By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
August 1, 2026
Yesterday, a rather contentious hearing occurred where Fauci was subpoenaed by the Senate to testify over what happened during COVID, which was immediately preceded by the private diaries (which HHS Secretary RFK Jr. team found sequestered on government HHS servers) being released to the public.
The hearing (after opening statements), began with Fauci giving a statement claiming he had been a dutiful servant helping the government for decades, that he was facing a malicious prosecution that put science itself at risk, and that he would be invoking his 5th amendment rights. Following this, Democrat members of the committee repeated this message, while Republican senators gave scathing criticisms of his conduct throughout the pandemic (eclipsing everything we've seen thus far), and Fauci, over a hundred times, in response to each question stating:
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
While the focus of this hearing was largely directed at the scathing statements made toward Fauci (and his refusal to respond to or even acknowledge them), it was also apparent that many of the questions were designed to set up a future prosecution, and that Fauci's allies gave speeches but never asked him a single question. This suggests the primary focus of both sides was executing a legal strategy each had worked out beforehand.
Note: there are widespread questions about the legitimacy of Fauci's presidential pardon, which covers all of his federal actions between 1/1/2014 and 1/19/2025, given existing legal precedent that a pardon can negate one's ability to invoke the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. Multiple Republican senators pressed this contradiction (that Fauci either does not have a valid pardon or is willfully committing contempt) and it will likely be an issue that plays out in the courts, especially if the committee votes to hold him in contempt.
Given all of this, there were a few noteworthy things about the hearing and Fauci's diary I felt merited discussion.
Fauci's 1988 Hearing
In each COVID hearing that has been conducted, Republican Senators and Representatives have grilled Fauci while Democrats have heaped lavish praise upon him. This is a remarkable contrast to the climate in 1988 where Democrats (whose constituents were dying while AIDS drug development proceeded at a snail's pace) instead grilled Fauci over his program (while Republican members of Congress were largely neutral towards him).
Note: Fauci's actions during the AIDS crisis (where he faced widespread pushback from the gay community for continually stonewalling effective off-patent therapies for AIDS to push through the toxic antiviral AZT), the fact that he was still in power over thirty years later, and his immediate endorsement of remdesivir played a large part in allowing me to accurately predict the trajectory of COVID-19.
To illustrate all of this, I will quote a few key lines from a 1988 hearing:
Chairman Ted Weiss (D-NY): "But then you told Mr. Waxman that you couldn't develop a drug that's been lying on the shelf for 13 months even though your committees have placed it on the highest priority list because you didn't have one person full time to devote to it. You can understand how the people in the affected community, those who have the disease and who are struggling for their lives, feel when they hear that." (p. 324)
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "Dr. Fauci, many people have complained that the NIH drug development process is too slow to put volunteers in trials. Thirteen months ago, your own drug selection committee said that aerosolized pentamidine, to prevent the deadly pneumonia in AIDS patients, was a very high priority for research. You have three protocols designed, but as best I can discover, no patients yet." (p. 321)
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "The pneumonia costs us millions of dollars in Medicaid dollars. Why can't we hire one full-time person to have gotten this study underway?" (p. 321)
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "Your own drug selection committee has named 24 drugs as high priority for development and trials. As best I can tell, 11 of these 24 are not in trial yet. Six of these drugs have been waiting for 6 months to more than a year. Why the delays?" (p. 322)
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): "Well, it's not the length of time - I'm in Congress, Dr. Fauci - it's the length of time that a person with AIDS has left to live before something, some hope is there for him or her." (p. 320)
Chairman Ted Weiss (D-NY): "Wouldn't you say that as far as drug development is concerned, very little has been achieved and you still have a long, long way to go?"
Dr. Anthony Fauci: "With regard to a cure, I agree with you; relatively speaking, little has been accomplished." (p. 324)
Note: despite my best efforts, while I have a transcript, I have not been able to find a video of this contentious hearing (e.g., in C-SPANs archives, it somehow was removed from all the other Congressional hearing that occurred at that time).
A Plague Upon Our House
After I read Scott Atlas MD's memoir about his time on the coronavirus task force (where he was brought in to serve as a counterweight to Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx's relentless push for mass masking, testing, and lockdowns), I was struck by the sense that he'd provided one of the most accurate accounts of what actually went wrong inside the White House in 2020.
The first thing that emerges from his account is that no one in the White House felt positioned to challenge the doctors' "expertise," so no one did. As Atlas explains, most of the task force "had no medical background so they deferred to those deemed medical experts." That deference ran all the way to the top. When Atlas pressed his case on testing, a frustrated Trump told him, "You'll have to convince my son-in-law of that," and as Atlas notes, "Kushner and everyone else had been deferring to Fauci and Birx on all things medical." The two doctors, in his words, "commandeered federal policy," and their prescriptions "had been instituted as though it were simple common sense." No one questioned them, largely because of the prestige of the people delivering them.
However, on closer inspection, the expert doctors had an almost unbelievable lack of scientific literacy or COVID-19 data. Atlas (a Stanford physician and health-policy scholar who had spent decades around serious researchers) was flabbergasted by what he found in the Situation Room. Of the "troika" of Fauci, Birx, and Redfield, he wrote that "none of them showed detailed knowledge of ongoing scientific literature on the pandemic," that he "never witnessed any of them provide any detailed critique of any journal publication," and that "none of the three ever brought scientific publications into the meetings."
Note: the third doctor, CDC director Redfield, during COVID unlike the other two tried to do the right thing, was repeatedly disparaged by Fauci in his diary, and since leaving the CDC has done a lot of really good work to make things right (whereas CDC directors typically take lucrative positions).
