Why is MAGA trying to jail America's top doctor?

0:02This is a global production. The Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who has long had Anthony Fauci in his sights, he called Fauci to give evidence to this committee and was the person responsible for releasing the private diaries of Anthony Fauci, which does seem to show Dr. Fauci in a slightly vain light. It has been alleged in the past by the American rights that Dr. Fauci was responsible for funneling some American federal government money to Wuhan and the Coronavirus Research Institute at Wuhan, which, of course, some people believe actually is responsible for the COVID pandemic in the first place.

0:45There was no manual. They were flying blind. What day of the week is it today? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. What color tie are you wearing? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. What color's the carpet in front of you?

1:13On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment. Allah has started with Imple divided by the Old Man. This is the circuit. that unfolded in the Senate yesterday when Republicans were trying to put on the stand Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who led the fight against Covid, and he decided the best thing to do was to stay stum and plead the fifth. During Covid, Anthony Fauci became the most famous official in American political history. Why now is half of American politics apparently determined to put their equivalent of Chris Whitty in jail.

1:53Welcome to The News Agents.

1:59The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And the committee hearing was so predictable in some ways because the Republicans in America, MAGA in America, absolutely hates, detests and loathes Dr Anthony Fauci. And I think it's fair to say that Dr Anthony Fauci would reciprocate some of that, particularly to the committee chairman, the Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who has long had Anthony Fauci in his sights. And as committee chair, he called Fauci to give evidence to this committee and was the person responsible, as you said in the introduction, Lewis, for releasing the private diaries of Anthony Fauci, which, let's put it mildly, does seem to show Dr.

2:53Fauci in a slightly vain light. So just to remind you, Anthony Fauci became famous certainly throughout America, but around the world because he was the head of the CDC, Centre for Disease Control, sort of their equivalent, I suppose, of what was then sort of Public Health England and so on. And it's actually a sort of bigger, more sprawling organisation than that. But as I said in the introduction, he was kind of the American equivalent of Chris Whitty, sort of chief medical advisor to President, then President Trump, the Trump administration. And yesterday, as John was saying, he was called before this Republican led committee in the Senate.

3:31And the hearing focused or was supposed to focus on the origins of COVID-19, especially in terms of the research funding that it has been alleged in the past by the American right that Dr Fauci was responsible for funneling some American federal government money to Wuhan and the Coronavirus Research Institute at Wuhan which of course some people believe actually is responsible for the Covid pandemic in the first place. Now everyone knew this is a long-running pedigree in terms of Senator Paul's obsession with him, the American rights obsession with him. So much so that, the viewers and listeners might remember, President Biden actually gave a pardon, a preemptive pardon, as part of that last batch of presidential action he had of his administration, because he believed, I think correctly, that the incoming Republican Congress and administration would do anything they could to try and incriminate the guy and potentially put him in prison.

4:33But that pardon does not cover things that happen in the future, i.e. And this is the reason why Fauci decided to plead the fifth repeatedly on the advice of his lawyers. If he were to say something before Congress that could then be construed by the bad political actors in Congress or on that committee as perjury or contempt of Congress or as having misled in some way, then he could potentially be liable to legal action in the future, despite that pardon, which is why he repeatedly refused to answer questions. But Republicans, of course, argued that his refusal to answer questions raises serious questions about him and basically say that it is essentially guilt by omission.

5:16Well, they're also going further. They want to have a vote on whether by pleading the fifth that was contempt of Congress. And so, you know, two amendments or two bits of the Constitution rubbing up against each other, whereby, you know, it is the right and the power of senators and congressmen and women to call people to give evidence. Refusal. Is that contempt or is that pleading the fifth? I mean, I would have thought the constitutional prerogative lies with Anthony Fauci to say I'm not going to self-incriminate. But they want to have a vote on whether he has committed contempt of Congress.

5:53And you can go to prison for contempt of Congress if that is upheld. It was pretty unseemly. But listen to Dr. Fauci explaining and really taking aim at Rand Paul about why he was making this move. Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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, quote, behind bars.

