Five Lessons Learned From the Fauci Fiasco

Stephen Moore on Aug 4, 2026

COVID-19 was a traumatic experience for our families, small businesses, schools and country. Understandably, people don't like thinking or talking about it. But we must. We now know, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul's doggedness and Anthony Fauci's supreme arrogance that he freely expresses in his diary, almost every decision made by the medical industrial complex was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Fauci has blown himself up, and almost overnight he has gone from hero to antihero. Politicians and the media didn't take note of the fact that Fauci had a track record of hysterical and erroneous predictions about viruses before -- he was, for example, the public health official peddling the nonsense about heterosexual AIDS. Instead, when Fauci went on TV in front of tens of millions of Americans preaching Armageddon and contradicting everything Trump was saying, he became a saint. No wonder Fauci developed a god complex.

So what have we learned -- or what should we have learned?

One of the first takeaways from this sordid affair is that never again should we let politicians and "scientists" throw away Americans' basic constitutional and human rights and lock down our economy, businesses, churches, stores and schools. This was one of the greatest abuses of government power in American history. We know that lockdowns did not save lives because states like Florida that opened up their economies early had no higher death rates than states that shut down for nine months to a year.

The second takeaway is that we learned once again that the teachers unions don't care about kids. Without unions' outsized political power, schools across the country, especially in blue states, would have opened up at least six months earlier. Instead, healthy kids who were never vulnerable to the virus lost up to a year of schooling, which will lower their lifetime earnings by trillions of dollars over the next 40 years. This was child abuse. Remember this the next time the teachers unions spout off about how much they care about "the children."

The third takeaway is that the media must apologize to the American people for being so willingly bamboozled by a conman. They believed him because they desperately wanted to take down President Donald Trump. You can go to YouTube and watch for an hour the slobbering devotion that all the networks, The New York Times and CNN poured over Fauci.

One journalist who originally got the story wrong was ESPN's famous sports commentor Stephen A. Smith. But to his credit, Stephen A. has apologized for swallowing the Fauci lies. Good for him. We ALL make mistakes in judgment, and it's best to man up and admit when you're wrong. Stephen A.'s apology has probably enhanced his reputation.

But how many others in the press have done so? Not many. Worse, The New York Times ran an opinion piece last week accusing Paul of McCarthyism for bringing Fauci in front of the Senate committee so all Americans could see the criminal/liar exposed. Fauci previously said he would "love to testify" before congressional committees. So the villain was the whistleblower, not the criminal. Amazing.

The fourth takeaway is that we must remember that Fauci had an accomplice, and that was Deborah Birx. This was a Bonnie and Clyde operation. Deb has recently thrown Fauci under the bus and expressed how shocked she was by some of the admissions in his diary. But she was the lead voice in favor of school lockdowns, and she even bragged about it. She should be brought before Paul's committee. Something tells me she would be advised by counsel to take the Fifth as well.

Finally, we need to always have our guard up when politicians and "experts" tell us to "follow the science" -- such a dangerous proclamation. Whose science? Is it the science of those who 50 years ago told us the world was overpopulated and we were all going to run out of food? Was it the experts who threw phony models in our face about "global warming"? Was it the people who warned that fracking, which has added $5 trillion to the U.S. economy, was going to pollute the drinking water and cause earthquakes?

As many readers know, I was singled out by Fauci in his diary for trying to stop the lockdowns in early 2020. I had visited Trump in the Oval Office and pleaded with him to get the economy reopened as quickly as possible, something the president very much wanted to do. Fauci also tried to silence Scott Atlas, who served as a health adviser to Trump and opposed lockdowns. A government official telling the president to "shut up Stephen Moore" was not just asking the president to take away my right to free speech, it was an attempt to silence ALL opposition to the government policy.

The sweet irony is that in the end, the only one Fauci shut up was himself.

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Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.