Coming up on Why Should I Trust You. There are few individuals who are more polarizing today than Dr. Anthony Fauci. Depending on who you voted for, which timeline you look at in your news feed, or who you typically hang out with, to you, Fauci is either a hero or a villain. Just yesterday, at 85, retired and preemptively pardoned by President Biden, America's top infectious disease expert was subpoenaed to testify before Congress by his chief nemesis, Republican Senator Rand Paul. And in the hearing, after the senator released sections of the doctor's personal diary from the pandemic, Dr. Fauci pleaded the Fifth, invoking his right not to answer questions in response to all questions in the hearing, which he said at the outset was the product of Senator Paul's, quote, unhinged obsession with him.
Today, we're going to dig into why all these years after the pandemic, we're still talking about Anthony Fauci. We're going to be joined by Katelyn Jetelina of Your Local Epidemiologist and David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times. What was the goal of bringing Dr. Fauci back to testify? Is there a good argument to be made that hearing from him now under oath gets us closer to understanding what caused the pandemic? Or was this all really just about vengeance, political point scoring? Was it rightfully about accountability? What do more than 1,000 pages of diary entries just released reveal about the man who became the face of the pandemic response? What does it say about America that six years out from the start of the pandemic, we're still wrestling with the origins of COVID? That if we know where it came from, it will reveal who we can blame. A lot to get to, so let's get started.
Hey, welcome everyone. We're so glad you've joined us. We are recording this on Wednesday afternoon, just a few hours after Dr. Anthony Fauci was in front of Congress. There's a lot to get into about what happened and what it says about the divisions in America that still feel pretty raw. We're really excited that Katelyn Jetelina and David Wallace-Wells are going to join us in a minute. But first, who are we? I'm Binda Akari.
And I'm Dr. Mark Abdalik.
And this is Why Should I Trust You, which is all about trying to understand the breakdown in trust in public health, medicine, science, and AI, and what might be done to build it back. And just a big reminder, you can always contact us by emailing questions at whyshoulditrustyou.net.
Okay, so look, today was kind of a wild day. There was obviously the hearing. There's also been these diaries that have been released, and my head has just been kind of scrambled on this issue. So that's why we're inviting Katelyn and David to help us kind of unpack it. But Tom, before we bring them in, just help us set the stage of what went down today.
Yeah, we could just do the basics. So, we're talking about Dr. Anthony Fauci. So, he was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Republican Senator Rand Paul is the committee's chair, and Paul is a fierce critic of Dr. Fauci. So, a little context here. Just this past weekend, Senator Paul released over a thousand pages from Dr. Fauci's diary, which the doctor wrote during the height of the pandemic when he was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And as we said, he really became the face of the government's public health and scientific response to COVID. So HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he gave the senator the diaries so they could, quote, see the light of day, and the diaries appear to have been kept by Dr. Fauci on a work computer. So anyway, stepping back, Senator Paul argues the evidence points towards a lab origin in Wuhan, China, including what he terms dangerous gain-of-function research that he alleges Dr. Fauci's agency funded. So he accuses Dr. Fauci of covering up the nature of the NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And he says he did that to avoid culpability for the pandemic, and it included Fauci suppressing the lab leak theory and lying to Congress about it. So Dr. Fauci denies that the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, and he says he is open to the possibility, or has been open to the possibility, that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, but he believes the virus more likely spread naturally from animals to humans. So Senator Paul also said today that Dr. Fauci had used his influence to usher in the COVID lockdowns by convincing state and local officials to enforce them and then using his authority to justify it all to the public. And this is something that came up in those diary excerpts as well. And then it was Dr. Fauci's turn to give opening remarks, and he spoke about, you know, his respect for congressional oversight and how he had testified or briefed House and Senate committees over 200 times, including hearings and interviews on these very pandemic issues. But Dr. Fauci said that the senator had an unhinged, those were his words, obsession with him. And given the senator's obsession with calling for his prosecution, as well as slanderous comments about him, and the senator releasing those diary excerpts, which Fauci said was an attempt to intimidate, embarrass him, Fauci said the only conclusion that he could reach was that Senator Paul's calling him to testify today was to get him to say something that could vindicate the senator's, quote, repeated public pledges that he end up behind bars. So Tom and everyone, you'll recall that President Biden at the end of his term issued