The Fauci Hearings: Defending Science as Science

For over six years, I have written about the Covid debacle. In the spring of 2020, when questioning lockdowns, masking policies, Anthony Fauci, or the recommendations and policies of the World Health Organization, I was met with accusations of being “anti-science” and supporting conspiracy theories. As the editor and main author of COVID-19: A Dystopian Delusion, which was published in 2022, I sought to preserve a historical record while events were still unfolding.

Indeed, through my publishing house, True Freedom Press, I recently published Bradley J. Maddeaux’s COVID-19 in Canada: How We Were Betrayed!, which revisits the Canadian pandemic response in light of evidence that has emerged since those early years. I hoped that, with time, people would revisit those events with the benefit of a fuller historical record, one that would be enriched by congressional hearings, testimony, released emails, FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, and official reports that were not available while the pandemic was unfolding.

Recent developments have begun to provide precisely that opportunity. But they have also exposed something deeper: how easily trust in scientific inquiry can become confused with trust in the institutions and individuals claiming to speak in its name. The ubiquitous injunction to “trust the science” often obscured precisely this distinction.

The recent congressional hearings involving Dr. Anthony Fauci raise two serious questions. The first question is whether he will ever be held legally accountable for his conduct. Throughout history, it seems powerful people are rarely held accountable, especially in more recent memory—something not just limited to the endless Covid corruption but also applicable to those involved in the Epstein files. Perhaps the recent contempt vote against Fauci will mark the beginning of genuine accountability. Or perhaps, like so many congressional hearings before it, it will amount to little more than political theater.

Cultural commentator Bret Weinstein likened Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment to the flex of a mafia “made man.” He also suggested that this display demonstrates that Fauci considers himself protected by forces more powerful than the congressional representatives questioning him. That question of accountability matters greatly. Yet there is a second question that receives far less attention: Why do so many otherwise well-intentioned people still fail to agree on some of the most basic facts surrounding the Covid fiasco? This problem extends beyond politics into philosophy and theology. More precisely, it is a problem of both epistemology and morality.

In popular culture, Christians typically address the question of how our world has lost its moral compass. Although truth is frequently invoked in Christian apologetics, the nature of truth and how we discern it are rarely discussed in any meaningful depth within many churches or our wider culture. To be sure, the two are inextricably linked. For the latter, I have, in some of my previous writings, noted this to be a significant problem—especially when engaging in discussions with those who deny the objectivity of truth.

Ironically, in recent years, when it comes to commonsense biology and debates over diversity and inclusion, sensible Christians have sometimes found unexpected allies within the atheist community over that of progressive Christians. It is worth recognizing that the real division is not always between believer and unbeliever but between those who affirm that truth exists independently of us and those who subordinate and relativize it to a particular ideology or preference. The same was true during Covid. When it came to questioning the so-called “science,” believers of various stripes and unbelievers, as well as people on both the political left and right, found common cause in defending freedom, common sense, and the right to question prevailing orthodoxies.

With those who stand in disagreement, it isn’t merely that we disagree about conclusions but also about what counts as evidence, which institutions deserve our trust, and, even more troubling, what questions we are allowed to ask. One of the many tragedies of the Covid years was not merely that politics interfered with science but that political loyalties increasingly determined which scientific authorities people trusted and, consequently, what they were willing to accept as scientific truth. Political allegiance increasingly displaced the impartial evaluation of evidence, reducing science from a method of inquiry to a tool of ideological affirmation.

Science is a method of inquiry. No scientist, administrator, or institution is “the science.” Once that distinction is lost, science is not merely propagandized; it becomes relativized and ultimately bastardized, since what counts as “the science” can shift according to who possesses the institutional or political authority to define it.

The case of Anthony Fauci vividly illustrates this problem. If you drop his name at practically any gathering, one will quickly discover that people are responding to entirely different bodies of information. Some have followed years of congressional testimony, released emails, diary entries, and what they regard as significant contradictions between Fauci’s public statements and the documentary record. Others know him exclusively through how he has been portrayed and defended by most mainstream sources. These are not merely different opinions formed by common evidence, but rather, they are indicative of different informational worlds.

This is why such conversations rarely advance anywhere meaningful. Before any valuable discussion about Fauci’s conduct, mistakes, or accountability can occur, we must first establish what he actually said and did, whether opposing evidence received a fair hearing, and whether there is a common understanding of the facts.

To be sure, none of this is unique to Covid. Unfortunately, instead of asking whether a piece of information corresponds with reality, people increasingly assess information through the lens of political or ideological allegiance. Conservatives and progressives are both guilty of this. Some MAGA supporters too readily dismiss evidence that challenges President Trump’s record or promises. Similarly, so-called progressives quickly dismiss contrary scientific and historical evidence in debates over abortion, transgender ideology, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).

The truth is objective. As such, it exists wholly apart from our desires, preferences, and ideologies: two plus two equals four, whether we like it or not. For Christians, the objectivity or absoluteness of truth is ultimately grounded in God Himself, who is Truth. Truth is not something that can be created; it is discovered. This, in turn, directly ties into our own fallibility and ignorance, what philosophers sometimes call epistemic humility, which is an awareness of the limits of our own knowledge.

