THE GOP’S OBSESSION WITH SLANDERING AN AMERICAN HERO

 

The latest witch-hunt led by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of GOP hangers-on against Dr. Anthony Fauci is a tragic and shameful travesty perpetrated against a man who, objectively speaking, can only be considered a scientific hero. The Stalinesque theater of the absurd created by Paul at the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week is a source of shame for not only the Trump-hijacked Republican Party, but for the US as a whole. The mere fact that Rand Paul was able to get away with setting up this throwback to the days of McCarthyism is indicative of the abysmal level of persecutory weaponization to which the Legislative Branch has plummeted with the GOP in charge.

Dr. Fauci has long been the genius far-right anti-science Republicans love to hate. But no one has more fully represented the witch-hunt against him than Senator Paul. Fauci has become a perverse obsession for Paul, one that his powerful position in the GOP-led Congress has permitted him to pursue with utter impunity. This impunity, then, has allowed Paul to raise every sort of unsubstantiated claim imaginable against Dr. Fauci with no need whatsoever to provide convincing evidence of his wild exaggerations and accusations.

As the head of a Senate committee that enjoys the dangerously sweeping powers of Homeland Security, Paul has also been able to entertain his obsession by calling on Fauci to testify under oath, a situation in which his Senate authority has permitted him to not only rake Dr. Fauci over the coals himself, but also to invite other GOP science-deniers to pillory one of the nation’s top scientists during their cross examinations. And to do so in the rudest and least protocolar of ways. Like when Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno shockingly asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck” he thought he was.

In my own mind, I was thinking that someone with a heart and a brain should stand up and provide a ten-minute summary of who the incredible Dr. Fauci really was, and then say, “Senator, we now know who Dr. Fauci is. The question on the table now should be, who the fuck do you think you are?

Rand Paul

The exchange between Moreno and Fauci was ugly in itself but was made uglier by the fact that Chairman Paul—besides making public intimate entries in Dr. Fauci’s own personal diary, which had been subpoenaed—never bothered to call out Moreno for his language or for the disrespectful way in which he formulated the questions he put to Dr. Fauci during the Senate proceedings. All of this is indicative of the depths of parliamentary perversion to which the Senate GOP has fallen. Its most vitriolic representatives are carrying out a veritable inquisition against defenders of America’s finest traditions and natural enemies of the current regime.

Paul would later compound the vile injustice to which Dr. Fauci was being subjected when he had Fauci’s attorney physically removed from the room, when the lawyer sought to respond to a question put to his client, after advising Dr. Fauci to plead the Fifth Amendment considering that the head of the committee was clearly bent on persecuting him.

It is important to note that the target of Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is a top scientist, with a career spanning more than five decades, during which his scientific work and public service have contributed to saving millions of lives worldwide. Paul’s accusations surrounding Fauci stem entirely from the scientist’s work at the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID-19 pandemic—the ham-handed mishandling of which by the Trump administration cost a million lives in the US alone.

The central issue here is not whether Dr. Fauci made mistakes—every public official managing a once-in-a-century novel pandemic is bound to—but whether the campaign against him has been proportional to the evidence. The historical record clearly demonstrates that it has not. More importantly, we should bear in mind whom we are talking about.

So, who is Anthony Fauci? Dr. Fauci's scientific career is virtually unmatched. A graduate of Cornell University’s medical school, where he was top in his class, Fauci was the longest-serving director of a US scientific agency in history, having headed up the NIAID from 1984 until 2022. In that role, he served as a scientific adviser to seven presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In recognition of that incredible service to the people of the United States, in 2008, then-President George W. Bush presented Dr. Fauci with the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives.”

Fauci receives Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush

In a 1988 presidential debate Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush paid Fauci—then practically an unknown in the public eye—one of the highest compliments possible. When the debate moderator asked the elder Bush to name a person who should inspire young Americans as a modern-day hero, the former CIA director and future president didn’t name a sports figure or someone in the military. Instead, he said, “I think of Dr. Fauci—probably likely never heard of him. You did? He's a very fine research top doctor at National Institute of Health, working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS.” Clearly, Bush had his priorities straight. Men like Fauci were the true heroes of humanity.

