institute for 38 years, who advised seven presidents, and whose work has saved countless lives. Accusing him of crimes and deception wasn’t enough; the release of the diary was meant to inflict public humiliation on him. And to some degree, it worked. Fauci was swept up in his own celebrity—starstruck by the famous, thrilled by his invitations to A-list parties, keeping a running tally of his appearances in the press. It was not a good look.

But this thought occurred to me as well: If three years’ worth and 1,000 pages of your diary were published tomorrow, how would you fare? Most of us would count ourselves relieved if the worst they revealed was that we had been dazzled by Hollywood stars and flattered when they called. And nowhere in his diary did Fauci confess to paying hush money to a porn star or brag that when you’re famous, you can “grab ’em by the pussy.”

Anthony Fauci spent five decades at NIH treating diseases that most often kill the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. He developed highly effective therapies that made once-fatal autoimmune conditions survivable before most Americans had heard of him. In the 1980s, he took AIDS in America seriously when many in the federal government wouldn’t. He met with, and later became friends with, Larry Kramer, an AIDS activist who had called him a “murderer.” Fauci then spearheaded a major shift that allowed patients far greater access to experimental drugs.

Two decades into the epidemic, as AIDS was killing millions in the world’s poorest countries, he was a key architect of PEPFAR—the emergency plan that President George W. Bush launched in 2003 that provided funding and medical resources to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

When anthrax spores arrived in the mail in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Fauci led the federal research response and laid the foundations of the biodefense system that we still rely on. He was also central to the development of mRNA vaccines. In the 1990s, he helped persuade President Bill Clinton to fund the NIH Vaccine Research Center, then recruited world-class scientists to staff it. One of them was studying mRNA as a platform for a MERS vaccine when the pandemic began. Because that expertise was already in place, the design for the protein that the COVID mRNA vaccine would use was finished within 48 hours of the viral genome being published. Within roughly 11 months, the first vaccine was authorized for use. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that more than 3.2 million lives were saved as a result of the vaccination program in America from December 2020 to November 2022. The development of mRNA vaccines for COVID was a stunning medical achievement.

In 2014, Fauci managed and directed the funding for research for an Ebola vaccine. When a Dallas nurse caught the virus while she cared for a dying man, Fauci put on protective gear and went into the isolation room himself. Eight days later, he walked the nurse out in public and hugged her.

This is the man whom Paul, Kennedy, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Republicans in Congress, the MAGA movement, and Donald Trump have decided to defame and vilify, and are intent on destroying?

[David Frum: Anthony Fauci is not the villain in this story]

So what explains the rage directed at one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation? Some of it is the result of an era in which a major political party—in this case, the Republican Party—has become deranged and captive to conspiratorial thinking. It draws energy from the dark passions. Many people within the party, especially within its leadership and the right-wing ecosystem, delight in destroying institutions and individuals. Fauci has a target on his back because during the pandemic, he refused to live in the Twilight Zone. He called out those who did. And for MAGA world, that is unforgivable.

Some of the fury aimed at Fauci may also be unprocessed grief and anger about the pandemic and its painful memories. My colleague David Brooks, then at The New York Times, wrote in 2020 that pandemics—unlike some other natural catastrophes—tend to drive people apart. In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. Viruses can’t be punished; people can. Attributing the pandemic to fate or random chance isn’t all that satisfying; a lot of people need a villain, even if, in this case, the villain is one of the men who helped end the pandemic that was ravaging the world.

In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, is an admirable if imperfect character. When others flee Oran, he stays. He works until he’s exhausted, even while knowing that many will die. An atheist and a humanist, he ultimately stands with victims, finding meaning through helping others. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero so much as a decent man doing his job. Neither does he pretend to understand suffering; instead, he fights against it. He is one of the “true healers.”

At the conclusion of the novel, Rieux concludes that plagues ultimately teach us that “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” There is much more to admire in Anthony Fauci than to despise. The same cannot be said of many of his critics.

“A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.

The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality. The stranger at the door stood under the personal protection of Zeus, the greatest of the gods and the protector of strangers. The bond between guest and host was not mere courtesy; it was the covenant that made trust between strangers possible.

In the Bronze Age, that covenant was foundational. Greece was not a nation; it was a scattering of city-states and island kingdoms with no common law and no shared authority. Travelers had no rights. Xenia was the guarantee that allowed strangers—hosts and guests, both with reciprocal obligations—to trust one another. It was the thread that held a fractured world together.

