Katie Miller, an erstwhile Trump administration official and wife of Stephen Miller, once relied on Dr Anthony Fauci to get through Covid. Now, she’s calling for his imprisonment – a reversal that illuminates the politicization of Fauci and of public health writ large, a trend that could have major repercussions for America’s preparedness for future crises.

A US Senate committee will vote on Thursday morning over whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after the physician and former public health official invoked his fifth amendment rights during a Senate hearing last week focused on Fauci’s actions during the Covid pandemic.

The invocation of the worst days of the Covid pandemic come as midterms loom and the administration struggles to address several infectious outbreaks, including cyclosporiasis and Ebola.

Rand Paul, a senator, released contemporaneous notes that Fauci took during his time in public office, which Paul called Fauci’s diary, that reveal the confusion and fear of the time and illuminate the private episodes of a man who became known as America’s doctor.

“By focusing entirely on one human being and by calling him all sorts of names, including ‘evil’, and by calling for him to be jailed, it abdicates Republicans’ own responsibility in the US response to the pandemic, which was under President Trump,” said Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. “I think that this is all aimed at riling up the base ahead of the midterms and at washing their hands of any culpability themselves in the mass death event of Covid.”

And it comes after substantial cuts to the public health infrastructure; misinformation has spread at the highest levels of the government, and growing outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, cyclosporiasis, Ebola, and more.

“This is an extraordinarily good way to distract people from the very deliberate destruction of the US public health system,” Yamey said.