Appearing before Rand Paul’s Senate committee on July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the federal government’s response to COVID under Presidents Trump and Biden, refused to answer any questions, even though Biden gave him a preemptive pardon “for any offenses against the United States…in any manner related to his service” to the government between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

Certainly Fauci has much to answer for, starting with severe errors in judgment—whether criminal or not. As Dr. Scott Atlas and his coauthors put it in a 2024 report, “[A] calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom.” Public health officials “overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health (including substantial non-COVID excess mortality) harms on top of the virus itself, which nonetheless worked its way through substantially all of the population.”

In particular, millions of men, women, and children needlessly lost their lives, jobs, businesses, or years of learning; saw their physical and mental health deteriorate due to unnecessary lockdowns or the side effects of largely ineffective vaccines; were fined or arrested for violating arbitrary public health restrictions; or were banned or censored on social media for sharing COVID “misinformation.”

That’s not all. Senator Paul’s release of Fauci’s diary adds to the evidence that he repeatedly misled and even outright lied to the American people. On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote, “It now appears…that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the [Wuhan wet] market.” Yet in April, he said that Chinese wet markets should be shut down, because “What we’re going through right now is a direct result of that.”

On February 1, Fauci noted that he had a conference call with 11 other leading scientists. Only two of them were convinced that the virus had a natural origin; “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible” and that, given the work at the Wuhan lab, “we could not let this go.” He later dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. On February 8, he wrote that the mortality rate for COVID was “more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%,” but in public he claimed it was “about 2, 2.5 percent.”

He maintained that he “didn’t recommend locking down anything,” but on March 15, he congratulated himself for convincing Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the schools, bars, and restaurants in New York City. Governor Gavin Newsom was persuaded to do the same in California. Fauci initially told the public that “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” but subsequently explained that he said so only to conserve supplies for health workers. Later still, he admitted the evidence that masks helped to prevent the spread of COVID was inconclusive.

In 2021, he told Congress that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” yet he personally approved more than $500,000 in U.S. government grants to that organization. Fauci also admitted in a congressional hearing that the six-foot social distancing rule was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data,” or, as he put it later, “I said that it is not based in science and it just appeared.”

It now seems clear that no measure of punitive or restorative justice could be great enough to set right the harms inflicted by Fauci and his political and media supporters. And the behavior of the Democrats on the committee, who praised Fauci and thanked him for his service, sent the message that they will resist any attempt to hold him (or anyone else) accountable for the bungled COVID response. Nor should the American people expect so much as an apology.

That is particularly unfortunate: American citizens no longer trust public health officials. Unless those officials, elected representatives at the state as well as the federal level, medical professionals, and the media admit that they made serious mistakes during COVID, there will be no way to restore that trust. This dramatically increases the risk of harm to the public during the next national health emergency.

A 2022 article in The Atlantic argued that we need a pandemic amnesty. It’s hard to agree with the article’s premise that the bad management of the COVID crisis resulted from the ignorance and uncertainty of people acting in good faith, not from moral failings. Still, the idea that we would do well to turn away from the past for the sake of the future (the word “amnesty” is etymologically related to “amnesia”) has merit. Yet the very notion of an amnesty implies a degree of culpability that should be officially “forgotten” for the sake of the public good, even if it is not entirely forgiven by private citizens. That culpability must first be fully aired and acknowledged, for otherwise it will be impossible to convince people to move past it.

It is an ironic coincidence that the first recorded amnesty in history followed the defeat of the so-called Thirty Tyrants at Athens, who were overthrown in a civil war in 403 B.C.E. The Thirty were a group of Athenian oligarchs put in power by the Spartans after they defeated the Athenians in 404, bringing the Peloponnesian War to a close. These oligarchs were led by a man named Critias, who proposed to introduce a “scientific” regime of experts whose knowledge would ensure that they made no mistakes in managing public affairs. (This story is told in the Charmides, a dialogue by Plato.)

Irked by Socrates, who raised critical questions about his policies, Critias effectively forbade him from engaging in philosophical conversations. The Thirty kept lists of citizens they considered to be polluted by vice. They also silenced their political opponents by putting them to death, ultimately killing 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

The physicist Richard Feynman once wisely remarked that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Any pandemic amnesty must be based on the understanding that whatever Fauci was peddling, it wasn’t science—and what’s more, that Faucism, taken to its logical conclusion, culminates in tyranny. This is precisely why America’s founders vested power in elected representatives and not in lordly bureaucrats with no accountability to the public.

With Critian hubris, Fauci outrageously defamed his critics and tried to shut down questions about his directives. He claimed (falsely, as we now know) that “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science because all of the things I have spoken about from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science…. That is what’s going on. Science and the truth are being attacked.” On another occasion, he asserted that Ted Cruz and Rand Paul were “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

Fauci also coordinated with Francis Collins of the NIH to dismiss the argument against lockdowns set forth in the Great Barrington Declaration—authored by Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford epidemiologists, signed by almost 10,000 medical and public health scientists and 26,000 medical practitioners—as “ridiculous” and “total nonsense.” Following Fauci’s advice, officials kept lists of people who refused the vaccine, many of whom lost their jobs or suffered other adverse consequences for not complying with mandates. That’s not the kind of “expert” we need to be calling the shots during the next pandemic.