6:56So again, just to reiterate, the figment, the thing that Senator Rand Paul and other Republicans are trying to suggest that Fauci is guilty of is lying to the American public about potentially, as I say, funneling money to this research institute in Wuhan and generally lying about for some of the reasons of COVID lockdowns, suggesting he said things at the time that weren't really true and so on, and therefore committed either crimes or certainly acted irresponsibly in terms of the job that he had. I mean, I think it is worth saying that, you know, if we're trying to sort of step back and ask ourselves why it is, this is now a sort of half decade dispute between Rand Paul in particular, this Republican, well-known Republican senator, himself a doctor, and Fauci.

7:43And there is an eye. One of the explanations for that is that there is this ideological gulf between them. Rand Paul is a libertarian senator, small state, came to believe that the medicalisation of the federal government at the time of Covid represented an overreach, a barbaric, tyrannical type overreach into everyday life of Americans. And so there is a sort of ideological gulf between them. And as for so many on the American right, Fauci is a kind of talisman, a kind of sort of emblematic of everything that they believe is wrong with a scientific, professional, expert class, which we have glimmers of in our own politics, but it is nothing so acute as it is in American politics.

8:27But this is also clearly at this point now, not just about ideology or politics. It is deeply, deeply personal between the two men. Indeed, as you heard Fauci there, he's described it as a vendetta. Such a vendetta this is that we have now got to the point where Paul himself has somehow, and he has not actually established how he has obtained them, but he has managed to actually acquire the personal diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci, covering the period from 2019 to 2022 during the pandemic and has published them for the entire world to see. Now, these entries, I think it's fair to say, whilst there is nothing especially scandalous, as perhaps for any of us, having our private everyday thoughts being put out there for the entire world to gorge upon is not necessarily, has not been the most comfortable experience for Dr Fauci.

9:22Well, I am going to ask you in a moment, Lewis, to play the part of Dr Anthony Fauci, a role that I think you're very fit to play. I've been preparing for for a long time. Because, you know, I spent days and days listening to Dr Fauci in the White House briefing room as he was coming in and trying to give his assessment of where things were. And it seems that what he was doing in the evening was going home and writing up about all the famous people that have been in touch with him and this one had rung and I've just become so famous. Lewis, would you take on the part, please? Well, there are more than 1 ,100 pages of these diaries.

9:56He certainly had some time on his hands, it turns out. I think it's fair to say it's not entirely flattering. For example, on a day when school closures had been announced, lockdowns had been announced, vaccine mandates had been announced, Dr Fauci's entry for that day doesn't really include much about that, but he does have time to know. Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post today. Very flattering. The situation with my national and big international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It's not hypoperbole to say, sick brackets, to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and indeed one of the most recognisable persons in the world.

10:35He goes on to say on another entry on February the 27th, 2020, stock market crashing. President Chief Medical Advisor writes, amazing day. And on March the 28th, after more lockdowns were announced, what a night. and indeed it turns out that Dr. Fauci developed something of a Rolodex of celebrity and I mean even John Sopel I suspect may have been there at some point he says that among other things he says Barbara, that is Barbara Streisand called me on my cell phone today she asked me questions about her booster shot it's always good to hear from her he said Julia Roberts as well we have on there we've got Elton John, Billy Crystal Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro even Emily Maitlis decided to put in a call and ask about the AstraZeneca vaccine So, you know, in a way, what you see there, and of course, this is sort of flippant and there's nothing scandalous about it in particular.

11:24There is no smoking gun, we should say. You know, what would Paul have loved to find? He would have loved to find basically an entry that said something like, oh, God, it turns out all that money I've been spending to Wuhan. Yeah, it turns out maybe actually there is a lab leak and I'm kind of responsible. There's nothing like that. There's absolutely nothing like that. There are some serious points of policy that maybe we can discuss that might have been at variance with stuff that he was saying at the time. But I think the problem of what it does, those sorts of things, is that in a country which is polarised as America, which still, much like our own country, has not truly had a reckoning with or come to terms with COVID and all of the lost moments, the trauma that is involved in that, what it does and the reason they published and released it is help augment and cement the impression, which has really sort of calcified and become toxic, certainly in the US, but even over here as well.