Curiously, during Covid it often seemed that everyone became an expert. Authentic scientific inquiry, by contrast, should reflect this same commitment to truth and epistemic humility. It welcomes dissent; and every hypothesis, theory, or model should remain open to being falsified, refined, or expanded. Scientific authority must, therefore, remain subordinate to scientific inquiry, since every scientist, physician, and investigator is capable of error. This is what makes Fauci’s infamous assertion that those who criticized him were “really criticizing science because I represent science” so troubling. Regardless of the qualifications offered in its defense, such a statement risks collapsing the crucial distinction between a scientific authority and science itself.

Fauci’s recently released text messages from his government-issued phone make this distinction vital. In January 2021, while discussing Covid vaccination during pregnancy, Fauci wrote in a private message: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” Although, technically speaking, this message does not establish that Fauci knew with certainty that the vaccines caused miscarriages, it demonstrates great imprudence. We must consider that he was privately contemplating a potentially grave adverse outcome at a time when much of the evidence concerning Covid vaccination remained unknown to the public.

To make matters worse, Fauci publicly stated that authorities had found “thus far no red flags” concerning pregnant women. This raises further serious questions not only about prudence but also about informed consent. To be clear, the problem is not that Fauci communicated these concerns privately but that they were kept from the public. Full transparency is vital for novel medical interventions like the Covid vaccines—which, in my estimation, were unnecessary at best and deadly at worst. This is especially important when taking into consideration that there were alternative medications, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, that were incessantly demonized by Fauci himself, the media, and medical organizations.

The late Kary Mullis offers a different perspective. Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, was an outspoken critic of Fauci long before Covid. Mullis said that he had challenged Fauci to debate and sharply questioned his scientific competence, at one point mockingly accusing him of believing that one could simply take a blood sample, examine it under an electron microscope, and know whether a virus was present. More important for the present discussion, however, was Mullis’ broader concern about how scientific authority is recognized and conferred. As he put it:

He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in…The vast majority of them do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn’t a really good scientist. I mean, that’s a problem—that’s a main problem actually with science, I’d say, in this century, because the science is being judged by people…funding is being done by people who don’t understand it.

Mullis’ criticism raises a broader problem for ordinary citizens, who cannot reasonably be expected to master highly specialized fields such as virology, immunology, or epidemiology yet are routinely required to decide which experts and institutions deserve their trust. Institutional prestige can therefore become a substitute for evaluating evidence. But it is worth considering that the opposite mistake is equally possible: distrust of institutions does not automatically make an outsider or dissident correct. Therefore, it would be prudent to say that neither institutional prestige nor antiestablishment credentials establish the truth of a scientific claim; both must ultimately answer to the evidence.

Reliance upon genuine expertise is both unavoidable and reasonable. The problem begins when that necessary reliance becomes deference to authority and scientists, administrators, or institutions cease to be treated as fallible interpreters of evidence and instead become arbiters of what may count as scientific truth.

Christians were not immune to this problem during Covid. All too often, political instincts, ideological preferences, and institutional loyalties were placed before theological discernment. This was often true within the Catholic Church. I addressed this problem in my review of QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross, a book that claimed to confront precisely these issues but largely did so in a partisan way.

In my writings on Covid, I have argued that Christians must resist two related temptations. The first is to treat institutional authorities—whether individuals such as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, media outlets such as CNN or Fox News, or public-health bodies such as the CDC, the NIAID, the FDA, or the WHO—as incapable of serious error. The second is to assume that because such authorities have sometimes failed, whatever they subsequently say must therefore be false. Their failures may rightly diminish our trust in them, sometimes considerably, but they do not relieve us of the responsibility to evaluate particular claims on their merits. Both blind trust and reflexive distrust abandon the difficult but necessary work of discernment.

Thus, my ultimate concern extends beyond Anthony Fauci himself to the growing difficulty we face in reasoning together when we lack sufficient common ground about reality and about how truth is to be discerned. When citizens inhabit such distinct informational “universes,” disagreement becomes extraordinarily difficult to resolve. Debate then risks further polarizing people rather than bringing them closer to the truth.

As a Christian, I believe the process must begin with humility. Christians should place Christ above any political movements, media personalities, scientific authorities, or public institutions. However, the Covid era showed the opposite. It illustrated how easily political movements, scientific authorities, public institutions, unhinged conspiracy theories, or particular public figures can become objects of misplaced allegiance. Repentance is not only a moral virtue but also an intellectual one. It requires the will to love the truth above political loyalties and the humility to admit when we are wrong.

Science remains science when its practitioners and institutions remain accountable to evidence, criticism, and correction. It becomes distorted when scientific authority is permitted to substitute for scientific inquiry—especially when particular individuals or institutions presume to speak as “the science” itself. For Christians, truth will never contradict Christ, who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).