After watching Anthony Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment before Congress over 100 times in July, you may have thought he was afraid to speak publicly about his actions during the Covid pandemic. Well, you were completely wrong. It turns out that Fauci, the former long-running head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is quite willing to talk about what he did – provided it is the right forum and he can shape the message to his liking.

Fauci recently gave an interview to Lawrence Gostin to a closed audience at Georgetown University, with a small online audience. Gostin is a distinguished law professor and health editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association. He is also a noted liberal. For nearly two hours, Gostin lobbed softballs at Fauci, and Fauci handled them as easily as Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani taking batting practice. He basically rewrote the history of the pandemic – without taking the Fifth even once.

Gostin began by asking Fauci about his overall role in the pandemic. ‘I’m the bad guy’, he joked. ‘I created the virus. I shut the schools. You know, I did everything, I did everything. Throw away the key.’

‘I did everything.’ Funny joke, huh? Actually, Fauci is too modest. As science journalist David Zweig wrote in his comprehensive book about school closures during Covid, Fauci’s ‘postures during the pandemic, expressed with extraordinary frequency in news interviews and press briefings, and otherwise ubiquitously set the tone for how many Americans thought about all numbers related to the pandemic’. Indeed, as Zweig explains, Fauci’s name appeared in 2,378 articles in the New York Times between 1 January 2020 and 1 January 2023 – two-and-a-half times more than the combined mentions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directors during the same period. He may not have done everything, but you couldn’t do much more than he did.

Fauci showed the same inimitable wit to deflect Congressional investigators in 2024. When asked about claims he steered CIA investigators away from areas of inquiry that could implicate him in supporting dangerous virus research in Wuhan, China, he sarcastically said: ‘I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.’ The truth is that Fauci was extensively involved with the CIA before and during the pandemic, the precise details of which are still unknown to the general public. A House Select Subcommittee claims the CIA escorted him into headquarters so many times he was not required to sign in.

Regarding lockdowns, Fauci had an interesting perspective: ‘We didn’t lock anything down’, he said. ‘Were you locked in your house? I wasn’t locked in my house.’ Really? From very early on, Fauci was a lockdown champion. At the beginning of the pandemic, Fauci sent one of his deputies to China with the World Health Organisation. He was impressed by the extreme lockdown implemented by the Chinese and reported back that to suppress the outbreak, the US might have to employ the same draconian measures. Fauci was favourably disposed towards the report and advocated that the US emulate many of those measures, which much of the country then did. You weren’t literally, forcibly locked into your house, but it was not far off. Ultimately, it was a busted flush – in neither the US nor China did a lockdown strategy successfully suppress the virus.

As for school closures, it’s true that responsibility lay with local politicians, school administrators and health officials. But state and local bureaucrats based their school-closure decisions on his pronouncements. The record again tells the story. On 12 March 2020, Fauci publicly called for a nationwide shutdown of schools.

On 11 April 2020, an article in the New York Times reported that New York City’s then mayor, Bill de Blasio, ‘said the decision to close schools was made on Friday evening, after he spoke with Dr Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’. Schools in NYC were not simply closed until the end of that academic year – they did not completely reopen for 18 months. Indeed, many schools across the US remained closed for much of 2020 and beyond. The effects on students in New York and nationally were devastating – socially, emotionally and academically.

While Fauci did not directly order closures, his advice was that schools could open when certain thresholds were reached. Those thresholds were arbitrary, vague and confusing. This allowed politicians, bureaucrats and teachers’ unions to default to the status quo, which was school closure.

Equally galling in the interview is his reiteration that ‘I’m a scientist, and I go by data’. Yet, in the case of school closures, he neglected extensive data from Europe, and some from the US, that showed children did not transmit the virus to a great extent and that they had an extremely low morbidity and mortality from Covid. Schools were basically not dangerous. The data were there for more than a year, but ‘the scientist who went by data’ never referred to them.

It seems Fauci remains convinced that his role in the pandemic response is beyond reproach. ‘I’m not sure we would change much’ about the public-health response, he told Gostin. Read that quote twice and let it sink in.

After nearly two hours of sycophancy and not a single pushback, Gostin closed the interview by calling Fauci ‘a national treasure’. The Zoom fails to record whether Gostin asked Fauci for his autograph and a photo op afterwards.