12:13party goat being the obvious example which is that there was one set of rules for them and another for us that whilst here was a guy who was appearing on television night after night telling us telling them how our lives had to be restricted had to um we had to forgo all of these special moments where how we had to endure genuine trauma i.e for example not being able to say goodbye to our loved ones or saying goodbye through through glass windows or whatever it was here was a guy who frankly if you were reading these diaries at times appeared to be relishing and enjoying what he was experiencing having sat through so many of those hearings you could understand some of the dynamics of what was going on that you had this chaotic white house with donald trump kind of going to meetings where one thing is agreed you emerge from the meeting and donald Trump says something completely different.

13:04And so Fauci took it upon himself and he has worked for the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, very powerful body in America since 1968. You know, during the AIDS pandemic, you know, he was the person who was there advising America on what it should do to keep safe and prevention and all the rest of it. So he's given his life to public health. And I don't doubt the sincerity of the man at all. And I think that he was trying to take the best medical advice possible and trying to shift, move the administration to a point where it was doing what the scientists thought was the best thing. Now, that obviously rubbed up against Donald Trump.

13:47And I remember one briefing where kind of Fauci almost contradicted the president. I think what the president meant to say was, and I thought that's a bloody bold thing to do. What is so terrible about those diaries is that he comes across just every bit as kind of vain, narcissistic almost as Donald Trump himself about the front covers. I'm now the most famous person in the world. He was. There was a whole press operation that was dedicated to looking after Fauci's media appearances. I dealt with them. You know, we tried to we spoke to them about getting Fauci on, when he would do us, where we might get a question in.

14:25he had become so big i didn't realize until these diaries how much he was relishing it look i think and in fairness to him there are it's 1100 pages so there are plenty of um plenty of entries alongside things um like being sent flowers by julia roberts i mean look who's not going to enjoy that and who's not going to put that in their diary if they're keeping a diary yeah yeah oh not julia's flowers i know it happens to you a lot but for the rest of us it would be a special moment no it like look so there are lots of other entries in it where he actually does you know he there are bits of it he clearly finds uncomfortable so so you know it is perhaps not surprising after a a lifetime or a career in relative obscurity to suddenly find oneself at the center of that must have been giddy and a head rush particularly in the way that americans cover politics and you know how everything becomes celebrity in a sense that's his problem right he became a celebrity yeah and if you become a celebrity and i think it actually adverts you in fairness someone like witty he did very well to sort of resist that um if you become a celebrity then almost by definition your status as a scientist and as a public official starts to be at the very least contested because celebrities always liked and disliked you know there are very few celebrities who enjoy universal acclaim and and look i think you know we've got to remember this ultimately as as sort of captivating as the diary stuff is you know ultimately this is not really about Fauci at all you know ultimately this is about and that sort of bizarre attempt at a show trial yesterday ultimately what this is about is an ongoing contestation in American politics about the role of institutions political authority and about expertise right Fauci is not on trial quote unquote or the attempt to put him on trial quote unquote is not about virology it's about technocracy it's not about his medical record it's about his role as a technocrat and the fact that technocracy expertise in america has become so so contested and so part of the partisan debate we see glimmers of that in this country and parts of it in this country but it is there's nothing compared to America, right?

16:36Because what's basically happened, what did COVID do in American politics? It shattered three old assumptions, it seems to me. One is that scientific expertise sits above politics. It was always more contested in America, but nonetheless. Two, that public institutions will automatically be trusted. And three, that America can unite around a kind of shared vision and version of events. That was largely true to a large extent in the UK, those three things. It certainly wasn't in the United States. And Fauci has just become a kind of lightning rod for those debates and all of those three things, it seems to me.

17:10I think I think that's a good analysis of where we are. I do. I am struck by how different the debate is in the UK. No one is raging. I mean, you know, look, we've had the whole covid inquiry into whether mistakes were made over procuring PPE and the fast track and all the rest of that stuff. but there hasn't been that kind of raging debate over the role of medicine the role that the state played in telling people how to lead their lives in the same way as it is still tearing america apart i mean it's more about the politics right it was about hypocrisy it was about party gate it was about political action and incompetence it was about access to contracts it was about all those other things about the people who enrich themselves in corruption this is about something so fundamental in America.

