Senate GOP’s pandemic hearing: Quasi-Stalinesque show trial or goofball political attack on science, public health?

When I was in junior high school, I asked my father to help me design an exhibit for the Science Fair. If memory serves, I wanted a glitzy whiz-bang display with lots of flashing lights and moving parts. But Dad, who was a forest ecologist for the Tennessee Valley Authority, talked me into buying some bean seeds and about a half dozen clay pots instead.

I knew Dad’s work involved growing “super-seedlings” in TVA experiment stations, with the intent of developing fast-growing, straight-grained loblolly pine seeds that commercial tree farmers could plant and sell to pulpwood and paper manufacturers. I thought it was pretty cool that TVA did this kind of research. The farmers didn’t have the resources to experiment with genetics, and the paper companies had their quarterly balance sheets to think about. Even as a 12-year-old, I understood they couldn’t grow trees fast enough to to boost their shareholders’ quarterly dividends.

So I figured the old man knew something I didn’t. (In later years when I was learning how to do my own research in grad school, I came to understand he had a flair for experimental design.) And I went along with the bean project for the junior high science fair.

Before I even opened the packet of bean seeds, Dad asked me what the seeds needed to have in order to germinate. We talked it over, and decided they needed sunlight and water. (I think there were other variables, but those are the two I remember now.) He asked me how I’d go about proving it, and one of those light bulbs went off in my head like they do in cartoons. Withhold water from one bean pot, and light from the other by putting a sheet of cardboard over it. With that in mind, we worked out a hypothesis — the seeds needed both sunlight and water to germinate.

(I didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad was teaching me the IMRAD format for writing up scientific research: Introduction, methodology, results and discussion. In later years, I’d teach it myself — in freshman English! — because I decided my students, like so many of us, could use a refresher in the scientific method.)

So I planted the seeds, followed the methodology and waiting. As expected, a nice, thrifty little green shoot appeared in the control pot — the one that got both sunlight and water — and nothing happened in the one I didn’t water. But in the third pot, a sickly little yellow shoot managed to germinate.

Uh oh. Did this mean my project went wrong? No, Dad explained, it happens like that all the time. When it does, you go back and adjust your hypothesis in your discussion of the results. In this case, he said, that little yellow shoot struggling to reach toward the edge of the pot was important. Look up heliotropism, Dad suggested; it’ll explain why the little bean plant turned toward the sunlight, and it actually helps confirm your hypothesis. For the record: I didn’t win the science fair award that year (or any other), but I was starting to learn how the scientific method works.

I’ve thought a lot about that old science fair project lately, since Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was hauled before a partisan Senate Homeland Security Committee to answer unfounded allegations that he — uh, well, instead of trying to summarize them, I’ll just refer you to the sound bites in Desi Lydic’s comedy shtick in which she “Foxsplains” them (or mimics the way a habitual Fox News viewer might describe objective reality). I’ll admit she isn’t entirely objective and impartial, but I think she gives Fox News and committee chair Rand Paul, R-Ky., exactly what they deserve.

I wonder what my father would have made of the hearing. He was a career scientist for a federal agency, and I think he would have been bewildered by the personal nastiness directed at scientists and public servants. (The partisan politics he would ignore, as he always did. When I was a kid, I’d ask him how he voted. “By secret ballot,” he always replied.)

Senator Paul’s libertarian ideology and his personal animosity toward Dr. Fauci are well known. He has an anti-establishment streak that might serve him better if he exercised more self-control, and he’s said repeatedly he wants to see the doctor in jail. The Guardian’s health correspondent Jessica Glenza, summed up “what we learned” from the hearing like this:

A US Senate committee hearing featuring Dr Anthony Fauci revealed at least one certainty: six years after the pandemic, politicizing science remains a vital political tactic.

The high-profile hearing was pitched by its Republican chair, Rand Paul of Kentucky, as an investigation into the origins of the Covid pandemic. It quickly became a forum for recrimination of a once-leading US government scientist by Republican senators.

‘But I think the most insightful mass media account of the hearing was by Michael Koziol, North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. (I tend to avoid US media on domestic politics — if they don’t actively support him, Trump makes them part of the story, and getting branded as “fake news” subtly affects their coverage one way or the other.) Koziol, who has covered politics in Canberra as well as foreign capitals, said it was “a McCarthyist show trial” that revealed more than Paul and most Senate Republicans intended. He explained:

Many of us wanted politicians and bureaucrats to explain themselves after the pandemic – to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, what could be done better next time.

But this is not that. This is revenge.

