Why making Anthony Fauci the enemy will harm US public health for years
Katie Miller, an erstwhile Trump administration official and wife of Stephen Miller, once relied on Dr Anthony Fauci to get through Covid. Now, she’s calling for his imprisonment – a reversal that illuminates the politicization of Fauci and of public health writ large, a trend that could have major repercussions for America’s preparedness for future crises.
A US Senate committee will vote on Thursday morning over whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after the physician and former public health official invoked his fifth amendment rights during a Senate hearing last week focused on Fauci’s actions during the Covid pandemic.
The invocation of the worst days of the Covid pandemic come as midterms loom and the administration struggles to address several infectious outbreaks, including cyclosporiasis and Ebola.
Rand Paul, a senator, released contemporaneous notes that Fauci took during his time in public office, which Paul called Fauci’s diary, that reveal the confusion and fear of the time and illuminate the private episodes of a man who became known as America’s doctor.
“By focusing entirely on one human being and by calling him all sorts of names, including ‘evil’, and by calling for him to be jailed, it abdicates Republicans’ own responsibility in the US response to the pandemic, which was under President Trump,” said Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. “I think that this is all aimed at riling up the base ahead of the midterms and at washing their hands of any culpability themselves in the mass death event of Covid.”
And it comes after substantial cuts to the public health infrastructure; misinformation has spread at the , and growing outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, cyclosporiasis, Ebola, and more.
“This is an extraordinarily good way to distract people from the very deliberate destruction of the US public health system,” Yamey said.
Senators set to vote on holding Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress
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The Senate is expected to vote today on whether to hold in contempt of Congress.
Fauci, a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, had invoked the fifth amendment and at a high-profile Senate committee hearing on the origins of Covid-19.
The hearing had been called by Republican senator Rand Paul, who has investigated Fauci for years – and who Fauci accused of having an “unhinged obsession” with him. Ahead of the hearing, Paul released what he , in which he described Trump as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.
that Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has also provided a copy of Fauci’s phone to the Republican-led Senate panel. Kennedy had written a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
Scientists and Democrats have rallied behind Fauci, with a group of 155 scientists signing an calling for the government to stop the “vilification and harassment of many American scientists”.
“This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service,” Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, said.