17:58And, you know, all the symptoms were there for it prior to COVID. You know, we had talked about how divisive America had become as a country. People had talked about the fact that there were two people who each had their own, two sets of people who each had their own truths and they couldn't agree on anything. And COVID came along and it became the exemplar of all that division. And you could funnel all the things that you felt through the COVID and whether your attitudes what your attitudes were to vaccines what your attitude was to face coverings what your attitude was to being told by the state what to do and the libertarian and rampall is the extreme example of that still wants to settle that score and you've got liberal america with you know the liberals on the committee also making the point oh dr fauci thank you for everything you've done to keep america safe well i do think that and i do think like on reflection And again, I do think we've got a bit of this here, but more so in the US.

18:57I think that the way, particularly in American politics, Fauci, I think he sort of embodies actually the inadequacies of, I don't want to do the both sideism here, but I genuinely think this embodies some of the inadequacies of both approaches, both from liberalism and from conservatism. right because the left's original position which or sort of progressive thoughts original position and again we have a bit of it here is basically that um questioning experts is just irresponsible particularly at that time but we should never question experts you know the left has become far more much more so than it used to be historically much more institutionalist in every sense right we trust institutions we trust the authority of institutions we trust in particular the non-partisan elements of those institutions, officials, scientists, and so on.

19:44And to even question or query some of that is dangerous. And I think they still think that, you know, even though in fairness, in the years since, legitimate questions have emerged and should be asked about, for example, whether school closures were a good idea or the lab leak theory itself, right? I mean, you know, dismissed as conspiracy very early on, much more contestable, right we might never know but it's it's certainly a legitimate question right and a legitimate set of questions the overall costs of lockdown i mean i reflect now although clearly you know i'm glad we live in a country that generally is deferential to expertise particularly medical expertise and authority and so on i do think at times in the pandemic that did go too far and in actually in the sense for when i reflect now you know say covering covid at the bbc at the time we were you know really scared about looking as if at any point we might want to we might want to query or question the idea that some of the costs of lockdown were not worth paying and so and i think there were particular elements as well and i sort of reflect on this a lot for example when we look at school closures i am not sure and i think i'll actually if this was happen again i think we would correct this i am not sure that even in the first lockdown that school closures for any length of time were a price worth paying.

21:05I think the long term, we're now seeing plenty of academic literature and evidence to show the damage of that on children, particularly children from the least well-off backgrounds and the most vulnerable kids. And I did some reporting on that at the time. Should we have been more vocal and should voices around that have been more vocalised? Maybe. And I think that one of the worries was, or the problems was, that institutions at the time, including institutions like the BBC, the media were widely, were especially worried about appearing critical of other institutions. And I think that that is a problem.

21:35And that was a problem. But the thing is, is that even now with the American left, they don't want to have that debate because to question someone like Fauci, all of the politics then floods in. Because to be fair, on the other side with the right, they're so nuts. They're not just going, look, let's just ask some legitimate questions here. Let's try to get to the bottom of things like our COVID inquiry is doing, in fairness. They're saying this guy wanted to kill people. He was funneling money to Wuhan. You know, he wanted to destroy your life. You know, they have an agenda which is to equate expertise and authority with basically with with being antithetical to ordinary people and the way that they live their lives, because there is political premium in them for so doing.

22:16So saying all this and kind of this and the Fauci diaries and what happened yesterday is brought back, you know, covering the covid story from America, reporting to an audience in England. And I think I was probably part of that institutional bias that, you know, when they were talking about, did it come from a laboratory in Wuhan? I was going on the television to say there was absolutely no evidence of this. This is a conspiracy theory being put around by some of those around Donald Trump on which there is no basis. And the World Health Organization has reassured saying X, Y and Z. It didn't help when the president referred to it as the Kung flu, of course.

