“COVID “”Cures”””
Anthony Fauci was hauled up in a senate hearing where ignorant, ideologically-poisoned buffoons like Rand Paul harangued him with absurd accusations. He rightly responded by taking the fifth — there is no point in arguing with delusional idiots. At one point, Paul had Fauci’s lawyer thrown out of the hearing.
Dr Anthony Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, has refused to answer questions at a high-profile congressional hearing, accusing a Republican senator of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.
Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination when appearing before a Senate committee on Wednesday.
Fauci said Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul had, who called the hearing, led a years-long investigation into himself and the origins of the pandemic aimed at “embarrassing and intimidating me”, and ultimately landing him “behind bars”.
This is the way. Paul’s harassment was ultimately fruitless, except that the current political regime gave him the opportunity to try and browbeat an 85 year old scientist who had espoused a rational, evidence-based approach to the COVID pandemic. Fauci’s approach reflected the scientific consensus.
A 2024 survey of virologists from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute found that most believed the pandemic began as a so-called spillover event, or a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human. Similarly, a group of virologists argued in the Journal of Virology that the “preponderance” of evidence points to a natural origin, even as the “lab leak” theory received outsized attention. Gain-0f-function research, meanwhile, has split the scientific community for years.
There is no good evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. It’s just a xenophobic contrivance made up to place the blame on China. It’s a political distortion of the evidence.
What was most bizarre is that Rand Paul exposed Fauci’s diary, in which he stated his opinions about certain political figures (and some journalists) without any diplomatic hesitations.
The scheduled hearing comes just days after Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary”, a more than 1,100-page document characterized as revealing Fauci’s inner conflicts about the lab leak theory. Scientists have said this is a normal part of scientific debate.
The diary also contained entries about Trump, who he advised closely during the early days of the pandemic. He described the president as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.
Hey, that was also just an echo of the scientific consensus! Trump is a bumbling incompetent. Some of us have been unabashedly saying that in public for many years. I would just rebuke Fauci for hiding his feelings away in his private notes. Let it all hang out, Anthony! It’s not as if being reserved about your true feelings has spared you any suffering at the hands of morons like Paul.
The true purpose of the hearing was obvious — the goal was to intimidate scientists from speaking out about biomedical approaches to disease, and to pander to all the frauds and influencers who profit off medical misinformation.
Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, described the hearing as damaging to science and ignoring ongoing public health threats, such as the outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora and measles, both at record highs.
“It’s attempting to turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations’ were responsible for handling,” said Peters, who did not ask Fauci any questions. “This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service.”
While the politicians are scapegoating Fauci, they’re giving a free pass to the MAHA goons who have enabled a cyclospora outbreak, watered down food safety regulations, and fueled criminal anti-vax mythologies that are allowing a measles comeback. The USA is at risk of losing our measles elimination status, thanks to people like RFK jr.
These people ought to be more self-aware. If they can drag the guy who successfully led the fight against the pandemic, I’m hoping we have the opportunity someday to turn the tables and confront the disease enablers with the butcher’s bill. There’s a better case to be made that they caused millions of deaths.
The same people who f*cked uo the COVID response and cut funding for overseas programs that would have saved millions of lives from preventable disease are only concerned with the lives of the “unborn”. But not the fetuses from abortions Republican politicians talked their mistresses into having.
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How GOP learns from past mistakes (not). 2017: abolishes team preparing for a pandemic.
2020: COVID happens.
2025: Again, slashes team tracking bugs like the Trump diarrhea epidemic. DOGE slashes cost-effectivr measures to fight preventable disease.
Scott Adams joins those who dies after thinking horse paste is a panacea.
Rand Paul (named after an atheist author) thinks Fauci is a Bond villain.
Let is not forget USA and Argentina have left the World Health Organisation, so they only learned of the Cruise ship ourbreak after it stopped by the harbor at a member state.
Yeah, I saw this and it is appalling.
Fauci is a true medical hero and Rand Paul is a braindead quack.
The death toll from the Covid-19 virus pandemic was higher in Red states than Blue states for reasons. Being dumb can and will kill you.
The lead organization that was supposed to deal with pandemics was the US CDC in Atlanta. They CDC had already been gutted by the GOP and didn’t have enough people and expertise to do much.
Fauci and the NIAID had to step in because there was no one else at the Federal level that knew enough medicine and biology to deal with a novel pandemic.
He did a great job under the circumstances.
.1. The vaccines were a notable game changer and saved the lives of around 3.2 million Americans. One of those was likely myself, someone in a high risk group who has now been vaccinated 6 times.
.2. The antivaxxers like Rand Paul’s most notable achievement was killing 400,000 antivaxxers by refusing the vaccines. Late in the pandemic, I asked someone who worked in the Covid-19 virus ICU, how many of their patients weren’t vaccinated. She looked blank and said none of them were vaccinated and they rarely got anyone in who was vaccinated.
Gee, I wonder why Republicans are suddenly so intent on scapegoating Fauci…distracting us (and themselves) from their other fiasco in Iran perhaps…?
The number of things wrong with this hearing is everything, and that is a long list.
