OPINION:
Dr. Anthony Fauci — director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, who could not stop talking about himself in his online diary — understandably clammed up when he went before a Senate committee Wednesday. He invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
To every question — including the color of his tie — Dr. Fauci replied: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based on my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Committee members tried to question Dr. Fauci about his knowledge of the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, whether he funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and whether he knew that face masks were ineffective, among other topics.
To each, his non-answer was the same.
Members of Congress and all Americans whom Dr. Fauci put through hell for three years demand answers to these questions. This includes people who were arrested for not wearing face masks, people whose businesses were ruined, people who suffered serious injury after getting the vaccine and people who were denied access to dying family members.
Those people wanted to hear those answers from Dr. Fauci’s mouth. Of course, the answers were right there in the 1,141-page diary he wrote on a government server, and they massively contradict most of the things he said in public.
Dr. Fauci suspected that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak rather than from animal-to-human transmission via a wet market. By a circuitous route, he did provide funding for the Wuhan Lab. He knew that face masks and social distancing were probably ineffective. He questioned the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, among other things.
The diary also revealed something else: a little man with a monumental ego. While more than 1 million Americans died, Dr. Fauci was having a high old time. He reveled in hobnobbing with the likes of actresses Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. He bragged that he was the most famous man in America.
To call the good doctor a megalomaniac is an understatement.
By invoking the Fifth, Dr. Fauci drew immediate pushback from lawmakers. Pointing to the preemptive pardon President Biden granted Dr. Fauci covering Jan. 1, 2014, through Jan. 19, 2025, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul argued that because Dr. Fauci faces no federal criminal liability, his reliance on the Fifth Amendment was legally unsupported.
Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, has announced that the Senate will vote next week on a resolution to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress.
Let justice be done.
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