"Behind Fauci’s Mask"

The man America trusted during its darkest hour now faces questions about private doubts, public declarations, unanswered mysteries, and the staggering price of misplaced trust.

I am not a doctor. I am not an epidemiologist. I am not a virologist pretending to be an expert on something I spent my life studying.

I was something far more ordinary: an American who trusted the people in charge.

I believed Dr. Anthony Fauci when he told us the COVID vaccine was safe and effective. I believed him because he was presented to us as the guy who knew. The expert. The scientist. The steady hand we were supposed to trust while the world around us was collapsing.

And the message wasn’t subtle.

Turn on the television and you were confronted with death tolls climbing by the minute. Refuse the shot and you weren’t merely making a personal medical decision. You were portrayed as reckless, selfish, dangerous; even potentially responsible for someone else’s death.

So my family and I did what we were told to do.

We trusted the experts.

That is why, after reading what Fauci reportedly wrote in his private diary, I am pissed.

And “pissed” is actually the polite word.

I have personally sat through seven congressional hearings. I can tell you from experience that testifying under oath before a room full of lawmakers is not exactly a day at the beach. It is stressful, exhausting and miserable. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Well, perhaps I would make one exception.

Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fauci will today sit before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in what promises to be an explosive confrontation chaired by Republican Senator Rand Paul, who has spent years accusing the former NIAID director of misleading the American public about COVID’s origins and the government’s response.

And now, thanks to subpoena power and an eight-month effort spanning eleven government servers and coordinated by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an extraordinary 1,100-page collection of Fauci’s private journal entries, covering December 2019 through December 2022, has emerged.

I have read through some of those pages.

And what jumps off the page is not simply information. It is the breathtaking disconnect between the public Fauci we were told to trust and the private Fauci revealed in his own words.

Rand Paul was right to emphasize how extraordinary that is.

Because when the person standing before the American people says one thing while privately entertaining something very different, the question isn’t merely what he believed.

The question is: What did he know, when did he know it, and why did we hear something different?

Start with the origins of COVID.

For months, Fauci publicly pushed the natural animal-to-human spillover theory as the prevailing explanation. But his own journal entries reportedly show that during a crucial February 1, 2020, call, several of the scientists he had convened believed a deliberate insertion or laboratory leak was possible; and that the possibility could not simply be dismissed.

That matters.

Another entry from late January reportedly acknowledged evidence suggesting infections were circulating weeks before the Wuhan seafood market outbreak was detected, with Fauci recognizing that the market could have been an amplifier rather than the original source.

Yet legitimate questions about the possibility of a laboratory origin were subsequently treated by much of the media and public health establishment as though merely asking them made you a conspiracy theorist.

That is what bothers me.

Not that scientists had questions. Scientists are supposed to have questions.

What bothers me is the possibility that the public was given certainty while privately the people at the center of the response were wrestling with uncertainty.

And then there is Fauci’s extraordinary relationship with his own celebrity status.

Reading his private notes, I found myself wondering whether I was reading the diary of the nation’s top infectious disease official during a historic catastrophe or the scrapbook of a man suddenly intoxicated by fame.

There are references to Hollywood celebrities including Barbra Streisand and Julia Roberts. There are newspaper clippings praising him as a hero and even as the greatest public servant of his time.

He proudly noted that the baseball mask he wore to a congressional hearing was headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

And then there is the remarkable self-assessment in which he reportedly wrote that it was “no hyperbole” to call himself the most famous person in the country and one of the most recognizable people in the world.

Maybe he was annoyed that his face appeared on prayer candles, donuts and throw pillows.

But look at the bigger picture.

While Fauci was documenting his newfound celebrity, millions of Americans were sitting alone in their homes. Businesses were closing. Parents were watching their children lose irreplaceable months of childhood. Employees were losing jobs. Families were separated. People were frightened, isolated and emotionally exhausted.

We were counting bodies.

He was counting headlines.

That contrast is impossible for me to ignore.

His private writings also reveal the deterioration of his relationship with the Trump White House. Early entries reportedly described interactions with President Donald Trump as “amazing.” Eventually, Fauci was describing White House briefings as painfully rambling streams of consciousness events and privately characterizing Trump on the campaign trail as a true embarrassment.

Fine.

Fauci was entitled to his political opinions.

But that isn’t the issue.

The issue is whether the man who became one of the most powerful and trusted voices in America during the greatest public-health crisis in generations was telling Americans everything he knew; or only what he believed they should know.

That is a very different question.

And perhaps the most infuriating part is what comes next: accountability.

Or, more accurately, the apparent absence of it.

Before leaving office, President Joe Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon. Biden argued that the pardon was not an admission of guilt, but protection against what he described as politically motivated prosecution.

Perhaps.

But from where I sit, the effect is difficult to ignore.

The American public was told to trust the experts. We were scolded. We were guilted. We were pressured. We were told that extraordinary restrictions on our lives were necessary because the people making those decisions knew more than we did.

So we complied.

I complied.

My family complied.

And now I am supposed to shrug when the private writings of one of the most powerful public health officials in American history appear to reveal a man wrestling privately with questions that were treated publicly as settled?

No.

I’m not shrugging.

I don’t care whether you are a Democrat, Republican, independent or politically homeless. This should not be a partisan issue.

It should be an accountability issue.

Because public trust is not an unlimited resource. Once government officials demand extraordinary power over our lives, they assume an extraordinary obligation to tell us the truth.

If Fauci was right, let him explain it under oath.

If he was misunderstood, let him explain that under oath.

If his private writings have been mischaracterized, let him correct the record under oath.

And if there is a gap between what he privately believed and what he publicly told millions of Americans, then we have every right to know why.

That is why Rand Paul is right to put Fauci in the witness chair.

I have been there myself. Seven times. I know what it feels like to sit under the lights, surrounded by lawmakers, surrounded by cameras documenting your every move, knowing that every answer matters.

This time, however, the American people should be the ones asking the questions.

Because we were the ones who trusted him.

We were the ones who followed the rules.

We were the ones who paid the price.

And now, after all these years, I think we are entitled to something Fauci owed us from the beginning:

The truth.

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