22:53Exactly. And all those jokes that he was trying at the time. Yeah, exactly. So I think that I understand all of that. I think the difference fundamentally between here, UK, and there, US, is that there, they were ascribing a certain malevolence to the motives of Anthony Fauci by saying there need to be lockdowns, there need to be closures, there need to be masks, there need to be social distancing, there needs to be this and there needs to be that. there was no manual they were flying blind you're a pilot of a plane you've hit a storm the likes of which you have never seen before and which you don't know whether the airplane has the tolerance to withstand it or not you are making it up as you go along on the basis of your hunches on the basis of a spanish flu that was over a you know a century earlier and you're thinking geez what the hell do we do now and i think that that was why you got you know school closures yeah mistake we can see the consequences of that today in the mental health of so many young people who go and miss vital years of socialization people in the room as their relatives died i think in retrospect i think genuinely a barbarous thing to do of course and you but you are you know you are as i say you are trying you're making it up as you go along on the basis of what you think and you know funnily enough in britain the attitude was from what everything that i can understand although not being here was that people kind of were very authoritarian about it people wanted the government to be taking you know we're going to be tough and we're going to have distancing much and we're not going to allow it and you know and you've got people splitting on neighbors there are 10 people in his back garden yeah yeah and so i i think that that was because you have a a situation where oh my god the state has to react i don't know how we're going to react to this what can we do to keep as many people as safe as possible i know we'll do that i think it was well-meaning but in america the view on the right is it no it wasn't well-meaning it was about a power grab i agree and that malevolence and that idea basically of experts and people in authority wanting to exert malevolent power so that is a political agenda that suits their politics right and it is pure and it is you know risible in lots of ways where i think we went wrong and where i think again liberal institutionalists let's put it that way on the left or whatever where and i think this continues to happen is that you know if something like this were to happen again what we have to remember is that science is a science is a science and one of my lead and that's fine as far as it goes but one of my least favorite things that you know boris johnson used to say in the government at this time is that we're following the science we're following the sign the science will tell you in these situations or experts will tell you about what's happening it is the realm of politics to decide what you do with that information and of course the problem was for me in terms of like being too trusting of expertise at that time or was not so much not trusting what they said, it's entrusting them with telling us what to do, which in fairness, Chris Whitty and people, Patrick Vallance, always repeatedly said, it's not for us to say what the policy solutions should be because politicians have to take a balance.

26:05And yes, undoubtedly it's true that we, quote, flatten the curve more quickly because we shut down schools and didn't let people see their relatives when they were dying and all of those more extreme things. The question was and should have been at the time and must be again, is that a price worth paying for the things that it causes, the externalities that are generated from it? Because it ultimately is for politics and for politicians to decide rather than people in authority or, quote, experts to decide for us. And I think that that credulity from the left sometimes towards experts allows that space to open up for malevolent actors or bad actors like Rand Paul and so on, which is they basically say, look, the left liberals, they just want to hand your life wholesale over to these unelected people who have no legitimacy to make these decisions over your life.

26:55So I think if something like this was to happen again, I think the language about this stuff and a reminder that it is for politics and for politicians ultimately to decide this stuff and to be front and centre is most important. In a moment, we'll be back with Louise Casey developing policies on social care. But she's done so much else besides.

27:29Well, Baroness Casey, thanks so much for joining us once again in the News Agents studio. I was saying before you came in, I sort of referred to you and you laughed as the government's fixer in chief. Do you not think that's fair? How does it feel to be the government's? Whenever there's a problem, we'll get Louise in and she'll come and sort it out. I'm not sure, really. I'm not, you know, you do your best. Well, I was reading today and I couldn't quite believe this, but the first sort of task force or the first czardom you had was in 2006. Tony Blair. No, it was 1999. Oh, right. Okay. It was 1999.

28:04Well, there you are then. The thesis is proven. The 1999 homelessness czar. I see. You've had plenty of czardoms. Oh, well, indeed. More than the Romanovs, Louise. Let's do it with a C rather than a T. We all know what happens to the Romanovs as well. Maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit about kind of what it's like to do those jobs. But just given, I mean, we're speaking on the day that Andy Burnham has made that speech in Enfield. It felt like a bit of a moment to me. I mean, a lot of prime ministers have obviously spoken about the importance of fixing social care. But I think rarely with such passion as Burnham did.