What they are trying to do is get Fauci to say anything and then indict him for perjury and claim he is lying. It doesn’t matter what, the Feds these days indict people for no reason and those charges usually get thrown out in court as being fake. They are going after people like Comey, the Reflecting Pool guy, and a lot of anti-ICE protesters based on zero evidence.
Fauci was right to call this out and take the 5th amendment.
One question I have is…how did the GOP even get Fauci’s “diary” whatever that is. If it was a personal document, they shouldn’t have had any right to obtain it.
The lesson here is if you are a government official, to expect anything you write down in emails or on paper to appear on Fox NoNews someday and be careful what you commit to permanent media. The lesson of Nixon’s tapes should have been enough or Hillary’s emails.
And the other lesson here is, No good deed goes unpunished.”
I used to think this was a joke but I see it all the time.
If only Trump had rejected the science and refused the best treatment for Covid back when he was really sick with the disease..*.
If only. Sigh.
.* Remember that in his first term. If there was ever any karmic poetic justcie Trump would’ve died from it – buit sadly , nope. Disproof of that whole karma idea really ain’t it?
What Fauci called Dump are the nicest things you can say about him. None of the terms I use describing Dump are printable.
For decades, disregarding any ego he expressed, Fauci did work in the public interest. I posted this to the infinite thread. It reinforces the rational assessment of this admin’s insanity and is an intentional, petty, malicious distraction from tRUMP’s innumerable crimes against humanity:
@190 shermanj
29 July 2026 at 2:11 pm
The repugs need a diversion from their abetting tRUMP in the destruction of what is left of this country. So, they found the ideal punching bag in Fauci since he claimed the 5h and won’t be responding. They are absurd and vile and have turned Congress into a CLOWN COLLEGE.
https://digbysblog.net/2026/07/29/2020-will-never-end/
2020 Will Never End Published by digby on July 29, 2026
I’m not a huge fan of Fauci, but he is ‘small potatoes’ compared to the blatant murderous actions of tRUMP who is the one who supercharged the covid deaths here.
StevoR @ # 6: Disproof of that whole karma idea really ain’t it?
Of the “California Karma” concept of immediate consequences, yeah.
We’ll have to see what type of microbe Trump reincarnates as to make a determination regarding Classic Karma.
@ Raging Bee : “Gee, I wonder why Republicans are suddenly so intent on scapegoating Fauci…distracting us (and themselves) from their other fiasco in Iran perhaps…?””
The Iran war in turn was to distract everyone from the Epstein files..
Trump, Shadow POTUS Miller et al just love toflood the zone with shit to distratc form mor eshit untilthey make the whoile world a sewer.
Always remember this could all have bene avoided had Kamala or indeed Biden become POTUS. Thsi is ONLY happening because Trump is POTUS now rather than anyone better -and anyone would be better. .
Mike the Mad Biologist: The Mostly Unknown Epidemiology That Undermines the Lab Leak Hypothesis
Potholer 54 debunks the lab leak idea really well in detail here –
Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese lab? 26 mins long.
BTW Anyone else keep getting the cloudflare timed out issue with FTB and esp here a lot lately?
@ ^ Plus Potholer54’s follow up to that here – More “man-made” SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak malarky running for 17 mins.
@9. Pierce R. Butler
I’m guessing one of the Trumporhea ones.
Oh and yeah, classic original
brandBuddhist / Hindu concept of Karma is ceratinly still a thing even given this, yeah, modern colloqiual view of “Karma” being disproven as noted in #6.“lab leak” does not imply “on purpose”. Everytime I hear someone talk about lab leak, it seems to mean China set the thing free with intent. I still think the spill happened when the Wuhan lab moved to a different facility closer to the city center in October 2019, that might also explain the 2 different variants they claim to have found in the paper mentioned above.
But be all that as it may, in the end it was an unfortunate accident, amplified worldwide by the military Olympics that occurred in Wuhan at the same time.
The strange thing about Covid and the left and right is that it is the right that opposed quarantines and lock downs while the left supported them. A few years earlier during the Ebola scare the positions were reversed.
From Slate Star Codex.
The proposition “a quarantine is the best way to deal with Ebola” seems to fit much better into the Red narrative than the Blue Narrative. It’s about foreigners being scary and dangerous, and a strong coordinated response being necessary to protect right-thinking Americans from them. When people like NBC and the New Yorker accuse quarantine opponents of being “racist”, that just makes the pieces fit in all the better.
The proposition “a quarantine is a bad way to deal with Ebola” seems to fit much better into the Blue narrative than the Red. It’s about extremely poor black foreigners dying, and white Americans rushing to throw them overboard to protect themselves out of ignorance of the science (which says Ebola can’t spread much in the First World), bigotry, xenophobia, and fear. The real solution is a coordinated response by lots of government agencies working in tandem with NGOs and local activists.
It would be really hard to switch these two positions around. If the Republicans were to oppose a quarantine, it might raise the general question of whether closing the borders and being scared of foreign threats is always a good idea, and whether maybe sometimes accusations of racism are making a good point. Far “better” to maintain a consistent position where all your beliefs reinforce all of your other beliefs.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/