Fauci’s legacy of lies paved the way for RFK Jr. and his conspiracy theories 

Opposite every outrageous pronouncement from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the long shadow of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the formerly canonized COVID-era hero who has already been stripped of his sainthood.

The lifelong liberal conspiracy theorist who endorsed President Donald Trump to secure a job in his administration sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash for an explosive interview on Sunday, just a few days after Fauci spent the entirety of a Senate Homeland Security Committee meeting pleading the Fifth Amendment.

Yin and yang, but both incompetent and ruinous.

Fauci’s sins are both too grave to exaggerate and too many to enumerate in full.

The ex-NIAID director and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden sought to undermine the lab leak theory of Covid’s origins publicly even as he contemplated it privately.

He relentlessly pushed destructive lockdowns and pointless masks, priming the public for a rejection of the much more efficacious vaccines to come.

He suffered from reality-warping delusions of grandeur that caused him to declare criticism of his person criticism of “science,” and to devote untold amounts of time and energy to marveling at his own fame.

“Press still hot and heavy about me,” he boasted to his diary during some of the country’s darkest days in April 2020.

His arrogant, mendacious brand of “leadership” yielded excess deaths from the virus he sought to contain, bestowed untold suffering and learning loss on America’s children and ushered in the new, distrustful era in which Kennedy has thrived.

The latter’s interview with Bash showed how.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images

The anchor kicked off their conversation by baiting him to attack Trump in a bad-faith display for the ages.

Then again, could anything more be expected of the very serious journalist who once told Fauci no one would have blamed him if he had told a Republican congressman to “go f–k himself” during a hearing?

The rest of her performance reflected the same haughty attitude she so admired in Fauci and emulates to this day.

This know-nothing newswoman denied Fauci’s culpability in the lockdowns even though his diary (quite famously) recorded his pride in having successfully lobbied for them, scoffed at Kennedy’s invocation of constitutional rights and was completely unprepared to push back meaningfully on his anti-vaccine talking points.

“Your job as a journalist is a fierce skepticism toward authority, and you weren’t doing that. You were beating up people who were dissenting,” declared Kennedy at one point.

The charge stuck because it was true — and it undermined her ability to expose him as the con man he is while discussing the ongoing measles outbreak and his efforts to revive the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism a few moments later.

So, to recap: Step one, assert the right course of action.

Step two, tell ignoble lies in pursuit of your objective.

Step three, shame thoughtful dissenters.

And finally, once you’ve torched your credibility, weakly protest as bad actors capitalize.

It was déjà vu all over again.

Fauci’s name will forever be synonymous with an elite class that reaches judgments with unearned confidence, punishes without mercy, lies as easily as it breathes and never takes responsibility for its countless mistakes.

It will also be inextricably linked to Kennedy’s, whose ascension was not only made possible by, but directly facilitated by Fauci’s failure.

Because when people are deliberately misled, berated and made to suffer by self-righteous mediocrities on one topic, they’re unlikely to come back for seconds.

And they’ll be more open to the idea that they’re being taken for fools on still more weighty topics.

Such as, say, the safety and efficacy of vaccines — just as an example.

Like Fauci before her, Bash had already been unmasked as a fraudster, and was thus powerless to point out that so too was her interlocutor.

The disgraced doctor is no doubt horrified to have been succeeded as America’s most powerful public health official by an egomaniac without regard for the truth.

But the rest of us are left musing that the new boss is very much like the old one.