Anthony Fauci and the System That Failed Us

Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s pandemic response, has been back in the news lately. Last month, Senator Rand Paul released the personal diaries Fauci kept throughout the pandemic. Then, after Fauci pleaded the Fifth in a Senate hearing, he was held in contempt of Congress. All of this has reignited a conversation about Fauci and how the country handled the pandemic. It’s been an intense, and intensely personal, debate. But at stake is much more than the reputation of one former public official.

In our Big Read today, Sigrid Bratlie, a molecular biologist and author of The Mystery of Wuhan, argues that we are still just scratching the surface of the real pandemic scandal: the way in which the public health establishment, led by Fauci, invested in risky virus research then appears to have tried to cover its tracks. It’s a story about institutional failures in science, intelligence, and politics, and we’re pleased to share it with you today.

We also wanted to go deeper into Fauci’s diaries themselves. Dr. Vinay Prasad, one of the pandemic’s most prominent contrarian voices who later became the Food and Drug Administration’s head vaccine regulator, has read them in full. Today he sits down with Rafaela Siewert to discuss what he found. You can watch their conversation below. —The Editors

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that few American bureaucrats in recent years have been more polarizing than Anthony Fauci—best known as the leader of the U.S. pandemic response.

Now the debate is raging after he was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic under oath. Republicans have made him almost solely responsible for everything that went wrong during the pandemic. Democrats call it a conspiratorial vendetta and an attack on science.

The rhetoric is disappointingly superficial on both sides—and so is the coverage in most media so far, which portrays the whole thing as vengeful Republicans against a somewhat inexplicably silent Fauci.

The matter is far more complex.