Anthony Fauci's Congressional Hearing: The Crushing of an Old Man and Science

In July 2026, the high-profile hearing of Anthony Fauci before the US Senate began. Topic – of course, COVID-19 pandemic measures and vaccines. It is a subpoenaed hearing, but in anti-scientific, anti-vax circles this is celebrated as a kind of Fauci trial and the much-desired “Nurenberg 2.0”. For the MAGA exQanon movement, the entire situation with the pandemic has long been used for politicization and polarization, unfortunately, not only in America, but also in global society, and a large part of this is reflected in our region.

Anthony Fauci is an American immunologist and physician who led the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was one of the main medical advisors of the US government and one of the most recognizable public figures in communication about the virus, vaccines and measures to combat the pandemic. Because of his role in the management of the pandemic, he also became the subject of strong political debates, so he testified before the US Congress.

Fauci's Invocation of the Fifth Amendment

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in the hearing, which angered several Republican senators, who have had this man in their sights for some time. For three hours, Fauci sat and did not answer questions, including parroting the same narratives that he was involved in creating the pandemic and that he profited from it.

The Fifth Amendment is part of the Constitution of the United States of America and protects the rights of persons who have been accused or are under investigation. The most famous part of the Fifth Amendment is the right not to testify against oneself . That is why in the USA it is often said that someone “pleaded the Fifth Amendment” , which means that he refuses to answer the question because the answer could be used against him in criminal proceedings.

Fauci is the punching bag in this process, the most available person for MAGA to bully. Rand Paul, already a proven far-right-of-center senator from the state of Kentucky, even before the hearing, ungentlemanly trolled an old man, and that in the manner of a pre-teen. These are literally those children who bully others and pull kittens’ tails. An eyeless evil that has no honor and cannot treat something it sees as an enemy with honor. In a gentleman's duel, the enemy is respected. In recent days, Rand Paul, who is now the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, has released a trove of documents related to Fauci; among them are more than 1,500 pages from Fauci's private diary. 

 

Paul Rand's obsession with Fauci is reminiscent of Nenad Bakić's obsession with Saša Ceci and a number of others who promoted scientific facts during the pandemic in ex-Yu region. And obsessions are the dark side of human nature that should be controlled and not let slip out.

Anti-science, bullying and threats

Paul Rand particularly focused on GoF research (gain of function) and whether there was such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in which viruses are modified so that they are more risky for humans. These studies provide insight into the nature and potential of pathogens and are at the same time very strictly regulated. The Trump administration has just made new, even stricter rules regarding this type of research, and Fauci himself testified that virus research did not fit the GoF definitions.

Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio asked Fauci to apologize for the military policy that required military personnel to receive the Covid vaccine, as if it were a war crime rather than a basic infection control and life-saving measure, and to apologize to Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic and to the single mother from Ohio who was arrested for not wearing a mask during an outdoor football game at the start of the pandemic. The senator called Fauci a “complete and absolute disgrace.” Republican Joni Ernst of Iowa criticized the use of fetal tissue in research, which has been a narrative among anti-vaxxers for decades. They are killing a man and putting on his shoulders a burden for which he is not responsible.

Job losses in a crisis situation are not the result of the lockdown, but rather the result of late-stage runaway capitalism that has no mechanisms for buffering crisis situations, providing aid and subsidies to small, family and medium-sized businesses to survive, to make it to the end of the crisis and the post-crisis impact.

Paul Rand was visibly frustrated by the Fifth Amendment push and threatened Fauci with “consequences” if he didn't testify. All this is happening under the guise of false, selfish MAGA patriotism and the catchphrase that the American people need to know. In this way, a target is placed on Fauci's forehead (which he has had for a long time) and any attack on this man that may happen, goes directly to the soul of the Republicans.

What is available to the public from the hearing is very painful to watch. Questions like “what color tie are you wearing” and similar tricks aimed at distracting, annoying and questioning the cognitive abilities of Anthony Fauci are sad attempts to humiliate the one you see as the enemy. In fact, the man who held the whole thing together so that the world wouldn't completely fall apart, and he wasn't the only one making decisions. He was just the face of public health in America.

There is another consequence of this hearing that is little talked about. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan argued that the hearing was an attempt to “make one person a scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials in the Biden and Trump administrations were responsible for solving,” warning, “This will only distract other scientific experts from public service.”

Scientists, scientific journalists and communicators and doctors, not only in the USA, but globally, were exposed to all kinds of attacks, insults and threats even before the pandemic, and especially during and after the pandemic. Only if you go to the social network profiles s of prominent doctors and science communicators who present scientific facts about vaccines and health, you will find the most derogatory comments. You will find comments from sweet grandmothers who swear at everything on the list, people who threaten, as if their only outlet for all their dissatisfaction in this world and in their home is to vent via social networks to someone who promotes arguments and evidence in science. We have had cases when such persons, under false profiles, told epidemiologists that they did not know what “viral infections” were. Everyone is a hero behind a fake name.

