This week, Republican senator Rand Paul subpoenaed Dr Anthony Fauci – the Covid pandemic’s rockstar medic (and long-serving bureaucrat). He was to appear before Paul’s Senate hearing for a showdown about the origin of the Covid pandemic. In the run-up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of emails and Slack messages sent by Fauci and his associates before and during the pandemic, including an astonishing diary that Fauci had kept during the critical years of 2019 to 2022.
Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer senators’ questions this week about his conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in the 1,141-page private diary released before that hearing, the former top infectious disease official had plenty to say about the press, his celebrity, his enemies on the “far right,” and his frustration with White House aides who would not put him on television.
If you believe in karma or that chickens always come home to roost, you have to explain why Mao and Stalin died in bed, and Hitler was able to choose his own way out. But watching Anthony Fauci on the witness stand before Congress taking the Fifth as fast as his lips could flap (more than 100 times), you could see some evidence that at least some hens become broiler chickens.
Former COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded The Fifth 111 times at Wednesday’s Congressional hearing – but, that’s not what promised to do when the prospect of oversight of his handling of the epidemic first surfaced.
At Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs hearing, the former face and head of the federal government’s response to the deadly COVID-19 epidemic refused to answer even a single question about his past actions, claims and health-safety recommendations.
It wasn’t good for Anthony Fauci or anybody else that he took the Fifth at his Senate hearing this week. That plus his diary may well have been a reputation-destroying event.
It was obviously his right as a citizen to invoke the protections of the Constitution, and he surely had his reasons, but everyone who takes the Fifth knows what it looks like: It’s the early ’60s, we’re at congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.
Watching the reactions to Wednesday’s “I Take The Fifth” Senate hearing starring Dr. Anthony Fauci was a good bit more illuminating than was the actual hearing.
I’m going to assume that’s an uncontroversial take — after all, with Fauci invoking the Fifth Amendment some 111 times, even to questions like “what day of the week is it,” “what color is your tie,” and “what color is the carpet in front of you,” the informational value of the hearing itself was close to zero.
I can't stop picturing him lying on a bed, writing in a diary like a teenager. pic.twitter.com/dF4iVYgC24
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) July 27, 2026
It’s clear that Anthony Fauci was fairly certain that he had funded the Gain-of-Function research that likely created the COVID virus from the very beginning of the pandemic, and that his top priority was covering up that fact
It was priority #1, even before addressing the public health danger.
He’s not just a powerful guy who acted in bad faith. He’s a totem to a whole class of people who don’t care about that.
This is old inside- baseball blogger stuff in part, but there’s a bigger lesson.
Old time (and I mean old-time) blog readers may remember Jeff Jarvis’s fierce post-9/11 warblogging, which pivoted rather suddenly into leftish pro-Democratic blogging in time for the 2004 election. Jeff and I were close before the pivot (he got me my long-ago MSNBC gig), and remained friendly even after. We were Facebook friends from the beginning, though our interactions over the past decade-plus were confined to the occasional like or happy birthday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has had quite a bit to say about Covid and “science” throughout the past year. But when it came to answering for his corrupt handling of the outbreak before the Senate on Wednesday, the so-called health “expert” kept his trap shut.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) went off on Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday, blaming him for COVID lockdown mandates and asking: “Who the f–k do you think you were for doing that?”
Moreno began his round of questioning during the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee by ripping into Fauci’s attorney and scolding the former White House COVID-19 czar for his handling of the pandemic.
My simple question for Anthony Fauci this morning: who the fuck do you think you are?
Fauci’s message to the countless Americans he locked in their homes, who were fired from their jobs over vax mandates, the children he forced to wear masks? “I plead the 5th.” Criminal. pic.twitter.com/mm9JWQSf6Z
— Bernie Moreno (@berniemoreno) July 29, 2026
Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment at the start of his Wednesday hearing, ripping Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for “unhinged” remarks and claiming the only purpose of the Homeland Security Committee’s investigation was to put him “behind bars.”
“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” said Fauci.
Fauci and “Good Faith”
On 8 February 2020, Anthony Fauci took a morning telephone call from Tom Frieden, formerly the director of the CDC. He wrote down what they discussed. Both men agreed the new coronavirus was behaving like a bad influenza in transmissibility. Fauci recorded 34,867 known cases against 724 deaths, then observed that the real denominator was far larger than the confirmed count. That put the case fatality rate at 0.2 to 0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent (Paul 2026).
He was right, and the estimate has held up better than most of what was said in public over the two years that followed.
h/t handy n handsome
Nobody wants to think about Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci anymore, lest he risk being retraumatized and suffer neck-breaking convulsions. But if we never want to experience anything like them again, it’s worth looking at the reasons both of them are relevant again this week.
For years, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective. What he never mentioned, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is that he may have suffered one of those “rare” adverse events himself, and he hid it from the country while publicly insisting such injuries weren’t happening.
VDH on Fauci – very good listen.
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) head Anthony Fauci privately admitted that scientists suspected the coronavirus likely stemmed from a lab leak as he publicly blasted it as a wild conspiracy theory, revelations from his diary showcase.
WASHINGTON — More than a year before the pandemic, in the autumn of 2018, coronavirus material was carried covertly out of a People’s Liberation Army medical academy toward the Minnesota laboratory of a federally funded virologist, a man named Fang Li, who was permitted to work on “bat coronavirus DNA.”
