On Monday, in their final hours in office, former President Biden’s team chose to issue a blanket pardon to a number of close political allies and family members. Among that group was former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci.
Fauci was pardoned “for any offense against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through the date of [the] pardon” relating in any way to his time as NIAID Director, on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the White House covid-19 response team, or as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor.
In the letter explaining the pardons, Biden defended the choice, saying, “baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.” Even when those individuals have done nothing wrong, Biden’s ghostwriters reason, “the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.”
Setting aside the fact that this was the exact tactic the political establishment used to try and tarnish Trump’s reputation, it’s revealing that the primary public reason presented for the pardons was to avoid investigations.
There are, of course, plenty of unseemly details about Fauci’s career that the political establishment would not like to see resurface in either the court of law or the court of public opinion. Many were detailed in RFK Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, such as the secretive and deadly drug experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at New York City’s Incarnation Children’s Center between 1988 and 2002 and the experiment that locked the heads of Beagle puppies into cages full of flesh-eating insects.
If Fauci had come under the federal government’s microscope, episodes like those could have done much to stain the name of the man Biden recently dubbed “a true hero.”
The same goes for Fauci’s completely inaccurate projection of the danger posed by a strain of swine flu in the 1970s, along with the millions of dollars of damages the government had to pay out due to injuries sustained in the related swine flu vaccine experiments.
Fauci also made similar failed projections relating to the 2005 bird flu, the 2009 swine flu, and the 2016 Zika virus. In all these cases, the virus was nowhere near as dangerous as Fauci had claimed it would be. But his warnings did result in his department and other parts of Washington’s public health bureaucracy getting billions of dollars in new funding.
Of course, these episodes pale in comparison to what Fauci is now most famous for: overseeing the covid pandemic.
Early on, Fauci famously explained on TV that cloth masks cannot stop people infected with covid from filling the air around them with virus particles. He then completely reversed his stance and advocated for universal masking and government mask mandates.
He later claimed his earlier comments on television had been lies meant to trick the public into not buying masks to protect the supply of masks for healthcare workers who, in fact, used a different kind of mask. He then acted confused when much of the public stopped trusting him.
Fauci also went on record in early April 2020 calling for nationwide lockdowns—something he would later deny doing. When some states like Florida started to reopen months later, Fauci warned the governors they were taking “a really significant risk.”
It quickly became obvious to anyone who was actually looking that Fauci was completely wrong about the effectiveness of masking and lockdowns. But Fauci ignored the data and kept pushing for these measures into 2021, after the vaccines had become available.
Another fact that had become obvious early in the pandemic was that children posed little risk of contracting and spreading covid. Yet, Fauci pushed for school closures and later school masking long after both were clearly shown to be unnecessary.
Finally, Fauci made several high-profile claims about the covid vaccines that would quickly prove false.
But making bad projections and giving bad advice isn’t a crime. So why was the political class worried about Fauci being investigated by the Department of Justice? Because a federal investigation would likely have related to the speculation that Fauci played a role in bringing the pandemic about in the first place.
One controversial method for studying viruses involves artificially making the virus more transmissible or virulent. This so-called “gain-of-function” research allows for virus mutation or possible treatments to be analyzed much more quickly, but it brings the risk of a much more dangerous genetically-engineered virus infecting people if a sample leaks out.
We know that an NGO that gets funding from Fauci’s department bankrolled gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the laboratory in Wuhan, China, in 2017 and 2018. And that the same NGO had received federal funding while conducting gain-of-function research going back to 2014, when a three-year ban on using federal funds for such experiments had been implemented and when Fauci’s pardon happens to come into effect.
While there is no evidence that these experiments are related to the coronavirus that would eventually spread out of Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020, there is still much we do not know about the extent of US involvement in similar experiments at the Wuhan lab around the time covid started to spread.
That fact, paired with the panicked and secretive behavior of Fauci and his colleagues after the first reports of covid started to emerge, has raised suspicion about the possibility of US government involvement in covid’s origin. Biden’s DOJ refused to investigate these matters. But after Senator Rand Paul got Fauci to explicitly deny, under oath, that his department had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, an investigation into the truth of the claim to determine if Fauci had committed perjury remained a possibility.
That was until Biden pardoned him Monday morning.
A federal investigation would have all but forced the media to revisit many of Fauci’s unseemly actions, failures, and possible crimes. That would have been uncomfortable for a political establishment that has embraced and celebrated Fauci for decades.
But the real danger of a high-profile Fauci investigation, from the political class’s perspective, would come if the public started to ask themselves why a bureaucrat with such a long track record of failure was embraced and celebrated by those in power. And why he enjoyed so much professional success before retiring with a net worth of more than $11 million.
Such questions could lead people to consider that maybe the decades of mistakes that transferred hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to public health agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and the crony healthcare system as a whole were not mistakes after all. That, perhaps, the federal public health apparatus is nothing more than a racket and that officials are professionally rewarded, not for keeping us safe, but for protecting and expanding that racket.
Those are the questions that could well have arisen had a federal investigation prompted a retrospective and examination of the career and conduct of Anthony Fauci. And that is why Biden had no choice but to pardon him.
