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Infectious disease expert on Fauci’s Senate hearing face off with lawmakers
July 30, 20264:40 AM ET
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Infectious disease expert on Fauci’s Senate hearing face off with lawmakers
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NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Céline Gounder about lawmakers’ contentious questioning of former top U.S. health official Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday
Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Dr. Celine Gounder also watched Dr. Fauci’s appearance in the Senate. Like him, she is also an infectious disease expert. She was among those who advised the Biden transition team on the pandemic, and she is an editor-at-large for public health with KFF Health News. Dr. Gounder, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us once again
CELINE GOUNDER: Great to be here
MARTIN: You know, that hearing was so contentious. I think it’s easy to get lost and forget some of the specific issues at play. So let’s try to home in on a few of those. Senator Rand Paul said even if Dr. Fauci was not directly responsible for closing schools and businesses during the pandemic, he encouraged officials to do so
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RAND PAUL: Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they made. The COVID lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime
MARTIN: So how much influence did Dr. Fauci have over COVID policy?
GOUNDER: So Dr. Fauci was the leading face, leading expert on the COVID response, highly respected and clearly very influential. In terms of legal authority, he did not have legal authority to close any schools. However, he clearly had influence over, for example, Governor Cuomo’s decisions in New York State, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Governor Newsom out in California. So he was very influential
But I think it’s really important to look at who actually had the power. And the power sat with – there’s over 13,000 school districts, public school districts, in this country – so those districts, their boards, their governors. And then at that time, 34 states, you had teachers’ unions that were at the bargaining table. And so that’s who made the decision. And if you look at studies since as to what predicted whether – when particular school districts reopened, because basically everybody closed in the spring, what predicted whether they reopened was actually political partisanship.
Far and away No. 1 predictor, so depending on if you were in a red district or a blue district. And secondarily, far secondarily, was the strength of the teachers’ union in that area. COVID rates actually played little to no role in the decisions to reopen. And so if political partisanship is really what’s driving it, it’s not really the advice of scientists or experts like Dr. Fauci
MARTIN: Is there something you think, as you heard Rand Paul and others repeatedly press Dr. Fauci to apologize, is there something, is there anything in your view that he should apologize for? Is there something he should have done differently?
GOUNDER: Well, I do think, with respect to masks, with respect to recognizing publicly that this was airborne, that had real implications for the public but also very much for health care workers. And I remember March of 2020, I was wearing N95 masks in the hospital. And it was not clear that that was the guidance yet. And so that could’ve resulted in people getting infected with COVID at that time. You know, in terms of the lay public, the mixed messaging, I think, was also confusing as well
MARTIN: So as you also heard, Senator Paul believes that COVID-19 was made in a lab. The White House seems also to be very committed to this. I mean, the White House has a whole section of its website supporting what’s called the lab leak theory. Is there credible evidence supporting that? And is there evidence in the documents that Dr. Fauci actually suppressed the lab leak theory, as a number of the lawmakers suggested?
GOUNDER: Yeah, so let’s take the first of that. So in terms of the timeline here, Senator Paul released not all, but some of Dr. Fauci’s diaries over the weekend. And I have actually read through all of them. If you look through – so starting in February of 2020, he – excuse me. He
MARTIN: Hello?
GOUNDER: Yeah. Sorry
MARTIN: OK. Go ahead
GOUNDER: I’m just looking at the timeline. So he’s called in to have a conversation – sorry – January 31, where he’s told by a colleague, you know, they’re concerned that this might be from a lab. And he is told – and this is Dr. Kristian Andersen, one of the leaders in this space – if you think the virus came from a lab, you should write a scientific paper on it. That’s what Fauci tells him. And then as Fauci is being alerted to his concerns, Fauci says, you know, we need to bring in the experts on this.
So he calls together the top evolutionary biologists, the top virologists. He’s not a virologist himself even though he’s an infectious disease specialist. So he’s deferring to other experts in the space and asking them, OK, here are your initial concerns. And what evolves as more and more data comes in, they become more and more certain that they think this has a natural origin but are very much entertaining the possibility that this could be a lab incident
And, you know, I think what’s happened is over time, over the two years after those initial conversations, more and more data was gathered. And then two years later, in 2022, there are two papers that end up being published in Science where they bring together all of that. And it really points towards a natural spillover event
And, you know, why do we think we can say that? So there are a few different reasons for that. So one is, when you look at these kinds of events historically, they have historically been from spillovers, so whether that’s HIV, Ebola, tuberculosis, measles. You know, you go back in time and history, these have all been from natural spillover events from animals into humans
Secondly, when you look at the testing they were able to do from the wet market, there was a mix of DNA from raccoon dogs, as well as civets, with SARS-CoV-2 virus. So there was clearly some sort of intersection there. But the Chinese had already cleared out the animals, so they couldn’t test the animals themselves. And then for the lab leak theory, what’s going against it is we see really evidence of two different, separate introductions of the virus, COVID virus, into people. With a lab leak, you would expect one with one specific variant of the virus, not two.
MARTIN: So you’re saying that the weight of evidence still points to a sort of transmission, natural transmission, as opposed to this lab leak? That is what the evidence, I guess. So before we let you go – we have about a minute here – you can’t help but notice the vitriol that was directed at Dr. Fauci. And I am just wondering if you have a theory about why that is. I mean, scientists sometimes disagree. They – in fact, they often disagree about what the evidence shows, especially in a situation that isn’t fully understood. So why? What’s your theory about why there is so much vitriol directed at him?
GOUNDER: I think people still have a lot of pain, a lot of anger, PTSD, frankly, from the pandemic. And they’re looking for someone to blame for that. And I think Dr. Fauci, the mistake he made was to be this of the pandemic, to be that lightning rod, to embody all of that. And in the future, particularly given in this era of identity politics, people trust who looks and sounds and votes like them. And I think we need more state and local experts embodying that messaging in the future. Secondly, I think public officials just need to be more transparent about what values…
MARTIN: OK
GOUNDER: …They are weighing and the experts they are leaning on
MARTIN: All right. That is infectious disease expert Dr. Celine Gounder. Dr. Gounder, thank you so much
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