The COVID pandemic started more than half a decade ago and a handful of republicans have brought Anthony Fauci back into the news. The re-emergence came from Senator Rand Paul, who has had frequent public disputes with Fauci and is now the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In a recent widely-reported series of events, Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify before the committee. Fauci was granted a blanket pardon for the time he served as NIAID director, but in the days before the hearing, several taking heads, including some members of the Senate, made it clear that the pardon didn’t cover any perjury that might happen at the hearing. In other words, while he couldn’t be charged with a crime that he admitted committing at the hearing (if the crime was during the time covered by the pardon), if he lied to the committee during this hearing, he could be charged with perjury and sent to jail.

The hearing was great fodder for the media and fanned anti-Fauci hatred that seemed to have died out. Fauci gave an opening statement explaining that Senator Paul has made it clear that his goal is to put Fauci behind bars and that he believes the hearing is an attempt to entrap him, and therefore following the advice of his lawyers, he would not answer any questions, and he didn’t. Not a single question. Not a question about what was in a folder in front of him. Not a question about things as mundane as the color of things in the room. It was incredibly frustrating to many republicans, but instead of cancelling the hearing, they went through the motions and each committee member used their time to either ask questions (that they knew he wouldn’t answer) or to make some statement about COVID or Fauci.

I watched it all live. Something that I couldn’t have done a few months ago, but I’m sort of between jobs right now and have more time (that I could have used to write more here, but haven’t until now). I found myself feeling several things. I was sad for Fauci, who has had an incredible career as a scientist and public servant. He is widely considered responsible for saving millions of people in developing nations from HIV/AIDS and is the longest serving director of NIAID in its history. I was sad that, in his retirement, this is what he has to deal with. I was also angry that some people in our government feel the need to re-litigate this all. I appreciate the need to set the record straight, and there are things that I think are worth re-litigating, but this isn’t one of them (to me). But more than anything, I was so upset by the views expressed by several of the republican senators on the committee. It’s upsetting to hear them express some of these things, and even more upsetting because I’m 100% certain they’ve had the opportunity to learn what they’re getting wrong, and they refuse to see it. All of that came together to highlight two vastly different competing narratives held by this country right now.

On the one hand, Fauci was a tireless public servant who, although imperfect, was an important voice that helped us get through COVID following rapidly developing information, taking a data-driven approach. On the other hand, he’s a criminal who is single-handedly responsible for COVID.

Much of the evil-Fauci narrative rests on the premise that Fauci himself approved research in Wuhan China that created the COVID virus and that virus, that was made using dollars awarded by COVID was leaked from the lab, by accident or on purpose, and caused the pandemic. That version of Fauci is either hiding his nefarious plot, or working overtime to hide his roll in the deaths of millions so that he isn’t viewed as the bad guy.

I find this version of Fauci to be completely illogical. First of all, it’s incredibly rare that the director of an NIH institute/center is making these kinds of granular decisions. That’s not to say that some directors don’t get into the weeds about which grants should and shouldn’t get funded, but they’re always picking from grants that were scored highly in the peer review process. Second, while there’s room for debate about the evidence for a lab leak, it seems pretty clear that there is considerably less evince supporting that view than there is supporting a natural origin of the virus. Do we have all the information we need (and by “we” I mean the scientific community, not me…I don’t do this kind of work)? We certainly don’t, but there’s a lot of information we do have that doesn’t fit with the lab leak version of history. Third, if it was a lab leak, I think we would have had a lot more knowledge about it faster than we had, and I think we would have been able to stop it.

But republicans are hung up on what feels to me to be inconsistent views. I have no problem holding inconsistent views. I have plenty of them, but it’s good to be aware of them, and I’m not sure they are. The same people who assert that COVID wasn’t as bad as it was and that the number of deaths were vastly exaggerated (e.g., the kind of stories we heard about people dying in car crashes who tested positive for COVID getting labeled as a COVID death), now use the higher number of deaths to paint Fauci as a mass murderer. There’s something nonsensical about it all to me.

I’m still left feeling like this is a really bad timeline to be on. Something has to give.