It’s performative, but who are they performing for? Do Americans in Toledo, Omaha and Seattle really care about the questions that were asked in the Senate today? It’s difficult to think so. They’ve moved on.

Instead, what we are witnessing in Congress is the long tail of the deep, deep anger that infects and pollutes American politics, and which will not necessarily be extinguished by the departure of one Donald J. Trump from the scene.

There is something deeper here: a sickness in the soul of American public life.

I can’t pretend to be objective about Dr. Fauci, and it would be dishonest of me even to try. In those first terrifying days of the Covid pandemic, I began to notice him at press briefings. I didn’t know him from Adam’s housecat at first, but I was relieved to hear from somebody who obviously understood the scientific method. It served him well during the coming months, as it did for us all.

Eventually I’d get Covid, but I have pre-existing conditions — age and COPD, to name a couple — and I paid close attention to the public health advisories and the science behind them. So it wasn’t until 2026 after effective vaccines had been developed, the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutated to a less deadly strain and a new administration was elected with kind of a la-de-dah attitude toward vaccines. I was in and out of the hospital for a couple of months, but I got over it. Which means I have those early interventions in 2020 (including, to be fair, Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine program) to be thankful for.

But there’s more to it than that. For 20 years, I taught in a Catholic liberal arts college, and Dr. Fauci came to personify some of my ideals about Catholic education. About education in general, in fact, about teaching and what it means to have a vocation, a calling, to serve others.

A native of Brooklyn, he studied at at two Jesuit schools, Regis High School in New York City and the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts (his MD is from Cornell). In the spring of 2020, at the height of the early Covid lockdowns, he was asked to record a video for graduates at Regis and Jesuit high schools nationwide. As quoted in an article in the Jesuit magazine America, he told the kids:

“Currently our lives have been upended by a truly historic global pandemic. I am profoundly aware that graduating during this time—and virtually, without your friends, classmates and teachers close by—is extremely difficult,” Dr. Fauci said. “However, please hang in there. We need you to be smart, strong and resilient. With discipline and empathy, we will all get through this together.” [Link in the original.]

By 2020 I had retired from classroom teaching, but I found it moving that Dr. Fauci would take the time to record a high school graduation message. And to address it in terms the kids would relate to during the crisis. He must have had other things on his to-do list. The account in America continued:

Dr. Fauci credited his education at Regis with teaching him both “precision of thought and economy of expression,” commenting that those two habits “inform how I think, how I write and how I communicate with the public every day, especially during the present unsettling times. Just as important, however, is the Jesuit emphasis on social justice and service to others. And now is the time, if ever there was one, for us to care selflessly about one another.”

My college was founded by the Ursuline sisters, not the Jesuits, and it later merged into the Chicago-area Benedictine University system. But there was nothing in Dr. Fauci’s message that wouldn’t have lined up perfectly with my teaching goals as a mainline Protestant lay faculty member. In fact, I might have changed a word or two — “common good,” perhaps, or “general welfare” instead of “social justice” — when I was a TA at a Southern flagship state university and taught at the local community college in Springfield and a nearby historically Methodist school, but I never found an appreciable difference between the goals and objectives of teaching in a secular or faith-based space.

What, then, are we to make of the Senate Republicans’ hyperventilating about old grievances and the promise of more show trials? Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald has one answer:

[…] Republicans have seen fit to drag [Dr. Fauci] through a McCarthyist show trial that may well result in the Department of Justice bringing charges of contempt of Congress.

Maybe that’s just politics. Fauci was gifted immense power – as occurred in Australia when politicians ceded government to health bureaucrats during the pandemic – and he does have to be accountable.

But he has been. These issues have been litigated over and over. Six years after the pandemic, we know what happened and why, even if we may not agree with everyone’s decisions.

So, it was jarring to see the raw anger from so many senior politicians at Wednesday’s hearing, meted out to an elderly man who has been through all this before.

That would be close to my own answer. I might point out, however, that Stalin had a penchant for show trials, too. He also had a fascination with junk science that Senator McCarthy, to my knowledge, didn’t share. In all fairness, however, the Trump regime hasn’t sent any biologists and geneticists to the gulags.

All in all, I think accusations of McCarthyism or Stalinist-adjacent show trials don’t quite hit the mark. Something older and more deeply American seems to be at work in Rand Paul’s inquisition. I think British radio presenter and podcaster Lewis Goodall, who discussed his impressions of the hearing on LBC radio of London. He took a step back, saying:

What you’ve got there is basically a kind of a five-year dispute that’s been incubating and growing between the Republican Party, the American right, and not just Fauci — Fauci in a way is just a cipher for it. — but basically between them and expertise in the government. [Against] authority, medical authority, all of these sorts of things You have this anti-elite, anti-expertise gene, which is perhaps latent on the American right, which becomes stronger and stronger.

