From Fauci to Conte, Covid is now nothing but political polarisation

In recent days, even the Chinese media have had to admit that the Covid-19 positivity rate is rising in the People’s Republic, reaching 20 per cent of flu-like illness cases detected in so-called ‘sentinel’ clinics and A&E departments. The vast majority of infections are “mild”, wrote the China Daily, citing a statement from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, but the underlying problem remains: how much do the Chinese trust the authorities’ communications? And how much does the rest of the world trust them? Because research into the origins of the 2020 Covid pandemic has so far proved impossible.

Immediately following the first lockdowns, Australia proposed an independent international inquiry into the origins of the infections that caused a global shock comparable to that of the Great Depression, the effects of which we have not yet properly studied: the initial handling of the outbreak in Wuhan, delays in sharing information, the role of the WHO, and the mistakes made by other governments as well, because to prevent a new pandemic, it was necessary to understand what had actually happened. Beijing, however, responded with a severe trade boycott against Canberra, and no independent investigator has since been able to challenge the account provided by the Chinese Communist Party, nor has any country proposed an international commission for fear of Beijing’s wrath. Thus, the investigation into the origins of Covid has ceased to be a scientific issue and has become a political clash almost everywhere in the world.

In the United States, Covid is one of the main battlegrounds in the culture war between Trump supporters and Democrats. The ‘lab leak’ theory was first turned into a defining feature of the right wing and then into a tool for assigning domestic political responsibility. It is against this backdrop that Anthony Fauci – first appointed by Trump to the Covid task force in 2020 and later by Biden as chief medical adviser – appeared last week before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security, chaired by Republican Senator Rand Paul, who had compelled him to testify via a subpoena. Paul has an “uncontrollable obsession with me”, Fauci said in his opening statement, and he then chose to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions, repeating the same phrase over a hundred times during the three-hour hearing, whilst Paul accused him – as he has frequently done in the past – of having helped create the pandemic or even of having profited from it.

For some Republicans, and for much of the MAGA movement, Fauci is the symbol of lockdowns, face masks and vaccination campaigns, but also the face of an alleged cover-up organised to protect China and prevent the truth about the virus’s origins from coming to light. The fact that he chose not to answer questions from those accusing him was interpreted as an admission of guilt. Fauci, however, argued that any response would have been used to bolster the accusations that Paul has been making for years. Because no one had any interest in producing new information, the aim was to confirm an existing belief. For years, Trump and the MAGA world have insisted on the term ‘China virus’, accusing Biden and the Democrats of wanting to cover up Beijing’s responsibilities. It seems like a short circuit: any discussion of the virus’s origins today becomes an internal American row, pushing the Chinese government’s responsibilities into the background – a government with which the current administration wishes to maintain an excellent relationship, one that is far more entangled than the one Biden had.

In Italy, the issue has taken a similar turn. The parliamentary commission of inquiry into the handling of the Sars-CoV-2 emergency, established in 2024, was tasked with reconstructing the errors and assigning responsibility for Italy’s management of the pandemic. But unlike judicial inquiries, it has limited powers and its conclusions will inevitably carry primarily political weight, rather than seeking the truth about those dark days. Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte continues to postpone his hearing, fuelling the clash between political parties rather than contributing to a rational reconstruction of the facts.

Six years on from the start of the pandemic, the only attempt to conduct a truly independent international inquiry was blocked by China. Everything that has followed has been largely a matter of domestic politics, and the more the debate has become polarised, the less possible it has become to answer the most important question for citizens: how did the pandemic actually begin, and what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again?