a preemptive pardon to Dr. Fauci, perhaps for this very reason. So that pardon does not cover crimes committed after the pardon was issued, and lying to Congress is a crime. So from Dr. Fauci's opening statement forward, every question that was asked of him, he answered with, you know, on advice of counsel, I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right. So, zooming out, at the heart of Senator Paul's hearing today and past hearings that we've already had in Congress on this origins of COVID story, you'll hear, you know, was it a lab leak or is it a natural origin? In other words, this pandemic that, you know, killed, you know, 1.2 million Americans, and did it essentially spread to humans from an animal, or did it originate and spread after an intentional or maybe an unintentional leak from a lab in China? Now, this is a question that we're still grappling with, and our guests today are going to help us understand what we know and what we don't know. And scientists have said in papers that we talk about, you know, trying to figure this out, understanding the circumstances that lead to pandemics is important for their prevention. So it's not just like scoring points, it's again to help society so that we don't find ourselves in this situation. But the problem is this remains one of the most consequential unanswered questions in modern science. So about those diary excerpts, those entries cover everything from the early scientific uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus to his sudden celebrity status that he found himself with, and also his dealings with the media. He talks about conversations, specific conversations with reporters, and he even talks about difficult interactions he had with President Trump. And he also talks about why he found himself in those situations being at the forefront of all of this. So, Senator Paul argues that the diaries reveal a disconnect between what Fauci considered privately and what he said publicly, particularly about the origins of COVID-19. Others say the entries simply capture scientific uncertainty evolving in real time. And we're going to ask our guests whether this release revealed anything genuinely important or whether the significance of these diaries has been overstated. Now, after this hearing, finally, Senator Rand Paul said his committee will vote on a contempt resolution against Fauci next week. So, Senator Paul is escalating the confrontation and will try to have the Senate or perhaps the courts declare that Fauci had no valid basis for remaining silent and not answering questions during the hearing today.
Thanks, guys. And look, before we bring our guests in, I just want to make it clear that we know that, you know, the name Anthony Fauci brings up a lot of emotions for our listeners. We know that there are several people, particularly supporters of Secretary Kennedy, who hear that name and it immediately kind of conjures up somebody who they think has not been held accountable for the pandemic. Our guests today, we believe, are very nuanced about Dr. Fauci, and we're not really here to kind of like score points on one side or the other. We're really just trying to understand kind of why we're still talking about this man, and we're trying to bring in some nuance to what actually happened today. So, coming up next, we have Katelyn Jetelina and David Wallace-Wells.
And a big Why Should I Trust You? welcome to two close friends of the show, Katelyn Jetelina and David Wallace-Wells. Katelyn is the founder of the super popular Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter and platform. As an epidemiologist, Katelyn worked around the clock during the pandemic. She has advised organizations including the CDC and is a leading public health communicator. Hi, Katelyn.
David Wallace-Wells is a columnist for The New York Times, where he writes about science, including a special focus on climate change and technology. He has covered the COVID-19 pandemic extensively and has conducted one of the most extensive series of interviews ever done with Dr. Fauci for The New York Times. Hi, David.
All right, so welcome to you both. Look, we're going to talk a bunch about Anthony Fauci today, the diaries, his legacy. But first, like, we basically emergency texted both of you to hop on today because we wanted you to help us understand what the hell happened today. Katelyn, let's start with you.
Oh man, I mean, a lot went through my mind when I was watching it, but I mean, high level, Anthony Fauci went to testify and pleaded the Fifth. And they threw every single topic at him that you could imagine, and he stayed quiet. And I don't think it's a very big surprise that he pleaded the Fifth. I think they were looking for any reason for him to go around his pardon from Biden, and it didn't really reveal anything, honestly. It was kind of a dud, and maybe that was his purpose and his point of doing it.
Yeah. David, is that basically like, is this went exactly how you thought today, and he pleaded the Fifth, and you were like, well, that's how it was going to go.
I was surprised that he pleaded the Fifth, and I frankly thought it was pretty cowardly and a kind of a disservice to the country. And I do think that something was revealed that's sort of important and profound, which is the degree to which we are living in so many different realities in our memory and arguments about COVID. You have on the one hand, you know, Republican ideologues who are sort of boiling with grievance still from five or six years ago.
