His personal defense came at the expense of the nation’s already fragile trust in physicians and medical expertise.
I have sat across from patients many times and told them things I would rather not have said: that a decision I made didn’t hold up, or the action I took was clearly the wrong one. Then I said I was sorry. Every physician keeps a private ledger of these conversations because the profession teaches us, from the first white-coat ceremony onward, that disclosure is not optional. It is a fiduciary obligation that doctors profess their expertise and confess their mistakes. That is why society still trusts us.
So when Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times last week before the Senate homeland security committee, declining to answer questions about Covid-19’s origins and the government’s pandemic response, I did not recognize the posture of a doctor. I saw the posture of a defendant.
Over a career as one of the nation’s leading clinician-scientists, Fauci asked Americans to trust the doctor in him. Yet at that hearing, the “do no harm” principle applied primarily to Fauci; he shielded himself at the expense of the nation’s already fragile trust in physicians and medical expertise.
His legal calculation is understandable. Former President Biden’s pardon applies to actions through January 2025, but it could not immunize him from a new perjury charge if this year’s testimony proved false, nor from state-sponsored prosecution. His lawyer advised him prudently. I only wish the doctor had advised his patients — the American people — with equal candor. If mistakes were made, we should hear them. That is what good doctors do.
Medicine has long confronted the tension between honesty and self-protection. A physician who discloses an error may invite a malpractice suit or professional discipline. Yet the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics requires disclosure anyway. Fear of liability is not a valid reason to withhold material facts. Many states reinforce that ethic through apology laws, shielding physicians’ admissions of error because society decided that a doctor’s silence should never be the safer option.
Fauci’s pardon is still a powerful shield: If anyone had room to speak candidly (provided he did so truthfully) about lab-leak evidence, changing mask guidance, or gain-of-function funding, it was him.
But if Fauci deserves criticism, so does Congress. If Senator Rand Paul’s goal is to understand what went wrong rather than simply embarrass a rival public doctor, Congress has a remedy: Grant transactional use immunity and ask every question.
A hearing that produces a hundred invocations of the Fifth is theater, not inquiry. We are a body politic in need of diagnosis. Physicians are taught to name the error, treat the patient, and worry about liability later. Fauci should have spoken as freely as his pardon allowed. Congress, if it seeks healing rather than spectacle, should have made that possible. When a public physician is squeezed between professional candor and personal preservation, it is the country’s health that feels the pinch.