Former President Joe Biden’s last-minute, preemptive pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci had an obvious and clearly stated purpose: protecting the elderly scientist from Biden’s successor.
For Donald Trump and much of the right wing, Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the peak of the Covid pandemic, has come to be a living symbol of what they see as the evils of the scientific establishment and the U.S. response to the virus. But the final-hour pardon is also being interpreted among Covid conspiracy theorists and in some corners of the mainstream right as an admission of guilt. In turn, that generated fresh calls for Fauci to be: “hunted down,” in the words of New Age conspiracy peddler David Avocado Wolfe, “and brought to justice.”
A pardon might protect Fauci from Trump, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion.
In the last moments of his presidency, Biden pardoned Fauci, members of his own family, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, people who worked on Congress’ January 6 committee, and police officers who testified before it. None of them have been accused of criminal wrongdoing, but all had reason to fear retaliation from Trump or those in his orbit.
In a statement to Politico, Fauci thanked Biden for the move, but stressed that “I’ve committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.” That said, he wrote, the “mere articulation of these baseless threats and the potential that they will be acted upon, create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family.”
Conservatives, most notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have persistently accused Fauci of supporting so-called gain-of-function research into viruses, suggesting that such research ultimately caused Covid-19 to be created and accidentally released from a lab. While a Republican-controlled congressional committee has insisted that Covid was likely created in a lab, any lab leak theory continues to be hotly contested. Most scientists still believe that Covid’s origins were natural, generated from sick animals at a wet market. The latest evidence shows that none of the viruses stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe the virus to have originated, closely resembled SARS-CoV-2.
Biden’s Fauci pardon was greeted by many in the vast and chaotic world of Covid suspicion as proof the scientist and retired public health official had been guilty of some poorly-defined crime all along. It also demonstrated how closely mainstream Republicans are aligned with the deepest reaches of the Covid conspiracy pool.
“There is now zero doubt that Fauci is a criminal,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, “guilty of crimes against humanity.”
Paul struck virtually the same note, tweeting, “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed.”
In a text message to NBC journalist Kristin Welker, Trump called the Biden pardons that included Fauci “disgraceful,” adding, “Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES!” His son Donald Trump Jr. specifically weighed in on Fauci, tweeting, “He doesn’t have to accept the pardon. If he did nothing wrong, be a man and turn it down… But you know he won’t because everyone knows he’s guilty of so much.”
Some online figures also suggested that, despite the pardon, something bad would befall Fauci, and that he’d be punished for his supposed crimes with death. On Telegram, QAnon figure Dustin Krieger, who uses the name Dustin Nemos online, called Fauci “a serial murderer,” adding, “Sooner or later God will cut him down.”
As that invective makes clear, a pardon might protect Fauci from the worst excesses of the new Trump administration, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion. He’ll always be at risk of other kinds of retaliation, from people who have been encouraged to view him as a murderer.
Going forward, the new administration and its empowered allies in Washington will only foster that view. Take Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. She suggested in an Inauguration Day press release that Congress and Paul would continue their war against Fauci:
“One of the things that’s positive here is that because he has been preemptively pardoned, he will not be able to assert a 5th Amendment protection in Congress when he is going to be investigated,” she said. “There’s no question that Senator Rand Paul, in particular, has every intention of going forward to investigate this man.”
