NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci is sitting before Congress, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on TV debating COVID lockdowns and Americans can’t agree on what science to trust.
If you squint, you might think it’s 2020 again.
Six years after COVID-19 thrust the world into the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past. Instead, they’ve recently returned its familiar political arguments to center stage for new scrutiny, demanding accountability for the scientists and media figures whom they feel deceived and mistreated Americans years ago.
The efforts ramped up last week, when a Republican-led Senate committee chaired by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul subpoenaed the now-retired, 85-year-old Fauci to testify about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The former National Institutes of Health immunologist repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, after accusing the lawmakers of trying to coerce him to perjure himself to justify criminal charges. In response to his choice, on Thursday, the committee passed a vote to hold Fauci in contempt, a stunning move that could motivate the Justice Department to initiate an investigation.
Separately, Kennedy, a politically independent former anti-vaccine activist who now serves as the Republican President Donald Trump’s health secretary, spent part of his weekend in a combative live debate with CNN host Dana Bash about how the pandemic was managed and the media’s role in it.
Political scientists and historians say the focus on COVID grievances half a decade after the virus’ peak demonstrates how some wounds it opened have never been closed. Democrats, meanwhile, have slammed the federal government’s blaming of Fauci as a performative distraction that’s not based in facts.
While both Paul and Kennedy have spent years airing their frustrations about COVID, the Republican takeover of Congress and the White House last year created a new platform for them to steer how America remembers the pandemic, and who is held responsible for it, according to Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University.
It’s also allowed them to use the administration’s resources to surface new information.
“The response to COVID has become a touchstone for Trump’s Republican Party,” Dallek said. “They’re using their power now to argue they were right all along.”
Pandemic grievances have simmered for years
When the coronavirus began spreading widely in 2020, under Trump’s first administration, groups of Americans revolted against requirements imposed by local authorities and businesses telling people to wear masks and stay at home to control the spread of the virus.
When a vaccine became available, those sentiments were supercharged. Figures like Kennedy, then a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, accused the federal government of trampling on personal liberties by supporting vaccine mandates and social media takedowns of dissenting ideas.
While Trump has long expressed pride in his first-term Operation Warp Speed effort to disseminate COVID-19 vaccines quickly, saving millions of lives, his second administration’s approach to the vaccines has taken a different tone.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, U.S. regulators have limited the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for Americans. Kennedy on CNN on Sunday questioned whether the COVID-19 vaccine protected children, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website that they “help keep children from getting really sick from COVID-19.”
Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist, said debates over COVID-19’s origins and the government’s handling of it have erupted on the fringes for years. Now that some of the leaders of those debates are in power, they’re hashing it out on the national stage — something she said needed to happen eventually.
“There are aggrieved parties, people who have a sense that they were done wrong during the pandemic and that there’s never been an accounting for that,” Lee said. “Most people don’t want to think about this topic, but nevertheless there are constituencies – so Congress is speaking to those constituencies.”
