Dr. Fauci: Rand Paul's White Whale
The eye doctor who invented his own medical board now wants to jail the most decorated physician in America. He is calling it oversight.
Rand Paul has been chasing Anthony Fauci for so long, and with such squinting, monomaniacal devotion, that you half expect the senator to turn up on the Senate floor one afternoon dragging the old man’s carcass, harpoon in fist, sputtering about the whiteness of the whale.
On Thursday, Kentucky’s junior senator, an ophthalmologist by trade and an Ahab by disposition, finally landed the thing he has spent years publicly praying for. His committee voted, 8 to 5 and straight down party lines, to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. Paul has said it out loud, in that flat affronted drawl, that he wants Fauci in prison. The hearing that produced the charge was pure theater, in what is now becoming a republican ritual: delivering a verdict before the witness was sworn in.
And what was Fauci’s crime? He invoked his right against self incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Paul, who went to medical school not law school, ruled that the Fifth didn’t apply, because a Biden pardon had supposedly stripped Fauci of his exposure and with it his right to stay quiet.
Here is what Paul seems not to understand. A pardon does not cancel the Fifth Amendment when you can still be prosecuted for whatever you say next. Fauci’s lawyers knew it as did Rand Paul, but jurisprudence was not the point. Showmanship was the point.
Rand has always cast himself as the last honest man in a city of frauds, the lone truth-teller squinting into the sun. He is, as my mother use to say, a person who puts on war paint like a hooker’s eye shadow. In fact the only thing larger than Paul’s outrage is his ego.
He loves to be introduced as a doctor, and he is one, an eye surgeon out of Bowling Green. But the medical credential he brandishes carries an asterisk he would rather you not read. Back in the 1990s, his board certification lapsed. Rather than submit to the recertification the rest of his profession swallows without a fuss, he “created” his own board, the National Board of Ophthalmology, staffed it with his wife and his father-in-law and certified himself. The American Board of Medical Specialties, the body that actually vouches for such things, never recognized it. The outfit dissolved in 2011. He has not called himself board certified, in the sense the word is normally used, in years. And the invented board was not even his first romance with a credential he did not hold. Paul has no bachelor's degree. He studied biology and English at Baylor, left after three years when he was admitted to Duke's medical school and never finished. In 2015 he told an interviewer, twice in a single day, that his degrees were in biology and English, until his own spokesman had to trot out and concede that the senator holds no undergraduate degree at all, not in biology nor in English. A man this inventive about his credentials and the truth is a curious choice to sit in judgment of anyone else's. But here we are.
Now set that beside the man he wants in jail. Fauci ran the government’s premier infectious-disease institute for thirty-eight years, advised seven presidents of both parties, and has been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. One of these men is among the most decorated physicians in America. The other printed his own certificate. Professional envy is an ugly thing to allege in print, so let us merely lay the two résumés side by side and observe that the man holding the lesser one is also the man holding the gavel, the grudge, and a fever dream of locking up an 85 year old public servant who worked tirelessly during several public health emergencies from HIV in the 1980s to Covid in 2020.
Strip away the subpoena and the republican brand of fake outrage and what is really the issue here is the vaccine, and behind the vaccine, the radical, seditious notion of evidenced-based science.
So let’s talk evidence, since Rand and the committee couldn’t be troubled to.
Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) does exactly one thing: it hands your cells a plan to create an antibody to attack in this case a spike protein; then dissolves within days. It never goes near your DNA. It cannot rewrite your DNA, magnetize you, or beam your coordinates to Bill Gates. The chemistry that made it possible won Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman the Nobel Prize in 2023, for work they had been laboring over since long before Rand Paul discovered that Anthony Fauci made a marvelously convenient effigy.
The vaccines went through enormous randomized trials, tens of thousands of people, placebos and all, and came out around 95 percent effective against symptomatic Covid. Then they used by billions, monitored more than any medicine in the history of vaccines. Were there rare side effects? Yes. Every drug has them. Myocarditis, an inflammation of the middle layer of the heart wall, known as the myocardium was found in some young men, mostly mild, mostly fleeting. What is important to know and what the hearing tiptoed around: catching Covid caused more myocarditis than the the vaccines did; the virus Paul would apparently have preferred American’s to face bare-chested was the bigger threat to the heart all along.
As for the body counts that ricochet around the internet, they are strip-mined from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS has been co-run by the CDC and the FDA since 1990, and it is the country’s early-warning system for vaccine safety.
The essential thing to understand about it is that it is a passive, open reporting system. Anyone can file a report: a doctor, a nurse, a vaccine manufacturer, a patient, a parent, or a stranger on the internet. Healthcare providers and manufacturers are legally required to report certain events, but the door is open to everyone, and reports are not verified before they enter the database. A VAERS report records that something happened after a vaccination, but it does not establish that the vaccination caused it. The two can be pure coincidence, and often are. The classic illustration is that if someone is struck by a car a week after getting a flu shot, that death can legally be entered into VAERS.
The purpose of VAERS is to catch potential reactions, not to prove or test them. When an unexpected pattern shows up in the raw data, that pattern becomes a hypothesis that gets tested for causation. The Vaccine Safety Datalink, which uses verified medical records from millions of people with a comparison group, plus systems like BEST and CISA, and v-safe during Covid are the systems that determine whether there is causation.
The vaccines Fauci championed prevented an estimated 19.8 million deaths worldwide in their first year.
Then there is the founding myth of the whole vendetta: that Fauci shut down America. He didn’t because he couldn’t. He had no power to padlock so much as a Chuck E. Cheese. Governors closed the schools. Mayors shuttered the bars. A president, Paul’s own party’s president, in the panicked spring of 2020, a fact that has vanished from the folklore with suspicious tidiness, presided over the entire shut down. Blaming Fauci for the lockdowns is like blaming the weatherman for the hurricane.
Which brings us to the real scandal. When the United States Senate drags a scientist toward a jail cell for the sin of being the government’s most familiar face during a plague, it is not oversight. It is a warning shot, fired across the bow of every doctor and researcher who might one day be asked to stand up in a crisis and say something true and unwelcome. The lesson lands with a thud: do your duty, tell the country the hard thing, and a decade later a senator with a grudge and a gavel will come to make you a cautionary tale.
Public health cannot survive that. The next plague is already out there, sharpening itself, gloriously indifferent to an angry, shortcut taking man from Kentucky. And when it arrives, it will find that the competent people learned the lesson Rand Paul was so determined to teach, and quietly decided to keep their heads down.
The Justice Department may pick up the case or let it molder in a drawer. A subpoena misdemeanor is not how serious prosecutors spend their time, and Paul surely knows it. But in these Trumpian days the DOJ is not what most of us recognize so who knows what’s next. God help Dr. Fauci, he does not deserve this.
What Paul never seems to get it that time is a focusing lens: he is no Melville and this Ahab does not get to rewrite history, no matter how many times he tries. He will be remembered as a small petty man who traded in his science training to stir a pot in hopes of grander places than an operating room or a Senate seat.
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