Over the years, Fauci has been a visiting professor at innumerable medical centers, and has received numerous honorary doctorates from universities in the US and abroad.

A young Dr. Fauci with George H.W. Bush

The remarkable continuity of Dr. Fauci’s service under both Republican and Democratic administrations demonstrates that, for decades, he has been regarded primarily as a scientist rather than a political actor. It is only in the wake of the first Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic that the GOP—and particularly Rand Paul—have sought to turn Dr. Fauci into a scapegoat for the one million COVID deaths that occurred on their watch. It should also be noted that Paul—a product of the Tea Party and its later iteration as MAGA—is basically a vaccine denier, who has campaigned for vaccines to be a choice rather than an obligation. He is, then, part of the problem in the trend toward the return of numerous deadly diseases that are today resurging as a result of ever-lower vaccination rates, after having been defeated through obligatory vaccination in my lifetime.

But as George H.W. Bush pointed out in his brief tribute, Dr. Fauci's greatest contribution predates COVID by decades. In the early 1980s, infection with the HIV virus was essentially a death sentence. Dr. Fauci became one of the world's leading researchers on HIV immunology and treatment. Among his major accomplishments in this field were: helping identify mechanisms by which HIV destroys the immune system; advancing clinical trials that produced effective antiviral therapies; promoting anti-retroviral therapy, and supporting a global HIV research infrastructure. His work directly helped shape scientific policies that eventually turned HIV from a fatal disease into a manageable chronic condition.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, Dr. Fauci also played an influential advisory role in the development of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is widely regarded as one of the most successful humanitarian health initiatives ever undertaken. According to US government estimates, that program alone has saved more than 25 million lives. Of course, no serious historian attributes all of those lives saved solely to Dr. Fauci. But it is equally undeniable that he was among the principal scientific architects whose expertise helped make those live-saving achievements possible.

As if all of this weren’t enough, Fauci’s work has extended far beyond AIDS and COVID-19 research. He also directed major federal responses to SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, West Nile virus, anthrax and pandemic influenza. Under his leadership, the NIAID became one of the world's premier infectious disease research institutions. His published scientific work numbers more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers, making him one of the most cited biomedical researchers in history.

The Trump GOP has frequently accused Fauci of dishonesty. The record shows that this is a facile, self-serving reading of a complex reality. Throughout the  COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci repeatedly testified before Congress, participated in hundreds of press briefings, responded calmly and cogently to intentionally hostile questions for hours on end, and transparently released scientific data as it evolved. He openly acknowledged the fact that recommendations were fluid and would change as scientific knowledge regarding the novel virus evolved and changed.

His statement that early guidance on masks reflected concerns about preserving supplies for healthcare workers has been broadly criticized, but this was a logical priority within his purview as the head of national efforts to deal with a grave emergency that was overwhelming US medical facilities. And he, furthermore, publicly explained the rationale behind that priority rather than denying it. He reiterated endlessly that uncertainty existed regarding many aspects of COVID transmission, and he repeatedly emphasized that recommendations would evolve with the emergence of new scientific and medical evidence.

Changing advice during a novel pandemic is not in any sense evidence of deception. Rather, it was acknowledgement that new scientific information was being applied and adjusted as more was learned, even as the health authorities were struggling to cope with the pandemic in practical human terms. Such adjustments are not evidence of errors or of someone like Dr. Fauci “not knowing what he’s doing.” They are, instead, proof that scientific knowledge is developing and improving almost daily and that, on that basis, recommendations must also change and evolve in sympathy with those improvements.

No elected official has questioned Dr. Fauci’s motive more aggressively than Rand Paul. The Kentucky senator has repeatedly accused Fauci of lying to Congress, funding gain-of-function research, and responsibility for the pandemic. Yet repeated investigations—including both reviews by federal agencies and independent analyses—have never concluded that Dr. Fauci intentionally lied under oath. The question of how to classify certain aspects of coronavirus research has remained scientifically and legally disputed, but no court has ever found Dr. Fauci guilty of perjury or criminal misconduct.

