We Learned All the Wrong Lessons from COVID. This Week’s Fauci Hearing Proves It.

MAHA isn’t a wellness movement. It’s a suicide pact, run by people who are either sociopathically indifferent to the death toll or willfully blind to it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci spent three hours this week pleading the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before a Senate committee run by Rand Paul. It was a sad, destructive spectacle that tells you everything about how badly we’ve botched the lessons of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

Republicans billed the hearing as an unflinching investigation into COVID-19’s origins. But this was never a search for truth.

It was a show trial, staged to turn a career public servant who spent decades fighting AIDS, Ebola, and a half-dozen other epidemics into a Republican bogeyman for the midterms. It was political theater designed to give a MAGA base that’s furious over Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files (in defiance of the law he signed) a fresh villain to focus on instead.

The setup alone should have been the story. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bragged to Fox News that he’d spent eight months digging through government servers and handed more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary over to Paul and equally loony Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.

That’s not oversight. That’s a smear campaign carried out on official Senate letterhead. And yet most of the corporate media coverage treated the hearing as a routine senatorial exercise rather than asking why a private citizen’s diary should become fodder for Republican senators who have spent six years trying to destroy him.

This is the same press corps that regularly refuses to ask Trump basic questions about his health, his corruption, or how many times his name appears in the Epstein files. And yet they have no issue giving credence to Republicans’ absurd grilling of a man who George W. Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The hearing was both tragedy and farce.

Paul, who’s feuded with Fauci since 2020, is now pushing a contempt vote over the doctor’s decision to invoke his constitutional rights. Those are rights every American is entitled to, and rights Fauci arguably needs, given how relentlessly Republicans have telegraphed their intent to prosecute him for the crime of running the government’s pandemic response (while being undermined by Trump every step of the way).

Let’s get the history straight. Fauci served under seven presidents, Trump included, who praised him and put him on stage at the White House podium day after day in 2020. But after years of threats and endless conspiracy theories swirling, Joe Biden made the call to pardon him, precisely because he could see this circus coming after Trump won the White House again.

One of the most disturbing parts of COVID’s aftermath is watching this poison circulate beyond the usual MAGA suspects. Even left-wing journalist Ryan Grim suggested this week that Fauci should be prosecuted. When people who should know better start echoing Rand Paul’s talking points, it’s clear just how many have convinced themselves that those who tried to keep us alive during the worst health catastrophe in a century are the real villains.

Let’s be clear about what actually got Americans killed. We lost more than a million people to COVID, which is a staggering number we’ve never truly grappled with. The most disturbing part — the part I’m still not over — is that most of those deaths were preventable.

Donald Trump stood at that podium and mused about injecting bleach to cure the virus and promoted ivermectin. He refused to wear a mask and mocked people who did, ignoring the scientific consensus his own administration’s experts were begging him to follow. He picked fights with Michigan, Minnesota, and other blue states trying to save lives with stay-home orders and encouraged the heavily-armed protests against them.

He was, quite literally, a superspreader of misinformation, and the country paid for it in body bags.

Trump (unsurprisingly) had a close call with COVID himself. He was hospitalized at Walter Reed in October 2020 and put on supplemental oxygen, even as his own doctors offered a rosier public picture than what sources described privately. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had spent days in close quarters helping Trump prep for his presidential debate, spent a week in the ICU after getting COVID and nearly died.

Even after Trump got one of the first COVID shots, he kept feeding his base doubts about the vaccine, because that’s what MAGA wanted to hear.

Now in his second term, the man he picked to run the nation’s health apparatus is the most famous anti-vaxxer in America. And we’re all paying the price.

RFK Jr. has spent months insisting a cyclospora outbreak that’s sickened thousands is “under control.” America has logged more measles cases in 2026 than in any year since 1991. We’re facing a double whammy of DOGE cuts to public health funding and Kennedy’s own dismantling of vital health boards.

Meanwhile, the CDC website has been rewritten to falsely suggest vaccines cause autism (overriding the agency’s own scientists). And the fallout isn’t abstract: babies are now dying of preventable bleeding disorders because more parents are refusing the vitamin K shot given at birth, a decision doctors trace directly to the broader climate of medical distrust Kennedy has spent years cultivating. When a member of Congress asked him to simply reassure parents the shot is safe, he wouldn’t do it.

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MAHA isn’t a wellness movement. It’s a suicide pact, run by people who are either sociopathically indifferent to the death toll or willfully blind to it. It’s all about control. They get to tell you what’s real, not egghead scientists (and not coincidentally, there’s a lot of money in quackery).

COVID was massively disruptive and traumatizing, and we’ve never really reckoned with what it did to us. We’ve never had a national day of mourning. Few memorials have been erected. Years later, we don’t want to remember the fear, the uncertainty, and everything we sacrificed.

People lost their jobs and their sense of community. Millions of us lost loved ones and couldn’t even say goodbye or attend their funerals. As the months of mass death dragged on, many people retreated online and came out the other side steeped in QAnon and other conspiracies. Paranoia bloomed, and it never fully receded.

The people who tried to save us became targets. Nurses and doctors reported rising violence from patients and their families throughout the pandemic. Fauci is simply the most visible face of that hatred. He’s needed round-the-clock security for years because of death threats, which is exactly why Biden felt he had to pardon him before leaving office. (And, like clockwork, Trump revoked Fauci’s security detail in one of his first official acts in his second term).

I saw a preview of this malignant irrationality years ago, watching jeering protesters outside the Big House where Fauci was giving the keynote address at the University of Michigan’s graduation. What was a fringe grievance movement has since been mainstreamed into the operating ideology of the Republican Party.

What does it say about a country when millions turn on the very people trying to keep them alive? When officials faced death threats simply for issuing public health orders, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of an actual kidnapping plot over her COVID restrictions? When so many people have convinced themselves — egged on by right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson who profit handsomely off their fear — that a vaccine that saved millions of lives is more dangerous than the disease it prevents?

None of it holds up to scrutiny. But as I wrote during the pandemic, we’ve spent years coddling ignorance in this country, treating willful anti-intellectualism as just another valid lifestyle choice rather than a public danger.

In my 25 years in journalism, I’ve learned one durable rule: you are never, ever supposed to make people who loudly reject expertise, who knowingly spread lies and congratulate themselves for it, feel stupid. That’s the unforgivable sin of elitism. Even stating plain scientific facts gets recast as looking down on people who insist their internet research deserves equal footing with epidemiologists’ life work.

That’s how millions of people can reject reality today. Because there’s never been any real consequence for doing so. Hell, you can be handsomely rewarded for it now — and become the nation’s top health official or commander-in-chief.

This week’s hearing wasn’t an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of a decades-long slide into idiocy, where millions of Americans believe expertise is the enemy. How far will our country sink to avoid admitting we got the lesson backward? Right now, it looks like there is no bottom.