Fauci in particular receives a striking assessment. Despite his daily omnipresence in the media, Atlas records that Fauci "was not in charge of anything specific on the Task Force" and "served mainly as a channel for updates on the trials of vaccines and drugs." More pointedly:
"A bigger surprise was that Fauci did not present scientific research on the pandemic to the group that I witnessed. Likewise, I never heard him speak about his own critical analysis of any published research studies. This was stunning to me."
Nor was any of this open to correction. Atlas describes a group that had locked in its conclusions and would not engage with contrary evidence. As he put it, "They were fixated on lockdowns, school closures, and stopping COVID cases, no matter the economic and human costs" or the fact the approach was clearly failing as it was not targeted to the primary group (elderly patients in nursing homes) that was dying. Birx's daily presentations, which drove national policy, were "fundamentally simple tabulations of weekly tallies," propped up by "circular reasoning as 'proof' that locking down was successful." When Atlas distributed peer-reviewed data on the flaws in PCR testing at a September meeting, it went entirely undiscussed:
"The White House Task Force doctors sitting in the Situation Room for months, Birx, Fauci, Giroir, Redfield, literally never discussed this critical error during the meetings I sat through. They never mentioned it, not even after I distributed the research at a Task Force meeting in September."
He handed the papers out, he recalls, "while noting with a tinge of sarcasm, 'I thought some people might actually be interested in reading the science.'" It only got worse from there. By his final task force meeting, nine full months into the pandemic, Atlas was asked to prepare a basic tutorial because the doctors still didn't grasp the rationale for testing. He refused, writing to the vice president's staff that he "had no energy or interest in teaching basic information to people who after nine months on the Task Force still lacked such fundamental knowledge." His verdict was blunt. This was "not the expected level of legitimate scientists, let alone those supposed to be advising the president of the United States," people operating below what, as he put it elsewhere, "every second-year medical student knew."
In 2006, a movie premised on projecting the consequences of our society continually selecting for low-IQ individuals was released. It became a cult classic thanks to how accurately it predicted the future just a decade later. As I read Scott Atlas's memoir, I was floored to realize the Coronavirus Task Force meetings were a real-life version of Idiocracy 's iconic cabinet scene: one person reasons from the plainest available evidence, lays it on the table, and watches a room full of the nation's most credentialed officials stare back blankly, unable or unwilling to follow, before defaulting to the slogan they'd already committed to.
However, while Fauci contributed little of substance in these meetings, Atlas made it clear about what he was good at. The gap between Fauci's actual role and his public dominance is one of the book's recurring themes:
"Dr. Fauci held court in the public eye on a daily basis, so frequently that many misconstrue his role as being in charge. However, it was really Dr. Birx who articulated Task Force policy [and pushed through the lockdowns]."
Atlas came to suspect this media fluency wasn't incidental but strategic. After one private meeting between the two men, he glanced at the news afterward and was astonished to find Fauci had tipped off reporters in advance:
"It turned out that Fauci had alerted the media beforehand that he was going to talk with me that day. I wondered, 'What kind of person would give a heads-up that he was going to speak with me?'"
Furthermore, Atlas's claims that Fauci sabotaged the COVID response and quietly worked the press against internal rivals (e.g., press hysterias were incited each time Atlas began getting traction to overturn Fauci and Birx's disastrous policies) was independently corroborated by Peter Navarro's White House memoir. Navarro described the same behavior aimed at him, writing what "really frosted" him "was the shadow leak campaign Fauci ran to get me off TV even as he sought to free himself completely from any disciplined White House messaging." Navarro also captures the broader dynamic that made Fauci untouchable. "During the Trump administration," he writes, "Saint Fauci, the anti-Trump media's favorite POTUS foil, was always off limits."
Navarro corroborates the substance, too. Where I've long argued that remdesivir was essentially Fauci's pet drug, Navarro documents the maneuver that got it approved. Fauci, he writes, "surprised the scientific community by abruptly moving this goalpost" for the remdesivir trial, shifting it from a reduction in mortality (the original "death off the table" endpoint) "to the much less consequential time to recovery." The drug that couldn't clear the bar it was originally measured against was waved through once the bar was lowered, all while cheaper, off-patent options were being publicly dismissed.
Navarro also connected Fauci's COVID conduct to a much older pattern seen in the 1988 hearing. He notes that "during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Fauci had sung the very same 'there's not enough data' song to block approval of a suite of drugs proving to be quite effective" at preventing the pneumonia that was then the leading killer of AIDS patients. Navarro cites a documented 1987 exchange in which activist Michael Callen told Fauci there was ample evidence that the drug could prevent that pneumonia, and Fauci, by the account Navarro quotes, "practically screamed" back, "There's no data." One AIDS-era memoir Navarro references put Fauci's share of the resulting body count at "nearly 17,000."
That history came roaring back during a Situation Room showdown over hydroxychloroquine, which Navarro argues both Fauci and the FDA moved to undermine against Trump's wishes. When Fauci played what Navarro calls "his 'there's only anecdotal evidence' card," (while the Vice President was present) Navarro walked over, dropped a dossier of studies on the table and exclaimed:
"Tony, these are not anecdotes. That's more than fifty scientific studies in support of hydroxy. Fifty ! So stop spouting your crap about there only being anecdotal evidence You are going to kill people just like you did during the AIDS crisis when you refused to approve medicines that everybody but you knew worked."
Within hours, in a room Navarro notes held only a small handful of senior officials, the confrontation was leaked to Axios and written up as an "epic Situation Room showdown", providing a fitting illustration of exactly the kind of press leak Navarro was accusing Fauci of running.
Note: in Fauci's February 28, 2020 NEJM editorial, "Covid-19 - Navigating the Uncharted," he listed chloroquine by name among the investigational therapies being explored against the virus and back in 2005, CDC virologists had published "Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread" in Virology Journal, finding it active against the original SARS virus fifteen years earlier.