This article was originally published by the Independent Institute on August 4, 2026.
Last week, Anthony Fauci appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He seemed somewhat less than interested in answering questions, though, choosing to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination some 111 times. Indeed, the only words he seemed interested in speaking were “Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
As an American citizen, these responses were well within his rights. One wonders why they were necessary, of course, given that President Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon before leaving office in January. Maybe he was concerned about possible state action against him. Maybe, as has so often been the case with Fauci, he was more concerned with public relations than with speaking the truth. We’ll likely never know.
What we do know, though, is that Anthony Fauci has finally come to see the value in the Bill of Rights, having spent the COVID years routinely trying to trample the First Amendment rights of those who would dare publicly disagree with him.
His ire was routinely on display whenever the Great Barrington Declaration reared its ugly head. The authors of that declaration simply asserted that “Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.” Fauci and his merry band, on the other hand, pushed for and got lockdowns. The healthy and the sick, the strong and the vulnerable, all fell into the same bucket, and that bucket was placed behind a locked door.
And anyone who disagreed was to be silenced, First Amendment be damned.
How do we know? A new Freedom of Information Act request has unearthed some 8,000 pages of his emails from the early COVID era. And they tell a clear story of a government actor doing his damndest to shut down everyone who didn’t toe his personal party line.
October 14, 2020, was a particularly busy day for Dr. Fauci. He spent most of the day sending emails to colleagues and the media to attack what he described as a group of “fringe epidemiologists” who had challenged his policy of lockdowns and other COVID restrictions.
A few days earlier, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director had ordered Fauci to wage a “devastating published takedown” of the three dissenting scientists who challenged him. I first revealed the story of Collins’s email back in 2021, along with Phillip Magness, when it showed up in another FOIA request. With the latest batch, we now know how Fauci put his and Collins’ plan into action.
Who were these scientists that Fauci targeted? The three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration are Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. Fauci would, later that same day, compare the three to the AIDS deniers of the 1980s.
The same day, Fauci wrote to his compatriot Gregg Gonsalves at the Yale School of Public Health about Scott Atlas, then Special Advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Fauci smugly reported, “I am trying to get this jerk shut down by working from within the White House. They promise they will handle it and nothing happens. I will keep trying.”
On October 15, Fauci was still beating the drum against Scott Atlas, writing to Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator and U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, about a conversation he had with Jared Kushner, Trump’s advisor and son-in-law. “I had a long talk with Jared tonight about Scott Atlas,” he wrote. “I really laid it on him, but he still does not understand how dangerous this guy is.” He then implored Birx to approach Kushner as well, and to make the case that Atlas is “killing people.”
Finally, on October 16, Fauci gave Birx marching orders to trash the Great Barrington Declaration and Scott Atlas on a scheduled COVID-19 task force call… a call he could not be part of, given a routine medical procedure.
And these were just a small handful of the 8000 pages at the end of the aforementioned FOIA request. If the rest of them are as damning as these, Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment may end up looking like one of the smartest moves he has made in his long career.
Allowing people to disagree with him would have been a whole lot better, but that sort of thing has just never been in his character, such that it is.
James R. Harrigan is the Chief Operating Officer for Polyhymnia, and co-host of the Words & Numbers podcast.