“Break Zeus’s law and see what they do to you if you give them that excuse,” Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, says to her son Telemachus. And in the movie, Telemachus says that one must always be generous to travelers, because they might secretly be gods in disguise. To mistreat strangers is to risk incurring the wrath of the gods.

The Trojan War began with a breach of hospitality. Paris, a son of the Trojan king, was welcomed as a guest into the Spartan home of King Menelaus—and repaid that welcome by running off with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, led a Greek expedition to bring her back. The war lasted 10 years, ending when the Greeks at last sacked Troy by the ruse of the Trojan horse.

[Read: Odysseus’s confession]

The ruse was Odysseus’s idea, a stroke of military genius for which he was celebrated. But in Nolan’s telling, it is not a triumph but a moral failure, one that fills him with such guilt and shame that for a decade he cannot go home. He had turned something sacred into a weapon. The horse was disguised as a holy offering to Athena; the Trojans, afraid to offend the goddess, wheeled it inside their own walls. Once the gates were open, the Greeks spilled out and slaughtered the city.

In the film, unlike the poem, that massacre shadows Odysseus, though we do not understand just how much so until the end. Throughout his journey he is accompanied by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Only when the film returns to the night Troy fell do we realize she wears the features of a priestess of Athena, beheaded at the goddess’s own altar as the city burned. Odysseus’s divine mentor, the guide who has walked beside him all along, bears the features of a woman he watched die. Whether a goddess ever accompanied him, or whether she is only the ghost of his greatest sin, the film leaves uncertain. What is certain is that until Odysseus can face what he has done, until he tells the truth about himself to himself, and to others, no homecoming is possible.

In the film’s closing stretch, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and sees what his world has become. Law and order are collapsing; trust is nonexistent; scheming is rife. The man who once commanded armies discovers how men behave toward someone who can do nothing for them. The only kindness he receives comes from his son and a few loyal servants. Then, near the end of the film, Odysseus says to Penelope, “We are the people from the sea,” by which he means the dreaded outsiders, raiders, and marauders. But they were not the threat after all. The “people from the sea” are the victors of the Trojan War, stripped of their humanity, their civility, their xenia.

Telemachus was not alone in his intuition about gods in disguise. The conviction that the stranger at your door may be more than he appears runs through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures too. When, in Genesis, Abraham looks up at Mamre and sees three travelers, he runs to meet them, washes their feet, and sets a meal before them—not knowing, as the reader does, that he is entertaining the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to show hospitality to strangers, for some have “entertained angels unawares.” And in Matthew 25, the stranger is Christ himself. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus says. What he is revealing is that the stranger is where God has chosen to be found, and that every person will be judged by how they treat the outcast, the hungry, the sick, the beggar at our door.

Homer’s poem, like the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, is an ancient text. But as Nolan told The New York Times, the greatness of the poem is that you approach it as something foreign and remote, and then find it “stunningly relevant.” On the treatment of the stranger, he added, nothing has changed—it remains essential to “holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.”

Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture—hospitality and magnanimity—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been.  

The Odyssey presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. Nolan could have told this story several different ways, but he trusted his instinct: A summer audience would embrace an epic story and its complicated hero, brave but broken, fierce but tender toward the weak, a person we admire not so much for his battlefield victories as for his conscience.   

[Read: The Odyssey was never about the gods]

Much of life in the ancient Greek world was harsh, even barbarous—mass executions in conquered cities, torture, the weak discarded at birth, chattel slavery—which is precisely why the Greek commitment to honor and hospitality was remarkable then and still resonates today. So, too, do the later, more humane virtues the film weaves in.

Those virtues are now under assault. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on vengeance and grievance. Theirs is a Nietzschean ethic, a “master morality,” the code of the strong that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the destitute.

But Nietzsche was at least honest about the cost of the revolution he heralded. With God dead, he warned, the morality built on God might collapse as well, and into the gap meaninglessness, fanaticism, and substitute faiths could rush in. Nietzsche declared, with some sorrow, the death of God. Many of his heirs gleefully practice their cruelty in God’s name.

The world that this ethic is creating is harsh and barren, raw and uninviting. It exists in the daily coarseness, in the anger and the ugliness, and in the isolation. There is a weariness in us, and a sadness, at what we have become. Robert F. Kennedy, citing the classicist Edith Hamilton, once issued this call: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago: ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’” What Christopher Nolan and his cast have tapped into is our longing for a gentler world. We want to go home.