The Fauci Hearings: Defending Science as Science

For over six years, I have written about the Covid debacle. In the spring of 2020, when questioning lockdowns, masking policies, Anthony Fauci, or the recommendations and policies of the World Health Organization, I was met with accusations of being “anti-science” and supporting conspiracy theories. As the editor and main author of COVID-19: A Dystopian Delusion, which was published in 2022, I sought to preserve a historical record while events were still unfolding.

Indeed, through my publishing house, True Freedom Press, I recently published Bradley J. Maddeaux’s COVID-19 in Canada: How We Were Betrayed!, which revisits the Canadian pandemic response in light of evidence that has emerged since those early years. I hoped that, with time, people would revisit those events with the benefit of a fuller historical record, one that would be enriched by congressional hearings, testimony, released emails, FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, and official reports that were not available while the pandemic was unfolding.

Recent developments have begun to provide precisely that opportunity. But they have also exposed something deeper: how easily trust in scientific inquiry can become confused with trust in the institutions and individuals claiming to speak in its name. The ubiquitous injunction to “trust the science” often obscured precisely this distinction.

The recent congressional hearings involving Dr. Anthony Fauci raise two serious questions. The first question is whether he will ever be held legally accountable for his conduct. Throughout history, it seems powerful people are rarely held accountable, especially in more recent memory—something not just limited to the endless Covid corruption but also applicable to those involved in the Epstein files. Perhaps the recent contempt vote against Fauci will mark the beginning of genuine accountability. Or perhaps, like so many congressional hearings before it, it will amount to little more than political theater.

Cultural commentator Bret Weinstein likened Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment to the flex of a mafia “made man.” He also suggested that this display demonstrates that Fauci considers himself protected by forces more powerful than the congressional representatives questioning him. That question of accountability matters greatly. Yet there is a second question that receives far less attention: Why do so many otherwise well-intentioned people still fail to agree on some of the most basic facts surrounding the Covid fiasco? This problem extends beyond politics into philosophy and theology. More precisely, it is a problem of both epistemology and morality.

In popular culture, Christians typically address the question of how our world has lost its moral compass. Although truth is frequently invoked in Christian apologetics, the nature of truth and how we discern it are rarely discussed in any meaningful depth within many churches or our wider culture. To be sure, the two are inextricably linked. For the latter, I have, in some of my previous writings, noted this to be a significant problem—especially when engaging in discussions with those who deny the objectivity of truth.

Ironically, in recent years, when it comes to commonsense biology and debates over diversity and inclusion, sensible Christians have sometimes found unexpected allies within the atheist community over that of progressive Christians. It is worth recognizing that the real division is not always between believer and unbeliever but between those who affirm that truth exists independently of us and those who subordinate and relativize it to a particular ideology or preference. The same was true during Covid. When it came to questioning the so-called “science,” believers of various stripes and unbelievers, as well as people on both the political left and right, found common cause in defending freedom, common sense, and the right to question prevailing orthodoxies. Real Anthony Fauci: Bi... Kennedy Jr., Robert F. Check Amazon for Pricing.

With those who stand in disagreement, it isn’t merely that we disagree about conclusions but also about what counts as evidence, which institutions deserve our trust, and, even more troubling, what questions we are allowed to ask. One of the many tragedies of the Covid years was not merely that politics interfered with science but that political loyalties increasingly determined which scientific authorities people trusted and, consequently, what they were willing to accept as scientific truth. Political allegiance increasingly displaced the impartial evaluation of evidence, reducing science from a method of inquiry to a tool of ideological affirmation.

Science is a method of inquiry. No scientist, administrator, or institution is “the science.” Once that distinction is lost, science is not merely propagandized; it becomes relativized and ultimately bastardized, since what counts as “the science” can shift according to who possesses the institutional or political authority to define it.

The case of Anthony Fauci vividly illustrates this problem. If you drop his name at practically any gathering, one will quickly discover that people are responding to entirely different bodies of information. Some have followed years of congressional testimony, released emails, diary entries, and what they regard as significant contradictions between Fauci’s public statements and the documentary record. Others know him exclusively through how he has been portrayed and defended by most mainstream sources. These are not merely different opinions formed by common evidence, but rather, they are indicative of different informational worlds.

This is why such conversations rarely advance anywhere meaningful. Before any valuable discussion about Fauci’s conduct, mistakes, or accountability can occur, we must first establish what he actually said and did, whether opposing evidence received a fair hearing, and whether there is a common understanding of the facts.

To be sure, none of this is unique to Covid. Unfortunately, instead of asking whether a piece of information corresponds with reality, people increasingly assess information through the lens of political or ideological allegiance. Conservatives and progressives are both guilty of this. Some MAGA supporters too readily dismiss evidence that challenges President Trump’s record or promises. Similarly, so-called progressives quickly dismiss contrary scientific and historical evidence in debates over abortion, transgender ideology, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Deception: The Great C... Paul, Rand Check Amazon for Pricing.

The truth is objective. As such, it exists wholly apart from our desires, preferences, and ideologies: two plus two equals four, whether we like it or not. For Christians, the objectivity or absoluteness of truth is ultimately grounded in God Himself, who is Truth. Truth is not something that can be created; it is discovered. This, in turn, directly ties into our own fallibility and ignorance, what philosophers sometimes call epistemic humility, which is an awareness of the limits of our own knowledge.

Curiously, during Covid it often seemed that everyone became an expert. Authentic scientific inquiry, by contrast, should reflect this same commitment to truth and epistemic humility. It welcomes dissent; and every hypothesis, theory, or model should remain open to being falsified, refined, or expanded. Scientific authority must, therefore, remain subordinate to scientific inquiry, since every scientist, physician, and investigator is capable of error. This is what makes Fauci’s infamous assertion that those who criticized him were “really criticizing science because I represent science” so troubling. Regardless of the qualifications offered in its defense, such a statement risks collapsing the crucial distinction between a scientific authority and science itself.

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