Republicans have often sparred with Dr. Anthony Fauci in various committee hearings and congressional inquiries into the origins and handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Few of those exchanges have been as tense as those between Fauci and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
The two often argued over whether Fauci was aware of funding, originating from within the health bureaucracy of the federal government, for “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab, that could have actually helped create the Covid-19 coronavirus still plaguing the world.
With the midterms looming and Democrats likely to be in the minority after the election, Republicans are plotting to investigate well beyond the walls erected by Democrats meant to protect Fauci and the bureaucracy as a whole:
“One way or another, if we are in the majority, we will subpoena his records and he will testify in the Senate under oath,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is in line to become the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee if Republicans win the majority with the panel’s current ranking member, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), retiring.
Republicans have not been shy about launching probes into the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on the origins of the virus and whether the federal government — and by extension, Fauci — helped fund controversial research that might have played a role in its creation.
While Republicans have been in the minority, those investigations have not gained much momentum. But with the majority, the GOP would have the authority to lob subpoenas at the administration to force it to hand over documents.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said earlier this year.
Much of the reasoning for more investigation goes well beyond partisan witchhunts. The Covid-19 handling by the CDC and other agencies, such as the FDA, was stunted from the beginning despite various agencies planning for years in advance of a potential SARS-like outbreak.
Questions concerning when and why various mandates were issued and whether they had any tangible effect on preventing the spread deserve more exploration.
Some questions already have answers, such as the damage inflicted on children by those like Fauci who said the trade-off of destroying years of education would be worth it in the end. From this standpoint, with millions of children playing catch up for lost years in the classroom, the trade-off clearly was not worth it.
More questions about what kind of funding the CDC and National Institute of Health send overseas and what kind of research, often banned in the United States, is carried out with U.S. dollars elsewhere around the world also deserve attention. These are topics Fauci has dodged or would prefer not to talk about it.
The sheer amount of distrust that has brewed between the American people and the federal government when it comes to matters of public health will prove dangerous in the future. Fauci has been embroiled in the middle of the distrust from early on when his story started changing on things like masks. As time went on, Fauci later admitted he changed his public statements based on what he felt the public could accept, not what the data said or what science said.
The damage done by Covid-19 to millions of Americans in terms of financial and educational damage well beyond the health effects can never be fully measured.
Before the next pandemic, questions must be answered and the truth must be laid bare.
