Fauci Hearing Brings Back The Covid Vitriol

Besides the illness and death, the disruption and the loneliness, Americans remember the pandemic for its vitriol. The handling of Covid divided the parties, the states, families and neighbors and it’s taken years, in many cases, to repair the damage.

Former Covid czar Anthony Fauci’s appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday brought it all back.

Rather than an evaluation of what went wrong and right, or how to do better next time, the rage stood out.

“Here I am sitting in front of you six years later, saying: Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?” Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno asked Fauci after recounting the story of a family arrested at a football game for refusing to wear masks. Many states imposed mask mandates after Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended them.

Moreno’s question at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was rhetorical and the F bomb the sort of language almost never heard in Senate proceedings. When Moreno later asked Fauci if he would apologize, he responded as he did to every question, by exercising his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination by declining to answer.

Earlier in the hearing, Fauci vented his own rage, accusing the committee chair, Rand Paul, of “an obvious obsession” and “repeated slanderous comments.” He explained that he wasn’t going to talk because the Kentucky Republican had made it plain he wanted him imprisoned for his role in leading the nation’s Covid response and was setting a perjury trap for him.

The hearing underscored that, as Moreno said, six years since the start of the pandemic, the rage over whether mitigations like lockdowns, school closures and mask and vaccine mandates were effective and justified, and over whether Fauci misled the public about the virus’ origins, are still simmering below the surface.

Republicans said it was about accountability; Democrats a vendetta.

Republicans joined Moreno in decrying the Covid response, saying the measures Fauci encouraged had unnecessarily damaged Americans’ mental health and children’s education, and made families miss funerals and other pivotal moments in their lives.

“You forced people to watch their loved ones die alone over the phone. It's disgusting,” said Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who blamed Fauci for hospital restrictions that barred relatives from visiting family members.

Democrats defended the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, thanking him for his decades-long service and for saving lives with the strictures he recommended. They accused Republicans of calling the hearing to distract from their own health policies, which they called disastrous.

The nasty divide, which historians have said tracks that of prior pandemics, underscores the challenge in hoping to do better when the next pandemic hits.

Republicans on the panel blamed Fauci, now 85 and retired for more than three years from a more-than-half-century career in government. They accused the former NIAID director of destroying trust in America’s public health institutions by pushing for measures that were ineffective and that left Americans deeply scarred.

Moreno recounted how a mother in his state and her family were dragged out of a football stadium and arrested because they didn’t wear masks, despite sitting away from other people.

“Those policies were put in place because you had moronic politicians that listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people, and that is you,” Moreno told Fauci, referencing passages in Fauci’s diary that showed he reveled in the celebrity attention his role managing the pandemic had brought him.

Paul released that diary last week. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his team found it on Health Department servers. Fauci in his opening statement said the release was “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me.”

Moreno said the arrests at the football game were what prompted him to first run for Senate in 2022. He promised to use Democrats’ defense of Fauci in political ads against them in the upcoming midterm elections.

New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan was among the Democrats to passionately defend Fauci. She decried Kennedy’s management of public health, citing the ongoing measles outbreak and the spread of the foodborne parasite cyclospora.

“We are here in an attempt to entrap you because you had a distinguished career trying to put Americans’ public health first,” Hassan told Fauci.

By contrast, she called Kennedy “the most unqualified secretary of Health and Human Services this country has ever seen."

Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, also criticized the Republicans’ targeting of Fauci, saying it would discourage people who want to work in government in the future.

“There is nothing perfect, no perfect clarity when it comes to pandemics, when it comes to crises,” he said.

Paul, who’s feuded with Fauci since the early days of the pandemic, gave no ground.

He told reporters he expects his committee to approve a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress next week.

If the panel does, the resolution would then proceed to a Senate floor vote. Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Wednesday he’d consider holding one.

"I think that's an option that ought to be available to us,” he said.

Sophie Gardner contributed to this report.