Dr. Anthony Fauci deserved gratitude, not Rand Paul’s Republican show trial

At today’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, which doubled as a character assassination of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, dripping with contempt, said to Dr. Fauci, “Who the f**k- do you think you are?"

I have a question for Moreno, and for the committee’s chairman, Rand Paul: "Who the f*** do you think you are?"

Fauci has a Presidential Medal of Freedom. He advised every president since Reagan. He spent more than 40 years of his life inside infectious disease wards while Moreno was selling used cars and Paul was an eye surgeon getting beaten up by a neighbor.

Today, Dr. Fauci rightly took the Fifth because, going up against a bunch of know-it-all morons, he had nothing to gain by trying to defend himself. So, in an attempt to give him a hand, I’m happy to defend him here.

Related: Dr. Fauci Calls Out Homophobic Lawmakers: 'The Antigay Attitude of People Is as Bad' As He's Ever Seen

The hearing wasn't oversight. It was a sham. It was a public execution, years in the making, staged by a spoiled, pretentious, narrow-minded jerk of a chairman who has said outright that he wants to see Fauci "behind bars."

The despicable Paul subpoenaed a semi-retired 85-year-old physician and, gallingly, released more than a thousand pages of Fauci's private pandemic-era diary. No one was surprised to learn that RFK Jr.'s HHS was complicit in this obscene invasion of privacy.

I have a question for you. How would you feel if someone exposed your diaries? Dr. Fauci no doubt lived in a dark world during the pandemic, so who can blame him for privately finding some silver linings?

Paul and his accomplices ridiculed Fauci for taking the Fifth. Fauci said as plainly as he could in his opening statement that the only reason Paul hauled him in front of the cameras was to get him to say something, anything, that could be twisted into the prosecution Paul has been chasing publicly for years.

And after all that was viciously said, nothing was done today to prove anything other than that the GOP members of the committee went after Fauci, as they have done for years, to desperately rile up a segment of the MAGA base. They have nothing else to campaign on for the coming midterms. So they’re working around the edges of the aggrieved, trying to dredge up anything they can.

Well, they picked the wrong man to try to make political hay because anyone who has dealt with Dr. Fauci knows what kind of man he is.

I've spoken with Dr. Fauci many times over the years about COVID, his work on HIV and AIDS, PEPFAR, and his life. There are millions of gay men and others alive today who can trace a straight line from the antiretroviral cocktails Fauci helped develop to the fact that HIV is now something you manage, not something that kills you in your twenties.

He built PEPFAR with George W. Bush, a program credited with saving millions of lives across sub-Saharan Africa, and he told me it was the proudest achievement of his career. He earned that Medal of Freedom.

Related: Thank You, Dr. Fauci, for All You’ve Done — So Far!

Instead of a hearing on why USAID's dismantling is now projected to cost hundreds of thousands more African lives to HIV, or a hearing on what we actually learned from COVID so we're not caught flat-footed next time, we got wretched senators dragging a man's diary through the mud to relitigate emails from six years ago.

The GOP members had the audacity to say Fauci politicized the COVID pandemic. That was laughable. It was them, all the way, all the time.

It was the Republican Party that told people masks and vaccines were tyranny, that fought school closures when closing schools was the best call anyone could make with the information available at the time, and whose own president mused out loud about injecting bleach.

Fauci didn't get everything right. My God, nobody could have. My partner, in his second year as a physician, says it constantly: medicine is an educated guess made in real time, under conditions that are sometimes not fully understood, words to that effect, since I'm not a doctor.

COVID was that, times one hundred thousand. Fauci made the calls he could with what he had, under a White House that had no coherent plan of its own. We got lucky, extremely lucky, that we didn't lose more lives under the ineptitude of Donald Trump. Dr. Fauci saved lives. He did his best to protect us and provide us with the best information he had at the time.

Not one Republican on that committee today thanked him for the vaccine that has saved millions of American lives. Instead, they blamed him for the ones it couldn't save. I was thinking about a conversation I had on a return flight to New York from California as the pandemic eased. I was sitting next to a young woman on her way to start medical school at Columbia. I asked what got her into medicine.

She said "Dr. Fauci." She was going to study infectious disease because of him. Surely, she is not the only one who was inspired by Dr. Fauci's expertise, leadership, and forthrightness.

I got to know Dr. Fauci, a little bit, anyway, through all of our conversations, and what struck me wasn't the fame. It was how little he seemed to want it. He talked about the AIDS patients he watched die in the early years, about the responsibility of that, far more than he ever talked about himself.

That's not the profile of the "sun god of science" Josh Hawley accused him of being today. Hawley's treatment of Dr. Fauci bordered on the hysterical and was an abomination.

Dr. Fauci is a doctor who has spent his whole life sitting with more suffering than any of us will ever see, who kept showing up, and who tried to do better for the greater good. Dr. Fauci doesn't deserve what happened to him today, or what the petty Paul has been doing to him for the last six years. He deserves the tremendous gratitude of a country he tried to hold together during its worst public health crisis in a century.

If anyone in that room today has earned a jail cell, it's not Dr. Fauci. It's Paul and his fellow GOP co-conspirators. What they tried to do to an American hero today borders on the criminal.

Who the fuck do they think they are?

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