The Failure of Fauci and His Fans

Turns out you can get him to shut up after all.

Anthony Fauci’s recent appearance before Congress is a good reminder that his reign of error would not have been possible without a deeply partisan and starstruck press.

As Fauci sat last week before members of Congress, pleading the Fifth and wriggling in his seat like a toddler, one could not help but recall that this was the man our news media sold as a living saint, a guardian angel whose competence and motives were beyond reproach.

He was treated as a savior — even as he lied through his teeth.

Fauci said he had “nothing to do” with the disastrous pandemic-era school closures, challenging critics to “show me a school that I shut down.” But his own diary, which, in a classic case of Faucian carelessness, he saved to a government server, reveals the truth.

In now-released personal notes, Fauci boasted of having persuaded New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools. He also bragged to himself that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) chief of staff had told him personally that, “based on my TV appearances,” the governor “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”

As a consequence, the education and development of countless children was set back; personal livelihoods and thousands of businesses beloved in their communities were also destroyed by decisions that, in many cases, had no scientific basis at all.

Elsewhere, in January 2020, Fauci privately ruled out a Chinese wet market as the source of the pandemic. He wrote in his diary that the market in Wuhan had been “not the source” but merely an “amplifier” of the virus. Yet he would spend the next several years suggesting the opposite, downplaying and dismissing what seems obvious in retrospect — that the virus almost certainly escaped from a Chinese virus lab connected to research funded by the agency he directed. It’s this type of two-faced messaging that has allowed China to escape responsibility for starting, spreading, and trying to cover up the origins of a disease that has killed some seven million people worldwide.

If ever he struggled to reconcile his private beliefs with his public statements, it doesn’t show in his journal. Instead, we get a portrait of a man deeply in love with the idea of himself.

“As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies,” Fauci wrote in his diary in May 2021, adding in the next line, “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”

He also bragged: “The nurses went absolutely wild to see me, they were squealing and laughing and clapping. It was something to behold.”

Earlier entries leave little doubt the man adored the limelight, writing, “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world,” “One person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more sexy than she was.” and “Over the past three weeks I have been on the cover of Time magazine X2, once as one of the 100 most influential people in the world again as the ‘guardian of the year.’ Also, on the cover of People magazine.”

These notes were written during the years when Fauci’s recommendations ruined lives, drove suicides, and left the elderly to die in isolation.

He even lied about his willingness to testify.

In 2022, he said he was “very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee.”

“I have nothing to hide,” Fauci said. “I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done. … I’m going to do what I need to do, and that is cooperate fully, because we have nothing to hide at all.”

Last week, during his appearance before Congress, cooperation was the furthest thing from his mind. He invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 110 times rather than answer questions about his oversight of the federal COVID-19 response.

Though Fauci personally will escape accountability, our press can still be held responsible for how it failed the public: for caving to popular opinion, for promoting narrative over fact, for defending everything he mandated during the pandemic as right, good, and just, for treating any question of his authority as the mark of a heretic, and for getting the story plain wrong.

Certain news outlets assured audiences early that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about.

Then certain news outlets inexplicably agreed to slap the labels “fringe theory,” “conspiracy” and even “racist” on any suggestion that the virus had escaped a lab, even though this was always the most likely scenario. National Public Radio ran a report claiming scientists had “debunked” the “lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.” ABC News baselessly went with this: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’” Don Lemon, at the time a CNN anchor, hosted unprosecuted perjurer James Clapper to defend Fauci’s public, but not private, assertion that the virus originated in nature.

News outlets embraced the Beijing-approved talking point that said it was “xenophobic” to name the virus by its city or country of origin. U.S. newsrooms even degraded themselves to the point of praising Russia’s and China’s obviously bogus claims about driving down infection numbers through ridiculous, cartoonishly authoritarian measures that in real life probably killed far more people than they saved.

“How uncomfortable is it,” asked former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?” Note that not only were China’s claims about stopping the spread obviously false, but the virus he was referring to originated in and spread to the rest of the world from China.

In what can only be considered a piece of malicious reporting, some hacks even misconstrued the White House’s worst-case projections of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths for the administration’s desired death total.

Perhaps the wildest media failure came in 2021 when the New York Times forced the resignation of longtime infectious-disease reporter Donald McNeil, who had spent decades covering Ebola and other deadly outbreaks. Parents and students on a Times cruise for privileged children reported him for saying the “n-word.” It turns out that McNeil had said it only in the context of asking a student to clarify a question she had posed to him about whether a classmate should be suspended for previous uses of that word. Even after learning that context, editors Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn wrote in a staff memo: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

McNeil was replaced by the younger, inexperienced reporter who undermined the paper’s credibility by claiming that the COVID lab-leak theory was racist.

Six years later, none of these media incidents is any less shameful. Yet despite everything we now know about the pandemic, about Fauci, and about how badly the news media failed, many in the press remain defiantly arrogant, stubbornly defending him as a beleaguered victim of Republican machinations.

“Anthony Fauci’s committee hearing was a spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts,” the Atlantic complained.

At the New York Times, contributing opinion writer Rachel Bedard called the hearing a “shocking performance,” a “show trial,” and “useless drama.” She characterized Republican Senator Rand Paul as a “contemporary Joe McCarthy” and said Fauci “took abuse… and stayed silent.”

Even at TMZ, which is trying to get back into the political reporting game, Harvey Levin called Fauci’s appearance before Congress “one of the most heartbreaking things” he has seen in government, likening it to the McCarthy-era “red scare.”

Last week, as members of Congress asked the supposed hero of the pandemic, the self-described “symbol of integrity and truth,” to explain his decisions and processes, the former NIAID director refused to respond.

Turns out you can get him to shut up after all.

A version of this article was published originally in the Hill on Aug. 3, 2026.