In Diary, Fauci Bragged of Role in School Closures. At Hearing, He Took the 5th
‘Children lost years of education,’ Sen. Rand Paul said, as Democrats accused the Kentucky Republican of ‘relitigating the past.’
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In a three-hour hearing Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the influential scientist who led the national response to COVID, refused to respond to questions about his role in school closures and the mask and social distancing guidelines that experts say have drastically set back students’ learning.
Subpoenaed by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to decline to respond, and accused the senator of an “unhinged obsession” with putting him in jail. Former President Joe Biden for any crimes he may have committed dating back to 2014 in his official roles with the government, but Paul threatened “repercussions” over Fauci’s refusal to answer questions and said the committee will vote next week on contempt charges.
“You argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close schools or impose every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions,” said Paul, who described Fauci as more concerned about his celebrity status than scientific evidence. “Children lost years of education.”
The hearing followed Paul’s recent release of Fauci kept during the height of the COVID crisis. The entries reveal his conflict with President Donald Trump over keeping schools open and his sense of pride that officials, like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff followed his guidance on closing schools. On June 29, 2020, for example, he noted with former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, about allowing in-person learning to resume that fall. “Since this is the first decision among governors regarding opening for the fall term, he feels that he will be the example,” Fauci wrote. “I recommended that he delay decision for two weeks.”
Democrats praised Fauci for his decades of service under both Republican and Democratic presidents and characterized the hearing as a personal vendetta by Paul. , the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the hearing was a distraction from some of the current public health issues facing the public, including a rise in measles cases. With staff cuts, he added, “the administration has hollowed out the public health workforce.”
Republicans, he said, are just “relitigating the past.”
Much of the questioning focused on whether Fauci misled the public about the source of the virus, saying that it originated in a Chinese market, while he wrote to himself that the market was only an “amplifier.” Since 2021, Paul has accused Fauci of lying about the National Institutes of Health funding the type of lab research in China that created COVID.
“Many people would say, ‘Well gosh, that doesn’t sound like a really good idea, to create viruses that don’t exist in nature to see if they’ll infect human cells,’ ” Paul said. “The American people deserve an apology.”
‘Slower in learning’
The nation’s schools shut down in mid-March 2020 as states responded to calls from Trump, under Fauci’s advice, to “slow the spread” of the disease. But what most assumed would be short-term measures turned into more than a year of on-again, off-again closures and intense battles over mask and vaccine mandates. By October of 2020, education researchers began to estimate that students had lost more than a year of learning in reading and math.
Those predictions held up. Data from the most recent shows that overall, students still haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels in reading and math.
Children are “slower in learning language now because they couldn’t watch someone’s lips moving,” said Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a Republican.
He also pressed Fauci on a May 6, 2020 conversation he had with Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over the fact that 1 million children had missed their measles vaccinations because of the shutdown.
“This is terrible and needs to be addressed since on that basis alone, there would be far, far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children,” Fauci wrote.
But Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, blamed the current administration for the rise in measles cases. So far this year, there have been over 2,300 reported measles cases, .
“Children are dying because there has been increased vaccine hesitancy fueled by Robert F. Kennedy,” Hassan said about the Health and Human Services secretary.
During the hearing, Trump took credit for the rapid development of the COVID vaccine. But he said he relied less on Fauci’s advice over time.
“I didn’t let him shut the country down, although he wanted to,” Trump wrote. “I went the Federalist way, and let the governors decide.”
The public, however, thought the president didn’t respond quickly enough to the outbreak. In an April 2020 , 65% of Americans said Trump was too slow to take major steps to address the threat.
Some experts say what schools needed at the time was strong federal guidance on reopening.
“It’s one thing to close for a couple weeks, which is what we all thought was going to happen,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which launched one of the of schools’ responses to the virus. “A couple weeks turned into months and years in some cases. That’s where the real cost to kids came in.”
She declined to say Fauci is to blame for the prolonged damage to students’ learning and mental health. But she said neither the Trump nor the Biden administrations protected schools from the political storm over reopening and COVID protocols.
“Everybody involved bears responsibility,” she said. “So many things went wrong.”
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