Legacy Media’s Fauci Love Affair Might’ve Buried COVID’s Origins
Ahead of the doctor's public testimony, making sense of what the dominant press helped to keep buried.
On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is set to testify in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee about damning new evidence made public by Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul about the COVID pandemic, including what the former head of the National Institutes of Health knew about the origin of the novel coronavirus.
Senator Paul has alleged that Dr. Fauci knew early in the outbreak that there was a possibility the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, despite Fauci repeatedly claiming that what has come to be known as the lab leak origin hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory.” Paul has also accused Fauci of providing a grant from the NIH to conduct “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The recent release by Sen. Paul of Fauci’s personal journal during COVID appears to confirm this information.
What is gain-of-function research? Put simply, it includes any efforts by scientists to make a virus or other pathogen more deadly or more transmissable, to better understand ways said virus could mutate to become more dangerous. Doing so, proponents say, helps better inform efforts to develop vaccines and other defenses in the future. But even proponents admit that doing so carries with it serious risks. A virus made more dangerous to study it is still a more dangerous virus; its exposure to humans no less a threat because it was turbocharged for “good” reasons; its likelihood of escaping containment not mitigated by “good” intentions.
In May 2025, President Trump decided such research was too risky, pausing it in the U.S., and making funding of foreign gain-of-function research illegal. Such research had previously been paused under President Obama as part of a new risk assessment in 2014 but resumed in 2017. Dr. Fauci has long been a vocal advocate of gain-of-function research, despite these considerable risks.
Given short shrift in the melee around the facts (by the media, to be clear, not by Sen. Paul and his team) is that this alleged funding of virus-enhancing research wasn’t just given to a lab in any nation, but to one run by the Chinese Communist Party, our chief geopolitical nemesis, and by any accounts a malignant communist regime opposed to truth and transparency of any kind. Why would we trust them with anything, none the less to conduct above-board research into a deadly pathogen, particularly when they had displayed a long history of safety lapses?
As I argued on The Hill’s Rising podcast with Emily Jashinsky and Ryan Grim back in 2021, Fauci was arguing semantics about what a new rule he himself inserted into funding guidelines said about what constituted gain-of-function research. That sleight-of-hand covered for what was really going on: the U.S. government was sending taxpayer dollars to research, in Wuhan, to make bat-based coronaviruses more transmissible and more deadly. This was happening at a lab doing cutting-edge research on these types of viruses and which had a reputation for flouting biosafety regulations – a lab just a couple miles from where newly transmissible and deadlier cases of bat-based coronaviruses first appeared.
It should be the story of the century. Could America’s top doctor have partnered with the Chinese Communist Party to help to unleash a global pandemic that killed millions? Why, ahead of said doctor’s public testimony aren’t outlets scrambling to understand what happened, given all this directional evidence?
I think it’s because of the legacy media’s love affair with Dr. Fauci as America’s supposed COVID-savior.
I worry we’re already forgetting just how enamored the legacy press — the institution constitutionally responsible for holding government to account — was with Dr. Fauci, certainly before but particularly in the early days of COVID.
To the press, Fauci was a hero, battling dangerous forces who refused to take COVID as seriously as The Science did.
Do you remember how preposterous these headlines were?
When Trump began to sour on Fauci, the legacy media dug in. Fauci, the noble public servant tormented by his ignoramus boss, was the good guy in all this. Rather than try to explore what was going on, the media started from the premise that Fauci was in the right and worked backwards.
And then it was no wonder that, when Trump began advocating for the merit of the lab leak COVID origin hypothesis, that media sentiment only hardened. Trump and his allies were “conspiracy theorists”; Dr. Fauci our heroic redeemer.
Perhaps nothing crystallized the legacy press’s status as Fauci’s stenographers more solidly than Sen. Paul’s fight with Fauci over the origins of COVID and gain-of-function research back in 2021. The senator’s charges against Dr. Fauci have been largely borne out by the former top immunologist’s own words (more on that in a minute). At the time, the press fought tooth-and-nail to lionize Fauci and undermine Paul’s push for public accountability.
We’ve gained an enormous degree of insight from Senator Paul’s release of Dr. Fauci’s Diary, his personal notes from the pandemic replete with damning evidence of what Dr. Fauci knew and when, particularly about the merits of the lab leak hypothesis, and the failed initial hypothesis that COVID started in a wet market in China.
It revealed in plain text that every time Fauci ran into public trouble about his connections to Wuhan or growing support for the lab leak origin hypothesis, he turned to his lapdogs in the press, as I explained in a thread on X.
Lost in all of it was even one iota of media interest in understanding what Dr. Fauci’s role was in what may have been the origins of the global pandemic that has killed millions. Is it any wonder that legacy press couldn’t bring themselves to investigate whether a “hero” “drawn from the ranks of society during a crisis,” as New York Times put it in 2020, could in fact be a villain?
I don’t know what will come of Wednesday’s hearing. All I ask is that you try to listen to it with an open mind, setting aside what may be your preconceived notions of Dr. Fauci as much as possible.
What an awful time, made so much worse by cover ups and lies. We’re still dealing w the fallout.
There should be Nuremberg level trials to investigate Fauci and the scientists who conducted, supported, and then lied for years about this experiment that cost millions their lives, destroyed economies, and damaged so many. Not to mention the careers Fauci and the media destroyed of anyone who dared to disagree with him.