I am all too familiar with the attitude Goodall had in mind. I grew up in the South and went to grad school at a Southern state university (where the only allowable object of worship was the SEC football team). I well remember Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s diatribes in a neighboring state against “pointy-headed intellectuals” and “college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.” Politicians like Wallace were not limited to Alabama, and 50 years later they are not limited to the South.

Wallace’s style of anti-intellectualism, as I read as a grad student in books by historian Richard Hofstadter including Anti-intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, has been around at least since the late 1800s, and it has always been marked by a distrust of elites, foreigners and city life in general. Today’s libertarians have inherited a good measure of it. Goodall continued:

So in a way part of it is personal between Ron Paul and Fauci, but in a way it’s about something far bigger — which is the role of expertise of authority, of officialdom within American public life and whether they ought to be listened to or not; or whether, as in the view of some of those senators that you’ve just heard [in broadcast sound bites aired on the LBC program], in many cases they believe they’re actually malevolent and malign.

By all accounts, Dr.Fauci isn’t out of the woods. In a rather breathless article in the reliably partisan New York Post, DC bureau chief Josh Christenson discussed ways Paul could get around an upcoming Senate recess — and a potential filibuster — with a criminal referral citing the doctor for contempt of Congress. State charges are also possible.

But I think the most lasting damage may come from something Lewis Goodall alluded to, the barely concealed contempt so many Americans have for experts in general, and scientific knowledge in particular. I’m not immune to it myself — as a reporter, I developed a skeptical attitude toward press conferences announcing bold new initiatives, revolutionary new concepts and life-changing new products that had no appreciable impact, positive or otherwise, whatsoever. But the kind of cynicism and hostility produced by the Covid epidemic — and Trump’s MAGA movement — is something new. And uniquely dangerous.

In a 2024 commentary in the Journal of Virology, Drs. James Alwine and Felicia Goodrum of the University of Arizona (with medical researchers at Arizona, Queen’s University in Ontario, the University of Florida, the University of Alabama-Birmingham and the University of Maryland contributing) concluded that an earlier hearing, on June 3, 2024, “was often disrupted and marked by contentious, disrespectful, and unfounded calls for Dr. Fauci to be ‘prosecuted’ and imprisoned for ‘crimes against humanity’.”

Much of the controversy, Alwine and Goodrum suggest, derives from a simple misunderstanding of how the scientific method works. Observing different hypotheses for explaining the spread of the Covid virus, especially in the early stages of the pandemic, politicians jumped to the conclusion that the evidence was contradictory rather than evolving. Or, worse, that the scientists were lying. According to Alwine and Goodrum:

The evidence [available in 2024] supports the scenario that two distinct ancestral lineages of SARS-CoV-2 jumped from animals into humans, and that the Huanan Seafood Market in Hubei Provence, China, where wild animals were routinely present and slaughtered, was the epicenter of the pandemic (4–9). Importantly, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he remains open to evidence supporting a lab leak if it were to become available. Indeed, all scientists must be open to this possibility. Factoring in new data that are sound and validated, even if a prevailing hypothesis were contradicted, is an essential aspect of scientific training. A critical guiding principle of science is that knowledge is continually revised and updated based on quality new evidence.

If I may return to my little 8th-grade experiment with the bean seedlings, that’s essentially what happened when I discovered light had somehow gotten into one of the pots. I looked at the evidence, the struggling little yellow bean sprout, and reevaluated my hypothesis in light of it. In the case of a world-wide pandemic caused by a previously unknown virus, of course, the evidence is more complex. But the scientific method is what it is, and it must be followed. I think that’s what Alwine and Goodrum are getting at when they say:

Many questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain unanswered and may never be fully resolved. We cannot currently disprove the lab leak hypothesis. Nevertheless, the lines of evidence needed to validate one hypothesis over another are not epistemically comparable (16). Validating the zoonotic origin is a scientific question that relies on history, epidemiology, and genomic analysis, that when taken together, support a natural spillover as the probable origin. This evidence is driven by scientific data that must be gathered and interpreted by experts. Much of the evidence that could have been obtained from animals at the Huanan Market was forever lost due to the clearance and cleansing of the market before any animals could be tested. Nonetheless, the available scientific evidence supports a zoonotic origin. Validating the lab leak hypothesis requires intelligence evidence that the WIV possessed or carried out work on a SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus prior to the pandemic. Neither the scientific community nor multiple western intelligence agencies have found such evidence.

