NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci is sitting before Congress, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on TV debating COVID lockdowns and Americans can’t agree on what science to trust.
If you squint, you might think it's 2020 again.
Six years after COVID-19 thrust the world into the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past. Instead, they’ve recently returned its familiar political arguments to center stage for new
scrutiny, demanding accountability for the scientists and media figures whom they feel deceived and mistreated Americans years ago.
The efforts ramped up last week, when a Republican-led Senate committee chaired by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul subpoenaed the now-retired, 85-year-old Fauci to testify about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The former National Institutes of Health immunologist repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, after accusing the lawmakers of trying to coerce him to perjure himself to justify criminal charges. In response to his choice, on Thursday, the committee passed a vote to hold Fauci in contempt, a stunning move that could motivate the Justice Department to initiate an investigation.
Separately, Kennedy, a politically independent former anti-vaccine activist who now serves as the Republican President Donald Trump’s health secretary, spent part of his weekend in a combative live debate with CNN host Dana Bash about how the pandemic was managed and the media’s role in it.
Political scientists and historians say the focus on COVID grievances half a decade after the virus’ peak demonstrates how some wounds it opened have never been closed. Democrats, meanwhile, have slammed the federal government’s blaming of Fauci as a performative distraction that’s not based in facts.
While both Paul and Kennedy have spent years airing their frustrations about COVID, the Republican takeover of Congress and the White House last year created a new platform for them to steer how America remembers the pandemic, and who is held responsible for it, according to Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University.
It’s also allowed them to use the administration’s resources to surface new information.
“The response to COVID has become a touchstone for Trump’s Republican Party,” Dallek said. “They’re using their power now to argue they were right all along.”
When the coronavirus began spreading widely in 2020, under Trump's first administration, groups of Americans revolted against requirements imposed by local authorities and businesses telling people to wear masks and stay at home to control the spread of the virus.
When a vaccine became available, those sentiments were supercharged. Figures like Kennedy, then a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, accused the federal government of trampling on personal liberties by supporting vaccine mandates and social media takedowns of dissenting ideas.
While Trump has long expressed pride in his first-term Operation Warp Speed effort to disseminate COVID-19 vaccines quickly, saving millions of lives, his second administration's approach to the vaccines has taken a different tone.
Under Kennedy's leadership, U.S. regulators have limited the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for Americans. Kennedy on CNN on Sunday questioned whether the COVID-19 vaccine protected children, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website that they “help keep children from getting really sick from COVID-19.”
Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist, said debates over COVID-19's origins and the government's handling of it have erupted on the fringes for years. Now that some of the leaders of those debates are in power, they're hashing it out on the national stage — something she said needed to happen eventually.
“There are aggrieved parties, people who have a sense that they were done wrong during the pandemic and that there’s never been an accounting for that,” Lee said. “Most people don’t want to think about this topic, but nevertheless there are constituencies – so Congress is speaking to those constituencies.”
Lee said Kennedy’s decision to surface numerous diary entries that Fauci had made on a government computer – and Paul’s decision to publicize them last week – created an opening for “the first real showdown” in years around the pandemic’s handling.
While some of the entries – including Fauci’s uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days about how best to curb the virus – already were reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time, they have nonetheless drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
Also discussed at Fauci's hearing last week was whether NIH-funded research in China may have played a role in how the pandemic started. During the hearing, Trump's White House also posted on social media to direct attention to a federal website that used to feature information on COVID vaccines, testing and treatment that has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak.
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific evidence supporting the theory that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins.
As Republicans hold up the Fauci hearing and contempt vote as important accountability, Democrats have called the process disingenuous. Paul said Thursday he'd invited Fauci to appear for a private, transcribed interview, but Democrats accused him of not allowing the full, bipartisan committee to be present for it.
Paul also opted to refer the committee's contempt vote directly to the Justice Department, instead of to the full Senate, as often happens with contempt resolutions. He said he did not “want to waste time” with that route, while Democrats insisted it should be done that way.
Last week’s hearing, at which Fauci pleaded the Fifth, came after the immunologist had repeatedly appeared before Congress over the years and talked about his thinking in the beginning of the pandemic and how it changed over time. Critics have raised concerns that the ordeal surrounding him will deter scientists from taking government jobs for fear of being similarly targeted.
Paul has long argued that Fauci should be criminally investigated, based on his belief that the scientist has been dishonest to Congress about National Institutes of Health-funded research and COVID's origins. Fauci's attorney last week called Paul's accusations about the scientist “false and disgraceful.” More than 150 infectious-disease experts also came to Fauci's defense, writing that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and that they are urging elected officials to “stop these witch-hunts.”
Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said the hearing didn't represent legitimate truth seeking.
“They were looking for a platform in which they could attack him, and he would not respond, and he would say ‘plead the Fifth’ over and over again,” Ornstein said.
He said while some Republicans are likely true believers that Fauci committed crimes, bringing him to the forefront serves a dual purpose in a midterm election year — distracting voters from less favorable headlines, including on the economy and foreign conflicts.
“They’re preaching to the right-wing choir here,” he said.
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said there are real lessons to learn from the pandemic, including more deeply examining which efforts to contain the virus worked and didn’t work. But he said Republicans in Congress aren’t chasing those.
“A review of revisionist history will accomplish nothing,” he said. “We won’t be any better prepared for the next pandemic.”
