Dr. Anthony Fauci, 85, spent more than three hours under questioning at a July 29 Senate hearing, then invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in response to every question before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The spectacle laid bare a familiar ritual: elected power hauling a retired public health official into its chamber, demanding answers about the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic, then threatening contempt when he refused to play along.
Fauci, who retired in 2022 after nearly four decades as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was subpoenaed to testify. Days before the hearing, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, who heads the committee, released more than 1,000 pages of diaries Fauci kept during the pandemic. In those diaries, Fauci wrote about President Donald Trump, calling him “out of control,” a “true embarrassment” and “an idiot.” The hearing turned into another round of institutional theater, with the committee wielding its subpoena power while the former public health chief answered nothing.
Who Has the Power
Rand Paul said he planned to schedule a committee vote next week to push for contempt charges against Fauci. That’s the machinery at work: the Senate, its committee chair, and the threat of punishment hanging over a retired scientist who spent years inside the federal health apparatus. The hearing itself was contentious, and Republicans used it to hammer Fauci over the pandemic response. The state doesn’t just ask questions. It lines up the chairs, sets the rules, and decides when the pressure becomes a charge.
Democrats, for their part, criticized the GOP’s grilling of Fauci and came to his defense. Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, wrote in a letter to the Senate committee that he offered “unequivocal support” for Fauci. Bertuzzi said Fauci’s career was built on “evidence, intellectual rigor and an unwavering commitment to improving people’s lives,” adding that the record was “measured in millions of lives saved.” He also called Fauci’s scientific research “by all accounts and measures, the gold standard.”
Who Gets Crushed
AVAC, or the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, said it submitted a letter to the committee ahead of the hearing. Mitchell Warren, AVAC’s executive director, wrote that the group is “dismayed and disturbed” by Fauci being subpoenaed “in pursuit of questionable allegations.” Warren urged the committee to “cease its erroneous investigations and harassment of renowned scientists and public servants such as Dr. Fauci,” saying his work “has changed the very course of the HIV epidemic at home and abroad.”
Dr. Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, told NPR that a hearing like this one, combined with cuts to federal agencies, “all adds up to undermining public health in the U.S.” That’s the hierarchy cost in plain sight. The people who carry the burden aren’t the ones issuing subpoenas or staging hearings. They’re the workers, patients, and communities left to absorb the damage when public health gets turned into a political weapon.
What People Actually Did
On social media, medical and public health professionals praised Fauci’s work throughout the pandemic. Olivia Zarella, a research associate at the Colorado School of Public Health, wrote on Threads that Fauci inspired her to push through 80-hour weeks as a university infection prevention specialist in the early days of the pandemic. “Dr. Anthony Fauci kept a lot of us going through this time and is a national hero,” Zarella wrote. “The behavior towards him throughout and since the pandemic is not only absolutely appalling but a sign of a bigger issue.”
Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General under President Trump’s first term, wrote on X that he believed “everything (Fauci) said and did was driven by the best intentions for our country.” He added, “There are plenty of people in Washington, D.C. who say and do things more for themselves than for our country. Tony Fauci is not one of them.” Dr. Irwin Redlener, a public health analyst and senior advisor for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, called the allegations against Fauci an “ignorant witch hunt.” Redlener also called Fauci “one of America’s most heroic public health scientists who has saved countless lives over his long career.”
Redlener said of the pandemic response: “Of course mistakes were made. This was science on the run & experts were making their best recommendations based on the information they had at that very moment.” That line lands harder than the committee’s posturing. The hearing was 3 days ago, but the same old pattern keeps moving: power demands obedience, then calls it accountability.