Instead, the politicians got involved. And when they did, I’m afraid any remaining hope of finding out exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped from animals to human beings went right out the window. And with the lab leak theory, they had a handy-dandy villain ready at hand. Communists. Not only Commies, but Chinese Commies! Soon we began to hear in high political spaces about the “China virus” and “Kung Flu.”

I watched the whole thing develop carefully. (Did I mention I have pre-existing conditions?) At least as I was able to follow it in the media, the reaction went slowly as alternative hypotheses, and public health measures, were tested. Step by step. Methodical But according to Alwine and Goodrum, political application of the lab leak theory had unanticipated side effects:

The lab leak theory in all its forms casts unsupported blame on scientists, many of whom had warned of the potential threat of, and need for effective countermeasures to prevent, zoonotic transfer of viruses into humans. Scientists who studied coronaviruses or led the response to the pandemic have been accused of engineering SARS-CoV-2 or allowing it to escape from a lab due to inadequate biosafety. Some have been unfairly accused of being part of an international cover-up or accused of taking bribes from NIH. Yet more scientists have been attacked for using objectively gathered data to conclude that zoonosis is the most likely origin of the pandemic or for simply engaging in communication of the evidence with the media and the general public.

There’s a lot of detail in the Journal of Virology paper. Compelling detail. Detail we all ought to be familiar with before the next zoonotic virus makes the leap from animals to human beings. As surely it will. Whether anyone with the political clout to take the necessary steps will even read it, let alone take effective action, is another matter. In the meantime, Alwine and Goodrum warn the political reaction, including the Senate hearings in 2024, do not exactly augur well for the future:

Intimidation and threats have significant and long-term consequences as scientists have withdrawn from social media platforms, rejected opportunities to speak in public, and taken increased safety measures to protect themselves and their families. Some have even diverted their work to less controversial and less timely topics. We now see a long-term risk of having fewer experts engaged in work that may help thwart future pandemics, and of fewer scientists willing to communicate the findings of sophisticated, fast-moving research topics that are important for global health. Research that could prepare us for future pandemics has been deferred, diverted, or abandoned (3). Most worrisome for future preparedness, the next generation of scientists has well-founded fears about entering fields related to emerging viruses and pandemic science (19–21).

Anyway, that’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it: We’re in deep trouble, but I don’t think it’s Stalinist trouble. At least not until new scientific evidence comes along to suggest I’d better revise it. If Dr. Fauci were shipped off to a gulag, or if Senator Paul began parroting the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, I’d reconsider, of course. But for now, I think I’ll just try to keep doing like that poor little yellow bean sprout in my 8th-grade experiment, trying to reach for the sunlight in Donald Trump’s America. 

Links and Citations

James Alwine, Felicia Goodrum, Bruce Banfield, David Bloom, William J. Britt, Andrew J. Broadbent and Samuel K. Campos, “The harms of promoting the lab leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 origins without evidence,” Journal of Virology, American Society for Microbiology, Aug. 1, 2024 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01240-24.

Josh Christenson, “Rand Paul seeks to fast-track Anthony Fauci’s criminal referral — undeterred by Senate recess, New York Post, July 30, 2026 https://nypost.com/2026/07/30/us-news/rand-paul-seeks-to-fast-track-anthony-faucis-criminal-referral-undeterred-by-senate-recess/

Jessica Glenza, “Anthony Fauci’s high-profile Senate hearing: what we learned,” Gurdian, July 29, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/29/anthony-fauci-senate-covid-hearing-takeaways.

Lewis Goodall, “Dr Anthony Fauci invokes the Fifth during ‘expletive-filled’ Covid hearing,” interviewed on LBC and LBC America, July 30, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ2gYzPiFEI.

James T. Keane, “Dr. Anthony Fauci to Jesuit grads: ‘Now is the time for us to care selflessly about one another’,” America, May 12, 2020 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/05/12/dr-anthony-fauci-jesuit-grads-now-time-us-care-selflessly-about-one-another/.

Michael Koziol, “American anger: The real takeaway from Fauci’s show trial is enduring rage,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 30, 2026 https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/american-anger-the-real-takeaway-from-fauci-s-show-trial-is-enduring-rage-20260730-p60k1n.html.

“Dr. Anthony Fauci To Join Georgetown Faculty as Distinguished University Professor,” University News, June 26, 2023, Georgetown University, Washington https://www.georgetown.edu/news/dr-anthony-fauci-to-join-georgetown-faculty-as-distinguished-university-professor/.

[Uplinked Aug. 3, 2026]