Criticism of science and anti-scientific attitudes have become a trademark of the Republican Party, especially the hard wing. This was reflected in all other political hardliners and fringe political parties and right-wing movements such as the Homeland Movement and Most in Croatia and Zavetnik and Dvera in Serbia, along with the politicization of mandatory HPV vaccination in Montenegro and a number of populist figures in BiH, who know how to tease the public with the issue of lockdowns and vaccines.

Republicans cling to one narrative like a drunkard – that the outbreak of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, known as the disease COVID-19, was caused by a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan. Although we do not have a 100% accurate finding that says this is black – this is white and this is the cause of the pandemic, most evidence points to a natural spillover of the pathogen somewhere in the Wuhan wildlife market . Somewhere the conditions for a perfect storm have been created, although in many cases animal viruses do not cause such events. One example of escalation is the evidence that suggests that the measles virus jumped from animals to humans some 400 BC.

Rand misused Fauci's diary, which he publishes publicly as evidence, and interprets the sentence in which Fauci writes “the animal market was not the source but the amplifier” as evidence that Fauci had information about how the leak from the lab was done. This sentence can mean anything, let's say that the virus was already circulating (as we now know) in nature, and that the market provided space to accelerate it.

The Republicans find the conspiracy theory about the deliberate release of the virus plausible, because it is anti-Chinese, as if the Chinese wanted to weaken their nation first, and then the others. This theory is also extremely racist because it tries to argue that Chinese laboratories are amateurish. Instead of cooperating and learning from each other, this is counterproductive, but Fauci is easier to attack than China.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson accused him of covering up unfavorable information about Covid vaccines, which he described as “experimental gene therapy”.

What the scientific studies say about the main issues surrounding the Fauci hearing

These are people for whom it is simply impossible to present evidence. And the evidence suggests that millions of people have been saved thanks to COVID-19 vaccines, like this estimate from JAMA or this one that estimates at least 14.4 million lives have been saved. The safety studies of these vaccines naturally show certain side effects, as was the case for adenovirus vaccines – thrombosis, so they were eventually withdrawn, or for mRNA/iRNA vaccines, myocarditis and pericarditis, especially in the group of younger men, but they also show that these side effects of covid vaccines are far less common than complications of infection. That is, the criterion that vaccines bring more benefits is met.

As for the unpopular lockdowns among Republicans, conservatives and libertarians , science says that most evidence supports early restrictions on contact during periods of intense virus spread (lockdowns or partial restrictions), especially before vaccines became available. In this way, the reproductive number (R) is reduced and the epidemic is slowed down, hospitals are prevented from being overloaded, and time is gained for the development of vaccines, the procurement of protective equipment and the increase of hospital capacities.

Flaxman et al., Nature (2020) analyzed 11 European countries and concluded that non-pharmaceutical measures (including especially lockdown) prevented millions of infections and significantly reduced mortality. Brauner et al., Science (2021) showed that a combination of banning large gatherings, working from home and restricting movement significantly reduces virus transmission. Haug et al., Nature Human Behavior (2020) analyzed over 6,000 measures in the world and showed that no single measure is sufficient on its own, but the combination of several interventions gives the greatest effect.

It is clear that long-term lockdowns/quarantines have serious consequences such as mental health problems, children falling behind in education due to the online regime, postponing the treatment of other diseases and economic consequences. This is why today most experts believe that a long-term general lockdown should only be used when the health system is threatened with collapse.  And that was the situation at the beginning of the pandemic. These flaws of the lockdown are often highlighted without context, which is exactly what the US Department of Education did in order to develop societal polarization and animosity towards Fauci.

During the pandemic, measures such as lockdowns, mandatory masks and vaccinations were perceived by many conservatives as state encroachment on individual freedoms. The conflict was therefore often more about the value and role of the state than about the biology of the virus itself. When you stand on the side of deregulation of the state and the reduction of state interference in the rights of the individual and the market, then this is the expected outcome – until you become the state yourself and start making money from the state interference in the market and individual freedom, right?

Anthony Fauci's hearing shows that the debate about the pandemic in the United States is no longer just a scientific issue, but also a political one. When scientific recommendations begin to be seen as a symbol of state control or ideological affiliation, trust in experts easily becomes collateral damage of political conflicts. That is why it is important to distinguish legitimate questioning of the decisions of individuals and institutions from rejecting the scientific process. Science is not infallible and must be open to criticism, but that criticism should be based on evidence, not on political identity. When politics starts to determine which facts we will accept, both science and society lose.

But let's return to the hearing itself. The political currents that propagate, disseminate and pump anti-scientific narratives have a very targeted and elaborate agenda. The goal is to create an electorate that does not understand science, to label the scientific community as the enemy, to completely dumb it down, to find arguments for defunding science, except in the field of surveillance and warfare, and to create fertile ground for the flourishing of charlatan businesses.