U.S. Senate Republicans voted August 6 to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress in a party-line vote on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That vote came after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, and refused to answer questions, at a July 29 hearing over fear of self-incrimination.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), a vocal Fauci opponent on Capitol Hill, introduced the resolution that skips a full Senate floor vote and sends the contempt referral directly to the U.S. Department of Justice.
What is referred to in public as Fauci’s “diary” is really a collection of private notes and daily logs, more than 1,000 pages in all. He kept that log in his official capacity as the nation’s top expert on COVID-19 as director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Fauci’s notes finally became public after Sen. Paul and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis) demanded them and HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. retrieved them from government computers.
Reacting to the diary and the contempt vote on the “Washington Watch” program, Dr. Andrew Bostom, a research physician at the Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention, said the diary exposed Fauci’s private view on everything from mask wearing to the virus itself.
“It’s Fauci versus Fauci,” Dr. Bostom said. “It's the private Fauci versus the public Fauci.”
On the controversial issue of masking, for example, hundreds of millions of Americans were forced to wear a mask to shop and to go to school.
To refuse to wear a mask at the time was called selfish and inhumane, especially for the elderly, and the term “Grandma Killer” became a common accusation.
Dr. Fauci’s private entries acknowledged that masks were ineffective against the flu-like virus, however, because medical trials he reviewed concluded masks don’t stop the transmission of the flu.
“He agreed, well, since there's about the same particle size as Covid, it's probably not going to work for Covid,” Dr. Bostom, referring to Fauci’s journal entry, recalled.
Another revelation in the private journal was about the virus itself. Fauci privately compared COVID-19 to a serious flu epidemic, like the 1957 Asian Flu, with a fatality rate under 1 percent.
“Not the 1%, 2%, 3%, 5% that the fear mongering was about,” the epidemiologist pointed out.
According to the World Health Organization, the global fatality rate during Covid-19 was .91 percent.
“Do you think it’s fair to say he veered away from science and ended up being influenced by politics?” show host Jody Hice asked.
“There’s no other way to interpret it,” Dr. Bostom replied.