In the absence of evidence of any wrongdoing on Fauci’s part, Paul’s repeated public accusations, then, function basically as a political red herring, aimed at taking the focus off of the Trump regime’s own disastrous handling of the pandemic, and as a distraction from other Trump failures, like his personal war in Iran, which is rejected by more than three-quarters of Americans polled.

The major boogey man in all of this has been Paul’s “gain-of-function” accusations. He has sought to make it sound like some sort of sinister plot on Fauci’s part to create a supervirus capable of wiping out a huge segment of the population. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to comprehend this, it is important to understand what gain-of-function is and how it works.

Gain-of-function refers to any genetic change that gives an organism a new ability or makes an existing ability stronger. This change can happen naturally through evolution or it can be induced by scientists in a lab. When gain-of-function happens naturally, it is because, over time, genes mutate, as a means of helping an organism survive. But gain-of-function can also be provoked intentionally in a lab, with the aim of learning more about how certain organisms work.

Gain-of-function is commonly used to help create medications, to improve crop yields, or to generate more useful bacteria. But its main use in the medical world is to help scientists better understand novel viruses and how they work, and then, ultimately, to create reliable vaccines to combat them. Clearly, these were activities in which Dr. Fauci was likely to be submersed daily during the pandemic, as scientists raced against the clock to discover a safe and effective COVID vaccine—a task they successfully carried out in record time in different parts of the world from Russia, to Britain, to the United States.

Where Rand Paul and other far-right anti-vax and MAGA actors have sought to hang their arguments are reports regarding the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated with an incident at the Wuhan research lab in China. Fauci was involved in American funding for experiments taking place there. A scientist of Fauci’s caliber and authority would, of course, be involved in research efforts worldwide, in seeking to find cures for highly infectious diseases. But from there to accusing Dr. Fauci of being the veritable architect of the pandemic and of intentionally seeking to cover up the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is the height of conspiracy-theory fabrication.

The origin of the COVID pandemic has never been adequately proven. Could it have been due to a leak from the Wuhan lab? Sure. This could have happened because of what is known as zoonotic spillover—in which, at some point, a virus might spread from animals to people—or it could have been due to some incident at the lab that no investigation has yet been able to determine. That’s not a conspiracy theory, but a legitimate scientific question that so far fruitless international efforts have sought to resolve.

But the problem comes when a subjective group motivated by political, personal or ideological leanings decides, based on no hard evidence whatsoever, that a mere theory should be taken as fact. The result is what is known as a conspiracy theory, and that is what is behind the continued persecution of one of America’s greatest medical heroes ever.  Despite the fact that there is still no conclusive evidence regarding the origin of the corona virus and the COVID pandemic, Rand Paul and his merry band of MAGA anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have decided that they are going to believe in the Wuhan leak theory and take it as fact. Very likely because it fits their obsession with vilifying Dr. Fauci, whose only arguable crime against humanity has been making every effort to keep spiteful, bitter people like Rand Paul from dying of some terrible disease.

The pitch that Rand Paul and company are trying to sell to the public is that, thanks to Dr. Fauci, US-funded research may have contributed to the pandemic. The argument is a real stretch, since the funding was granted for research aimed at improving the available means of combating dread diseases. If a problem at that lab was, in the end, somehow responsible for the spread of COVID—and again, there is no hard evidence that this is true—it was a tragic and unintentional consequence. To date, no investigation has established that the virus was either intentionally manufactured or released there.

The thing with conspiracy theories is that they have a lot in common with novel viruses like COVID-19. They have an uncanny ability to move and spread from one group to another. Float a claim in some radical online group, and before you know it, it has spread across the length and breadth of the social media universe. It is easy then, to posit that it is based on “well-known facts”—trust us, on this—and to turn it into a powerful political weapon.

And that is precisely where things stand today in the Soviet-style kangaroo-court hearings through which Dr. Fauci is being persecuted. So the biggest take-away from all of this is the question of how mere conspiracy theories can suddenly acquire a veneer of “authority” when pressed into service by bad government actors. 

Complicating the conspiracy theory, Rand Paul has presumed to portray himself as a medical professional of the same caliber as Dr. Fauci, and therefore, an authority worthy of opining on Fauci’s competency. Let’s look at the facts.

