In July 2020, Anthony Fauci got into a heated exchange with Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul during a Senate committee hearing. At the time, the question of whether the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a Wuhan, China, laboratory was considered a conspiracy theory by most health officials and media outlets. But a few independent scientists and reporters kept investigating the possibility. A particularly troubling question was whether the U.S. government might have funded “gain-of-function” research that had made a naturally occurring virus more infectious. Fauci had supported such research in the past. And, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a key branch of the Bethesda, Maryland-based National Institutes of Health, he was involved in distributing millions of dollars in grants to virus researchers around the world. In a hearing several months earlier, Fauci had denied that the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But new information had come to light since that earlier hearing. Now, Senator Paul pushed the NIAID director to correct the record. “Dr. Fauci, as you are aware it is a crime to lie to Congress,” Rand began, before asking him if he wanted to retract his earlier statement. “Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress,” Fauci responded, “and I do not retract that statement.” Paul pushed back, explaining that, by gain-of-function he meant research in which “you take an animal virus and you increase [its] transmissibility to humans.” Fauci wouldn’t budge: “You do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially.” The exchange grew even more heated. “You are implying what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals. I totally resent that,” Fauci continued. “If anyone is lying here, Senator, it is you.”
Fauci’s haughty defense of his integrity got sympathetic treatment in most media outlets, while Paul’s aggressive questioning was described as “grandstanding.” Their argument wasn’t about whether the NIH had funded research at the lab; it had already been established that $600,000 in NIH grant money had gone to a Wuhan Institute project studying bat coronaviruses. Rather, the debate concerned whether the institute’s manipulations of those viruses could be described as gain-of-function (GOF). Fauci and then-NIH director Francis S. Collins publicly insisted on a narrow definition of GOF, one that didn’t include the Wuhan study. On the other hand, Rutgers University scientist Richard H. Ebright, a vocal critic of such research, told the Washington Post that the NIH-funded Wuhan project was “unequivocally gain-of-function research.”
The matter might have rested there: at best, an honest difference of opinion over scientific terminology; at worst, a senator’s demagogic attack on a dedicated public official. Unfortunately for Fauci and Collins, damning revelations about the internal operations of their agencies continued to seep out over the next three years, with the floodgates bursting wide in the past several months. Fauci’s assurances before Congress have now been exposed as brazenly evasive. In fact, a string of emails and other disclosures reveals a pattern of deception and arrogance on the part of not just Fauci and Collins but an array of leading scientists and public officials. None of the recent disclosures constitutes definitive evidence that the virus did, in fact, leak from the Wuhan lab. That question remains hotly debated, and advocates for a natural (or “zoonotic”) origin can point to several studies that provide tenuous evidence for their position. But Fauci and Collins’s dishonest handling of the lab leak question is a scandal, whether or not the Wuhan lab is ever proven to be the pandemic’s source. At a time when the public had urgent questions about the origin of Covid, both scientists withheld key information. They denigrated any scientist, reporter, or politician who questioned their narrative. And they worked behind the scenes to keep the question under wraps.
Such high-handedness on the part of public health leaders would become all too common throughout the pandemic. Top officials had firm ideas about what policies were needed to slow the disease, and they didn’t trust civilians to handle nuanced questions or awkward facts. Instead, they tried to nudge the public toward what they viewed as proper behavior through oversimplifications, half-truths, and noble lies. Fauci seemed particularly comfortable taking on the role of the all-knowing voice of science itself. The NIAID chief acted as though it was self-evident that he should have the last word on factual disputes. If anyone challenged him, Fauci notoriously told CBS’s Face the Nation, “they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Americans—including most conservatives—generally accepted the extreme measures that experts said would “flatten the curve.” But as the pandemic dragged on, Americans noticed that public health policies often seemed based more on official whims than on reliable data. First came Fauci’s famous flipflop on the efficacy of wearing masks. Then, the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies downplayed evidence that the Covid-19 virus travels mostly through the air. Their constantly repeated advice to stay six feet apart and avoid touching your face turned out to be useless.
Across the country, health officials aggressively shut down parks and beaches and banned religious services. Some churches faced nearly Stasi-level surveillance. But when millions of demonstrators flooded the streets during the George Floyd protests in the spring of 2020, the same officials stood aside, or actively cheered the protests on. That astounding shift revealed how almost every aspect of Covid science and policy had become politicized. The CDC maintained its rigid support for mask-wearing and school closures to meet the demands of teachers’ unions, relying on discredited research in the process. While the rapid development of vaccines was one of the few policy victories of the pandemic, the CDC and other health bureaucrats gummed up the initial vaccine rollout by proposing confusing social-justice metrics to determine who should be first in line for the shots. For more than a year, officials both overstated the vaccines’ benefits and understated their small (but not trivial) risks to certain populations. Eventually, the public learned that officials from the FBI and other agencies had been strong-arming Twitter (now X), Google, Facebook, and other social media outlets, demanding that the companies squelch questions about vaccine efficacy and criticisms of lockdown policies.
Step by step, Americans began to lose confidence in both the competence and honesty of our public officials. According to a Pew Research poll, approval of “public health officials such as those at the CDC” dropped from 79 percent to 52 percent between March 2020 and May 2022. Tellingly, while Republicans and Republican leaners gave public health officials higher approval ratings at the start of the pandemic (84 percent, compared with 74 percent for Democrats and Democrat leaners), by May 2022, only 29 percent of Republicans thought those officials were doing an “excellent/good job responding to the coronavirus outbreak,” while support among Democrats held almost steady. Just as the financial crisis of 2008 destroyed the public’s confidence in financial leaders, the Covid pandemic exposed the many ways our public health establishment was both overconfident and underprepared. In the end, all those exhortations to “trust the science” backfired. It gradually became clear that, when it came to some of the most important scientific and policy questions involving Covid-19, Fauci, Collins, and other officials were simply not trustworthy.
The lab-leak question slowly re-emerged, thanks primarily due to the dogged work of a few scientists and independent journalists willing to defy the mainstream consensus. Fauci and Collins sidestepped questions about it, while their agencies slow-walked responses to Freedom of Information Act requests. In an earlier era, such stonewalling from government agencies would have infuriated the press and spurred intense reporting efforts. But instead, for the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream news outlets eagerly assisted health officials in suppressing or demonizing questions about a possible lab leak. In 2021, the New York Times’s lead Covid reporter famously tweeted her hope that people would “stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”
In the end, it took some grandstanding Republicans in Congress to break the logjam of information. In July 2023, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a trove of emails, text messages, and other interactions between Fauci, Collins, other health officials, and leading virus experts. Other messages were leaked to independent reporters, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger. These communications reveal a stunning contrast between those experts’ confident public statements and the doubts and fears they expressed privately.
In dozens of interviews, dating to the start of the pandemic, Fauci, Collins, and others expressed bland assurances that the new virus must have spilled into the human population from a wild animal. The idea that the Wuhan Institute might have been involved was dismissed as “just a conspiracy theory,” in Fauci’s words. But the recently disclosed communications reveal that behind the scenes, many of the world’s top virologists worried that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab. Worse, some feared
