Fauci invokes his Fifth Amendment rights before Congress.
Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s pandemic response and frequently appeared before Congress during his 54-year government career, said that it “pains me” to now invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination. But he alleged that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), a longtime adversary who convened Wednesday’s hearing, was wrongly seeking to trap him in a misstep that could lead to perjury charges.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) peppered Fauci with basic questions, such as the day of the week and what color tie he was wearing. Fauci declined to answer those questions, too.
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said.
If they have any evidence of wrongdoing, he is choosing not to defend himself. If they are fishing for him to say the wrong thing, then good on him for not playing a stupid game with his freedom on the line.
Just my guess, but I think Fauci’s problems go back to his 2021 Congressional testimony where he insisted, categorically, that “NIH ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute’.”
What he should have testified to was something more like “via the EcoHealth Institute NIH funded experiments that could generically be described as gain-of-function, but they did not meet the federal regulatory definition of gain-of-function research.”
In 2021 Fauci was concerned about the regulatory definition of gain of function research, which he insisted NIH/NAIAD research had not met. Sen. Paul seemed to be asking Fauci if, by a broader definition, gain of function research was being done on coronaviruses by the NIH.
It doesn’t help his cause now that then, in 2021, he attempted to browbeat Sen. Paul by insisting Paul had no idea what was meant by “gain of function.” Fauci’s pedantic nature (and love of the limelight) may have led him to deny too much in an attempt to embarrass Paul.
That’s Fauci’s own doing by choosing not to answer anything. Fauci served multiple administrations, and was serving in Trump’s first administration during much of the pandemic.
Anyway, if there was a federal regulatory definition for gain-of-function research and for whatever reason EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not meet that definition, then technically Fauci wasn’t lying. I’d be very interested to see what exactly was the federal definition then.
Not really liking Fauci using the 5th 111 times, but to be fair, if the current President can do it 200 times, then 111 are not so many… It’s all about comparison
He was a great fuckload better than A Certain Person advising people to ingest bleach or take horse wormer, or simply ignore COVID while having access to the most cutting-edge treatments.
With all the problems America is facing now thank God Congress is stepping up and doing something useful. I can’t wait to vote for these patriots again in November:
show tri·al
/ˈSHō trī(ə)l/
noun
a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice.
I think the goal is to salvage whatever lessons are still possible from our experience with Covid. We still haven’t managed to take a good, long, non-partisan look at what happened and when, and memories of actors like Anthony Fauci are slipping. Would be nice to salvage what we can.
I think the juice is worth the squeeze, and I think Fauci can and should provide more help.
Such a [bi-partisan] panel, which would have been modeled off the 9/11 Commission, could have pieced together a more definitive, nonpartisan record of facts regarding the virus’s origins. More importantly, it could have evaluated where the government went wrong in responding to the pandemic.
The failure to conduct such oversight squandered a precious learning opportunity to strengthen U.S. defenses against the next deadly pathogen.
Kangaroo courts often invert the normal judicial process by investigating the man and desperately trying to find the crime to hang him by. If your first interrogator has said in the past that his goal was to see you behind bars, perhaps you might be hesitant to expect a fair and honest trial.
One of the most pernicious fallacies in modern America is just because you have an opinion, it deserves respect, and you should bray your boorish, ignorant thoughts all over the place, by guddummit, because you’re an 'Murhican, and them’s your rights! The man was just trying to do his job, and didn’t need a horde of tinfoiled hats and braying yahoos who barely remember 6th grade biology telling educated professionals with postgraduate degrees and years of experience, that no, all that fancy book learning, that don’t mean shit, cuz I reads on the internet that shooting up horse medicine’ll fix what ails ya.
I am fine with Fauci as the head of the White House’s COVID Task Force because honestly, by the time the White House was willing to respond to the COVID threat, it was too late to contain it at the border. Fauci did what he could do with the hand he was dealt. If Fauci was given more control of the situation earlier on, I’m sure he would have taken the same measures the Tsai administration in Taiwan did.
I am less fine with him by trying to cover up for the Chinese government’s involvement in the creation, release (accidental or not), and spread of COVID. While doing that didn’t cause more people to get hurt by COVID, it was giving green light to not having accountability for future gain-of-function research screw ups, and potentially cause hurt more people down the road.
It seems Paul just wants to do a hatchet job on him by leaking his private diary because he didn’t get his pound of flesh in public ? How does one get into somebody else’s private diary ? Is it even his private diary ? How do we know this ?
And is Paul just choosing a few excerpts to release or the whole diary? There’s a difference.
I don’t have much opinion on Fauci one way or the other as I haven’t looked into what he is even accused of , but it seems he’s correct about what he was being setup for .
Following intense pressure and intimidation from Fauci, Walensky overruled her committee and recommended boosters for frontline workers. By insisting on this recommendation, Fauci ensured that states and employers could require boosters for healthcare personnel. New York, for example, explicitly tied its healthcare booster mandate to the CDC’s advice.
Emotive language. Certainly the number of Coronavirus deaths in the US was high during the first wave or two. A lot of people were dying, it was a tense time. Health chiefs should respond and rapidly so. That is literally their job. Their job is not to sit back and say well whatever dude it might be ok let’s see how the chips fall, you can always try ivermectin and see how it works out.
A healthcare worker being vaccinated for coronavirus, that was par for the course around the world . That a given state government required vaccination or not is up to that government , not Fauci. Was Fauci the governmor of NY?
Just by the alleged message forwarded by Fauci to himself, I don’t see anything wrong with what he did. There is nothing similar to what your original post implicated that somehow “Fauci thought vaccine was useless but still forced to recommend it”. I think the message showed that Fauci thought the recommendation is required.