Many of those grievances aren't really held by their constituents, but like their leaders, I guess, still are very angry, as are many Americans, but not a majority. You have Democrats who want to be able to say that they're defending the science, but don't really know what to say beyond that and feel a little empty in their performance anytime they try to make any argument about public health and the pandemic. And then you have, you know, in the middle, kind of embodiment of the public health establishment, scientific establishment, who is mute and who is unwilling or unable to directly answer his critics and to offer an affirmative argument on behalf of decisions that were made in 2020 or 2021, reflect on what he may have learned. Just not interested in that. And what worries me most about this spectacle is the possibility that we're going to be living in those different realities going forward. And that without an event like this to really hash things out, without Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci yelling at each other, we may not really get beyond the lines we've all drawn in the sand. And that is not good on many fronts.
Boy, that has really like fired my synapses. David, this is going to be a spicy conversation, but Katelyn, you just shared something with me. I'm honored that you shared it with me, but you know, you said, leave the man alone. That was the title of your essay. Talk a little bit about that. You think it's time to leave Anthony Fauci alone.
Yeah. So, in my essay, you know, what brought up a lot watching Anthony Fauci was my own experiences that I've been through the past six years on being on the front lines, being assaulted, being doxxed and hacked, and death threats and all of this sort of stuff, mainly driven by, I think it was fear as well as immense anger. And you know, when I reflect back at that, a lot of the decisions I made when I was in Texas, but also trying to write through, was really reflective of we made mistakes. Like there's no doubt about that. Like there was a lot of mistakes made, and I'm very angry sometimes at Anthony Fauci for the mistakes he made because they were preventable, and in fact, I think swayed me wrong sometimes too. But also we are forced into these systems that work around us. And I think that a lot of the anger has really snowballed into beyond a pandemic that we are in right now from everything around all of our systems and really targeting one person. And you know, I wrote in the piece that, you know, there's quite a lot of survivor's guilt, survivor's guilt that I have in this moment too, watching him. And if we really want to fix the systems, it wasn't going to be this. I think I disagree with David in that aspect. Like I don't think a conversation between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci screaming at each other is really going to change anyone's minds. We have been put into these camps already. And I think the biggest question is what is, and I don't know if anyone knows that. I think it's time to like actually like start fixing the systems because they sucked back then and they still suck now.
David, you said you found what Fauci did today is cowardly. Just talk through that a little bit. I mean, I imagine there's many listeners who are hearing this and thinking this wasn't above board. This was an entrapment. This wasn't a good faith effort to figure out, you know, the origins of the pandemic. This was about vengeance, political point scoring. And good for Dr. Fauci, who has testified on these issues already, done interviews on the record on these issues already, that he just said, no, I'm not playing. I'm not putting myself and my family at risk so you can score points.
Well, let me start by saying what I thought about all these issues yesterday, which is to say I very much agreed with the perspective that Katelyn just laid out. I think that Anthony Fauci has become the scapegoat for this pandemic for a huge portion of the country. I think that the arguments that are made against him by his critics are often contradictory. They suggest wildly different approaches to the pandemic. It's, you know, you have Rand Paul saying, how come Fauci is, you know, obsessing over his phone calls with Barbara Streisand when tens of thousands of Americans are dying, but he also thinks that Fauci pushed a much more restrictive COVID mitigation program than he would have liked. So it's like, what is it? Are you not paying enough attention to the deaths of Americans? Are you paying too much attention to the deaths of Americans? There's similar contradictions layered through so much of the, you know, the public's rage to the extent that it is rage against Fauci, and I think it's really unfortunate. It signals that few of us are seeing the experience of that period very clearly, and we are just so many of us so eager to pin the blame on someone as a way of avoiding thinking about more systemic problems. Yes, that's part of it, but also just the sheer difficulty of navigating a pandemic in a complicated, divided country, which is just a project inherently laced with trade-offs. And we want to believe that it was possible to avoid all those trade-offs and simply avoid the pandemic as though Anthony Fauci was singularly responsible for a disease that killed 30 million people all around the world. And even if you believe, you know, that this disease came out of a lab in Wuhan, I think it's an open question. But even if you believe that, that story is still bigger than Anthony Fauci. The story of our response to that disease is still bigger than Anthony Fauci. And I think that there's something incredibly reductive about the desire to string him up as a villain. It avoids our reckoning with how scared we all were in 2020. The people who now oppose mitigation restrictions, many of them were supportive of it back then. It pushes, you know, it's just a sort of a convenient scapegoat for a country that wants to move on and still nurse grievances about the pandemic, but basically not think all that much about it. The reason that I thought that it was unfortunate that he chose to speak openly is because I would like to see many of these things hashed out in public. Can I take the point that this is not the best format? I also, and I would like to see more open, faith conversations, you know, back and forth, a lot, you know, of the kind that you guys do here, in more venues with bigger audiences at higher levels of visibility.