Paul indeed graduated from Duke Medical in 1988 specializing in ophthalmology. He finished his ophthalmology training at Duke University Hospital in 1993. That same year, he and his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he started working in the private sector with the Downing McPeak Vision Centers and the Graves Gilbert Clinic. He later opened his own private practice in Bowling Green as an eye surgeon. 

At the turn of the century, the American Board of Ophthalmology modified its standards of practice, and required specialists in that field to recertify in order to keep their licenses to practice. Paul failed to comply with the recertification standards—whether because he was afraid he would not be able to meet them or maybe just out of bullheadedness—and his license to practice ophthalmology was revoked.

Instead of simply biting the bullet and taking the recertification examination, Rand Paul got together with a group of other disgruntled professionals and they started their very own rival certification board called the National Board  of Ophthamology. Paul was among the first to be recertified to practice medicine by this knock-off board, with other unlicensed medical school graduates following him in basically recertifying themselves to practice. Clearly, getting around the American Board of Ophthalmology recertification examination was the main purpose of the so-called National Board of Ophthalmology, because after Paul and company recertified themselves with the stroke of a pen, their organization waned in importance and was eventually dissolved.

Under that authority, Rand Paul practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green until 2008, before launching his campaign for the US Senate in 2009. He won his Senate bid in November of 2010.

So let’s look comparatively at the professional performances of Dr. Paul and Dr. Fauci.

Rand Paul graduated from Duke Medical, practiced privately as an eye surgeon, lost his certification to do so, challenged the recertification standards of the medical board with oversight for his profession, started his own certification board and was recertified under his own authority, decided to run for the Senate, and won a seat. Since then, he has opposed obligatory vaccination for epidemic diseases, supported abolition of the Department of Education, opposed healthcare for all, and supported a free-market medical sector. He has also become—for reasons clear only to him and his MAGA base—the number one detractor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, vowing to put the scientist behind bars. He has spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and taxpayer funds going after Fauci for alleged criminal misconduct, based entirely on MAGA conspiracy theories that have never resulted in any criminal findings against Dr. Fauci.    

Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, has become one of the world's leading infectious disease specialists, spent more than fifty years conducting biomedical research, scored monumental achievements in major infectious disease control and prevention, advised presidents of both parties and been praised and rewarded by two presidents from Rand Paul’s own party, contributed to public health initiatives that have saved tens of millions of lives, transformed the lives of HIV-AIDS victims worldwide, and published more than a thousand scholarly papers that have served as gold standard guidance for broad sectors of the medical profession.

Former President Obama joins Dr. Fauci at a school event to
promote COVID vaccination programs during the pandemic

Paul has clearly devoted far more public attention to unreasonably attacking Fauci than to engaging with the broader scientific consensus on infectious disease and seeking to apply the proven science to making his constituents healthier.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not infallible, nor does he pretend to be. He has acknowledged mistakes and changing guidance during the pandemic, which was an unprecedented public health emergency.

That said, Dr. Fauci should be judged not on the basis of conspiracy theories supported by the anti-science prejudice of the MAGA movement, but on his   half-century of scientific achievement and service to the American people. Measured over the course of that stellar career, Dr. Fauci stands as one of the most influential physician-scientists in modern American history. His leadership helped advance treatments for HIV/AIDS, strengthen preparedness against emerging infectious diseases, and guide public health responses under seven presidents from both political parties.

By contrast, Senator Rand Paul's sustained focus on portraying Dr. Fauci as personally culpable for the pandemic has not resulted in criminal convictions or judicial findings of misconduct of any sort with regard to Fauci. The obsessively nefarious anti-Fauci—and anti-science—campaign mounted by Paul is no more than a political scam designed to assign personal blame to a scapegoat for a complex global catastrophe in which Paul’s party bore a huge measure of responsibility by generating distrust in the science that sought to save lives, and encouraging Americans to “decide for themselves,” rather than strictly adhering to the science as it evolved and became ever more effective.

Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is simple MAGA deflection, and the Senator, taking his cue from the ghost of Eugene McCarthy, is bent on unjustly trashing Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary reputation as a means of stroking his own ego and of gaining points among his anti-science MAGA constituents.