28:35Does this feel like it could be? Is it Panglossian to think that we're going to be actually fix this at last or on the way to fixing it at last? Or is this different? No, it definitely feels very different. It feels very personal. I think it's interesting that a lot of people don't really know or think about social care until it kind of happens to somebody in their family or their lives, at which point it takes on a completely different dimension. So most people probably don't even know what it is or why it is or how it is. And then something happens like somebody gets really ill or poorly or disabled or more likely a relative is getting on, getting old and has a fall.

29:20So it feels very personal for Andy. I think it is because of his dad. But I think when he speaks, he kind of speaks for a lot of us that have got sort of family, friends that are living this world, which is too bloody difficult, too complicated. Frankly, not efficient enough where it should be efficient. And we're having a woman on the radio that I was on early this morning talked about having to navigate the system. And you think, nah, if public services mean that the public have to navigate them, you're doing something wrong, in my view. And I'd say that no matter what job I was in. Obviously, you were initially tasked and asked to look into this by the Starmer government.

30:05And now the timetable for that has been brought forward. Are you happy about that? Yeah, I'm really happy about that. I mean, I think the thing is that Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves were serious about it, or else I wouldn't have said yes. You know, it matters a great deal to me. And I don't take on jobs like this just to be a process person or produce a report that, you know, is interesting and helpful, but doesn't get anything done. So I was convinced that they would do it. um i just think that andy burnham has arrived wants to do it a lot faster why do you think they i mean i have to say i remember when it was announced that you were looking into it and you're going to do the report and then they announced the chronology of it it did seem quite a long lag time i know these things do take time but that was political wasn't it they just didn't want to confront the the costs and the potential politics around it and they just wanted to shove it to the back end of the parliament that's the truth isn't it i think some of it was definitely political we inserted a word a colleague of mine that I think you've met put the word by 2028 in so originally it said to report in 2028 and we slipped we took the word in out and put the word by in so I had some sort of sense really if I wanted to bring it in in next year then that would be possible but yeah I'm not going to sit here and lie they wouldn't expect me to nobody would expect me to that there was a degree of nervousness about this is a big deal and it is a big deal it really is a big deal I mean trying to sort out social care is up there with kind of one of the most biggest you know important public service reforms certainly in the 21st century and you know and that's a big deal and I think they thought and I thought that we would put a really really really good case together of what we could already do better within the existing resources, of which there is some, and then create the consensus for what a kind of care service would look like and how, and then how we would then kind of gauge how we would pay for it at the sort of towards the later end.

32:26And Wes Streeting stood up like within days of the announcement and said, if you met Louise, like she'll do this in the way that she thinks is right. And so if she wants to bring it in early, she can and she will. So I didn't feel constrained by it. But I'm really pleased to have a kind of bigger commitment to it being a higher priority for this particular administration. You said something interesting there. And it's something that the prime minister has said that he wants to try and achieve, which is use the word consensus and using your report as a basis for consensus. Is that just rather too optimistic in a sense that, I mean, we've seen some response from Nigel Farage today already talking about, you know, invoking the spectre of death taxation and all of that sort of stuff.

33:11But even if you, let's put to one side bad faith actors, if that's what you, if you assume there are some bad faith political actors, like, why should there be consensus on something like this? It's deeply political, right? I mean, basically, it's probably extremely costly. The questions are who pays for it, how they pay for it. There are questions of fairness and equity and all those sorts of things. I mean, they're fundamentally political questions. So perhaps it's inevitable that political parties coming at things from different political traditions and different political points of view, they're just going to see it differently.

33:42And that's legitimate. It is completely legitimate. I think that the challenge for something like social care is that people don't really, we didn't need it in 1948 when we set up the National Health Service, when we went for full employment, when we set up a welfare benefit system, when we introduced national insurance and national contributions. And since 1948, the population has changed so fundamentally that by 2026, there are 12 million people of pension age. That's a hugely different picture to what it was before. and I think the other thing is that people and this is a wonderful thing many people born with disabilities whose life expectancies was incredibly short their life expectancy now is much much better so people are living with disability well and for longer and at the same time the age group of the population has changed beyond recognition really and the other thing dare I say it, women were in the home in 1948.