A review of Fauci’s actions is necessary, but it must not turn into a public trial

Anthony Fauci has returned to public speaking and, reading the lengthy interview published in Science, what strikes one most is the contrast between the ordinary nature of much of what he says and the political significance those very same statements have acquired in the United States of 2026. When he points out that mRNA vaccines have a well-documented safety profile, that the paediatric vaccination schedule does not overload the immune system, or that the zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 now has greater empirical support than the hypothesis of a laboratory accident, Fauci is not putting forward eccentric or particularly novel arguments. He is bringing back into the public debate conclusions that have long been part of normal scientific discourse and which, in the meantime, have become the subject of political confrontation at the highest levels of the US administration.

The change is easily gauged by looking at who currently holds those positions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. heads the Department of Health after describing the Covid vaccine as ‘the deadliest vaccine ever made’; Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organisation and drastically reduced America’s involvement in global health, whilst Rand Paul continues to treat the origins of the pandemic as a potential criminal case in which Fauci should be held personally accountable. The recent Senate hearing, during which Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, is part of the same dynamic. Six years on from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, dissent over how certain decisions were made now coexists with a deeper transformation: the scientific uncertainty that accumulated during the crisis is increasingly being reinterpreted through the prism of personal responsibility and blame.

Fauci’s return has reignited this debate because his interview concerns not only the accusations levelled at him personally, but also the way in which scientific and political institutions made decisions whilst information about the pandemic was still incomplete.

A pandemic forces us to make decisions whilst our knowledge is incomplete, and Fauci’s interview brings this difficulty back into focus because many of the accusations levelled today at the handling of Covid treat decisions made when the data was still incomplete as evidence of incompetence or bad faith. In January 2020, crucial information on the transmission of the new coronavirus was lacking; there were no vaccines or specific treatments, and even estimates of the case fatality rate depended on denominators that were still uncertain. In the months that followed, knowledge accumulated regarding asymptomatic transmission, aerosols, the effectiveness of face masks, the duration of immunity and, finally, the ability of vaccines to prevent different forms of the disease and the emergence of new variants. In such a context, the quality of the scientific response also depended on how quickly recommendations were revised as the data changed.

Fauci emphasises this very point when he points out that science gathers the information available at a given moment and revises its conclusions as that information grows. This is a basic definition of the scientific method, yet it has been rendered politically explosive by our memory of the pandemic, in which a change to a recommendation is easily interpreted as proof that the previous one was fraudulently false, whilst an error in forecasting can become a sign of incompetence or bad faith. A serious reconstruction should instead establish what evidence was available when a decision was taken, what alternatives were realistically considered, and when new data should have altered the course of action; for only this chronology allows us to distinguish between a reasonable choice that turned out to be wrong and a choice that, even at the time, ignored sufficient information to have avoided it.

This is also the point on which Fauci ought to go into greater depth. When he says that, looking back, “I’m not sure we would change much”, he is condensing several years of the pandemic and decisions taken by individuals with very different levels of authority into a single statement. It would be far more useful to know which choices he still considers justified in the light of the information available at the time they were made, in which cases he believes that updates came too slowly, and where he acknowledges errors in the way risks and uncertainties were communicated to the public. Such a discussion would enable genuine scientific self-criticism, which is meaningful precisely when it succeeds in pinpointing the error and reconstructing the circumstances surrounding it without automatically turning it into a confession.

The story surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2 shows, however, just how difficult this distinction has become. Fauci continues to regard a laboratory accident as a possibility and notes that the available data do not allow it to be presented as the established origin of the virus, a position that essentially coincides with that reached by the WHO’s SAGO group, according to which the weight of the evidence favours a zoonotic spillover whilst the incompleteness of the information coming from China leaves other scenarios open. In a normal scientific controversy, the persistence of uncertainty should lead to calls for new data and a ranking of hypotheses proportionate to the available empirical support. In the American political debate, however, China’s lack of transparency has often been incorporated directly into the explanation, to the extent that the absence of the information needed to prove a laboratory escape is used as one of the reasons for considering it plausible or even probable.

Fauci thus ended up becoming the focal point for issues that actually belonged to different levels of the pandemic response. His public influence was enormous, and his constant media presence helped to identify him with the entire federal health system, whilst the power to close schools, businesses and public spaces lay largely with governors, local authorities and other bodies. Over the years, this distinction has become blurred in the collective memory, to the point where the caricature he himself presents in the interview – when he says: “I created the virus. I shut the schools. I did everything” – makes perfect sense. The quip works because it sums up a real process of retrospective concentration of responsibility, in which a particularly high-profile figure ends up becoming the symbolic focal point where decisions and failures – which are in fact much more widely dispersed – converge.

Once a judgement takes this form, the evidence gradually loses its ability to alter it. A document may be absorbed into the narrative that has already been constructed; a correction may become further confirmation of the suspicion; and anything that is not documented may be explained away by the hypothesis of a cover-up. This is the stage at which a scientific controversy ceases to be subject to genuine scrutiny, because every possible finding is reinterpreted in a way that is compatible with the initial conclusion. At that point, it becomes difficult even to learn from the actual mistakes made during the pandemic – mistakes which do exist and deserve to be studied – because a mistake that contributes to knowledge always requires the possibility of determining what might have prevented it.

Fauci’s reappearance comes as this transformation has now reached federal institutions. The Secretary of Health can describe Covid vaccines as exceptionally lethal despite the wealth of data accumulated on their safety, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the WHO and reduced the US presence in international surveillance networks, just as new outbreaks continue to demonstrate how crucial it is to recognise an outbreak quickly; and the still-necessary discussion of the mistakes made during the Covid pandemic is taking place within a system that is undermining some of the very tools through which those mistakes could be identified and corrected.

For this reason, a review of Fauci’s actions remains necessary, but it must not turn into a public trial in which politics and public opinion take on the role of a court called upon to pass judgement. Instead, the discussion must take place in accordance with scientific criteria: we must attribute to each individual what they actually decided, reconstruct the information available at the time that decision was taken, and distinguish between error and deception. Its aim is not to identify a culprit to be paraded as a scapegoat, but rather to understand what happened, which decisions were reasonable in the light of the data available at the time, and which might have been different, so that we may learn before the next emergency. The accountability of experts and the possibility for knowledge to evolve alongside the data are part of the same system of checks and balances: a public science in which every revision is retrospectively turned into a fault will end up defending its initial assertions even when the evidence has begun to contradict them.

The next epidemic will once again arrive with incomplete data and decisions to be made before all the consequences are known. The quality of the response will therefore also depend on the ability of institutions to quickly recognise what is not working and to correct it without every change being immediately interpreted as evidence of prior fault. After a pandemic in which we learnt almost everything whilst the crisis was already unfolding, it would be particularly dangerous to build a system in which maintaining a mistake becomes more convenient than correcting it.