Of course Anthony Fauci took the Fifth — and I know the damning reason why

Despite being pardoned by President Biden for his COVID crimes, Anthony Fauci pled his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

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He refused to answer a single question about his role in pandemic policy before the Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Senator Rand Paul, despite being immune from prosecution.

I think I know why.

Fauci was wrong about everything. From the lab origin of COVID-19 to the China travel ban, from foolish mandatory face masks to punishing lockdowns, his “legacy” is one misstep after another.

His authoritarian edicts made things worse, much worse, for Americans than they otherwise would have been.

Fauci had initially dismissed the Wuhan virus in January radio interviews as “a very, very low risk to the United States.” So it might have been, except for the incredible series of wrong calls that Fauci made in the months following.

These began early in 2020, when President Trump wanted to impose a travel ban. Dr. Fauci vigorously objected to the move, insisting that “travel bans don’t work.”

And so planes from China carrying infected passengers continued to land in New York and other American cities.

As COVID began its predictable spread in the US, Fauci was suddenly everywhere on the airwaves warning about how contagious and even lethal the coronavirus was.

In March 2020, panicked by a pandemic model from the UK that predicted a viral apocalypse, he recommended that the entire country be shut down indefinitely. He backed a shelter-in-place order for New York City and the closure of schools and “nonessential” small businesses.

These moves denied tens of millions of children an education, put roughly 40 million people out of work, and nearly bankrupted the US economy.

The model that Fauci relied upon turned out to be algorithmic garbage, but that didn’t stop America’s most famous virologist from committing every epidemiological sin in the book.

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There was early evidence from geriatric Italy that, while COVID merely gave the young the sniffles, it could be deadly to the elderly. This was shockingly confirmed by New York City’s long-term-care centers, whose residents were carted out in coffins by the thousands.

But instead of protecting the vulnerable elderly, as experts like Scott Atlas recommended, Fauci publicly attacked their ideas as “nonsense and very dangerous.” His solution — a scattershot effort to vaccinate every man, woman and child in America — cost the lives of countless elderly whose lives could have been saved if they had been given priority.

It was clear from the outset that the risk of children dying from COVID-19 was effectively zero, far lower than their risk of dying from the seasonal flu, which itself is tiny. Yet by early March 2020, Fauci was loudly calling for nationwide school closures.

Closing America’s schools did not save lives. But it did have a destructive effect on the academic performance and the emotional health of children. Many children suffered severe learning losses as they went a year with virtually no schooling or social interaction at all.

Fauci’s “original pandemic sin,” of course, was funding Chinese labs. The long-time head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease was the chief cheerleader and funder of “gain of function” research — the dangerous idea that deadly viruses could be created and studied in the lab to help prevent the next pandemic.

Had the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Shi Zhengli, not been taught these techniques in Fauci-funded labs, she wouldn’t have been able to create coronaviruses in her lab. And the world might have been spared the COVID pandemic.

Whether Fauci inadvertently helped to create COVID or not, once it had emerged from the Wuhan, he made a bad situation much, much worse.

The truth is, Fauci couldn’t have caused any more unnecessary suffering and death in America if he had tried to.

No wonder he doesn’t want to answer any questions.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” and the President of the Population Research Institute.

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