And yet I still think it's good to take those opportunities when they come, even if the context is quite, you know, complicated and fraught. And I thought watching Fauci this morning a lot about an exchange that he and I had a few years ago when I was interviewing him in the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, in which we talked about a previous back and forth he had had with Rand Paul about COVID origins and gain of function, and in which he very categorically dismissed Paul's assertion that the US government had funded gain of function research. And I said to him that I didn't think that that was a very sophisticated, nuanced answer that he had given. I actually think that he was basically lying, although you could sort of quibble with that. But in any event, like I don't think that he was being forthright in his response to Paul. And he said to me in a kind of, you know, standoffish, like bigfooting way, David, have you ever testified before Congress? And I said, yes, I had. And he said, well, then you know how hard it is to express nuance in that context. And I said, well, maybe so, but if I had been in your shoes, I would have said gain of function means different things to different people. It includes things that everyone agrees are useful, like doing research on flu vaccines. It also can refer to research that some people think is risky and other people think is worthwhile. I personally, Anthony Fauci, think that even that work is worthwhile, but it's a conversation worth having. And yet I can say that according to the NIH definition, this research did not qualify as gain of function research as you're suggesting. And Fauci said to me, okay, if I had the opportunity, I would answer that question in exactly the same way with exactly that kind of nuance. And today he had the opportunity to answer those kinds of questions in that kind of way, and he declined to. And that's not a disservice because I think Anthony Fauci should be thrown in jail. I think Anthony Fauci made mistakes throughout the pandemic, but is basically a hero. I think that he did great. He did incredibly important work during this.
So, David, are you saying that, and I want to ask Katelyn this in a second, but you know, David, if I'm hearing you, it's like you almost are saying he had a moral obligation to speak up, and the importance is too grand for him to just kind of be like, you know, plead the Fifth. Katelyn, when you say leave the man alone, which is kind of like the other side of that, is there a risk that the public just says, okay, that means we just have to ask any more questions? Like just we don't know. Just like move on. Like where is the line?
Absolutely not.
And I think I need to edit my headline now because, but like, you know, there's nuances here, right? Like there's...
There is. And I'm just a nuanced person. That's just like, I think that's why I love David Wallace-Wells so much too. Like it's just how I think, and I absolutely think there needs to be conversations. I continue to be just completely shocked we didn't have a 9/11-type commission after losing 1.5 million Americans. Like how is that even possible? Like I don't even understand how we haven't had that. And so like David says, like I think we should have conversations. I don't think it should just be Tony Fauci. Like there's a lot of people that made a lot of mistakes but also did a lot of good. I will also say I'm actually not too surprised to hear about your conversation, David, with Fauci because one of my biggest pieces of feedback to him is how terrible he did at communication and communicating uncertainty and nuance. And it was incredibly confusing. It caused a lot of whiplash and there was very little transparency to know what was going on, and in the end it really backfired. It's not how you build trust. So...
Is anything in the diaries, did anything in the diaries, you know, inform what you just said? Like did you read something that recent over the weekend?
Like what was in the diaries that makes you say that he was not so good at communicating uncertainty when everything was uncertain at the time, right?
But he was talking about uncertainty in his diaries, right? Like he was talking about how he had a conversation of is this a lab leak or is this intentional, like we don't really know, we're having a conversation. And then it came out very clearly, at least to me, I distinctly remember that it was only a spillover, end of conversation, that's it. And that's just not the reality of the conversations that were happening behind the scenes. And I felt like that transparency, I would have appreciated it as someone who is trying to communicate to the public as well.
But just for a, I mean, I know if it's easy, I feel like it's easy to say that now, but like we so much ask our leaders to just be clear. Give us a clear message. Help us understand.
I think you never underestimate the intelligence of the public and the audience. They want nuance and they deserve nuance. And saying that we only need three words strung together in a sentence, I mean, you'd see this with everything in public health, right? Like get your flu shot, like all of it. Like it undermines. And I think one thing that I learned over the past seven years was that people want to know and they deserve to know and they can handle it, and you can do it in a way that is balanced. You can insert your expertise. I don't think expertise is dead. You can insert the probabilities and where you land. But again, it's an art. None of us scientists have ever been to this art. But I think that needs to change and I hope people are seeing that.
