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Oh, for the best, expect the worst
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Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way
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it's going Hope for the best, Expect
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the worst, Hope for the best.
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Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, July 30, 2026. I am John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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And back again at long last, our longtime tech Commentary columnist, now a columnist on the free expression vertical at the Wall Street Journal and knower of all things technological and Covid related, James B. Meigs. Welcome back, Jim.
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It's great to be back, John.
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Okay, so we're gonna devote this podcast to the Fauci hearing and the Fauci diary and the Fauci controversies, because throughout the COVID period, Jim wrote at least six significant articles for commentary on the lab leak hypothesis, the public health response, the top down problem with public health seeming to impose its sort of totalitarian ideas on how people should live their lives and all of that. And the major thing that you were extremely cautious about was the discomfort with the question of whether or not the public health and social media and media atmosphere was making it impossible for people who had honest questions about the development of the COVID virus to get their views expressed in public and that they had been shut down, they had been deplatformed by social media, efforts were made to fire them, to defund them. The now what is the Great Barrington Declaration, which was the assemblage of scientists and virologists who expressed skepticism about the wet market theory of the COVID spread, were basically kept off the airwaves and out of respectable publications and all of that. So this was stuff that you read, but you were very careful to say, we don't know, we don't know if it was a lab leak or the wet market. We don't know. And we should understand that people are acting in somewhat good faith about how they need to suppress, how the COVID virus needed to be killed off at the very least, even if we didn't know how its origins were. Now here we are, 2026, the diary's out. Fauci has testified. We know all the things that we have come to know. How do you feel today, before we get into his testimony and the things that he said? How do you feel today about the lab leak theory, the wet market theory, and the question of the public health response from a four year vantage point?
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You know, at each stage, my Faith in these public officials has gone down by a big notch. Early on, I agreed that, you know, it was a chaotic situation. We didn't know exactly what was going on. You could understand some missteps or oversteps. You don't want a Monday morning, Monday morning quarterback. The early decisions. But as the, the pandemic went along and we saw our public health officials, most notably Anthony Fauci, who was really the face of the whole operation, even when he didn't have operational control over certain agencies, we saw how they gradually, how they didn't learn from experience. They didn't change their policies when new information came in. They served as handmaidens for. When the Biden administration came in, they served as handmaidens for the teachers unions and other activist groups. As, as you guys were saying on the podcast yesterday, there was this effort to use Covid as sort of a blanket validation of all kinds of progressive policies like no evictions and things like that. And the other thing that we saw was from the get go, this effort to suppress any discussion of the idea that the virus came from the Wuhan lab, which looking back, you know, it was so overwhelmingly likely that a bat related virus in a, you know, that had been modified emerge and hit the public, or probably possibly modified genetically emerge and hit the public right as the. Right in the city where the lab that specializes, the leading world's leading lab that specializes in that kind of research, where that was located.
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I was having conversation with somebody last night who has not followed the ins and outs of this over the last six years and was puzzled by the hostility to Fauci shown by Rand Paul and the senators.
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I'm glad you bring this up. I've had similar. I was going to bring up similar experiences.
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So, you know, those of us who were granularly involved in watching this, and of course, this podcast's evolution into a daily voice entirely the result of COVID We started doing it in the middle of March when everything shut down as a daily update on where we were with COVID as a way for the staff of commentary to sort of at least lay our eyes on each other over zoom, at the very least. And then it sort of grew from there. So this is something that we have been watching, we watched for two years on a daily basis like everybody else, but very, very focused. And people have forgotten or they haven't paid attention. So if we could try to come up with a narrative that explains why Rand Paul was so furious with Fauci and why Fauci said Rand Paul is obsessed with me and wants to throw me in jail. And that's why I'm going to take the fifth 111 times. There is a narrative that explains the lab leak. Then there is a narrative that explains why it was not a lab leak. And the narrative that explains why it was not a lab leak, it appears, has crumbled under the weight of circumstantial evidence over the last four years that the not a lab leak people had all kinds of reasons, personal, professional, and possibly criminal, to argue that it was a naturally occurring phenomenon and that In February of 2020, they had a meeting together and basically laid out the idea that they were going to make a phalanx say it was naturally occurring, say that anybody who said that it was a lab leak was a conspiracy theorist who had bad designs on Asian phobia, xenophobia, phobia against the, you know, this was a war against the Chinese and all of that. Can we start with the September 2019, this is why it was probably a lab leak origination date and sort of move forward just to lay that out, if that's right.
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Well, I would roll the date way back, much earlier, there had been a controversy around the gain of function research, where viruses are. You described it well yesterday. Viruses are modified genetically in ways that are supposed to mimic what might happen naturally. And then you have this more dangerous virus, and then you can say, okay, let's make a vaccine or let's study how we can control it if it happens to evolve in this way now, you know, one virologist I talked to compares this to looking for a gas leak with a lit match. You know, viruses escape from labs all the time. There have been many cases of disease infecting a lab worker and then getting out into the public. But this research was very controversial. There was kind of an outrage over one particular study. The Obama administration tried to put a clamp on it and asked the NIH to severely limit this kind of research and make sure it was only done under very, very close supervision. There were a few virus experts in the US who wanted to continue the research. Fauci was generally an advocate for gain of function research. The funding continued for some of this research through the EcoHealth Alliance. It was kind of a, you know, so the niaid, Fauci's agency wasn't making direct decisions over every grant handed out. And some of these grants went to research that was where American scientists and scientists at the Wuhan lab collaborated. And there were a number of projects they worked on together. So you could say this is a way of evading the American restrictions on the research. There was one particular proposal for a study that would take a sars, take a SARS virus, modify it with this, what's called a fern cleavage site, a spike protein that makes it bond to human cells in the respiratory tract more readily. And this is like a recipe for COVID 19. It's like the exact roadmap, if I can mix my metaphors, that did not come through Niad that came through. That proposal went to the Defense Department, but they turned it down. And so as far as we know, that research was not funded by the US What a lot of people, including me, suspect happened was by the time that proposal was made, the research was already underway. This happens frequently in science. People start a project and then it's going pretty well and they need more funding. The research proposal, the grant proposal, or it continued under Chinese supervision. So it sounds likely that Americans were not involved as that project went forward, if that was the source of COVID But there's every reason when we saw Covid to say, huh, that looks just like the project was called defuse. It looks just like that defuse proposal that was turned down. So when the virus started circulating in Wuhan, a lot of people, even those who didn't know about the diffuse proposal, were immediately suspicious. What's fascinating, what's going on now, and you mentioned that February 1st phone call is we have been told that all the leading scientists are very, you know, they don't think it's, they didn't think it was a lab leak. They were pretty sure it came from nature. But in fact on that call, one of the things that comes out in Fauci's diary, which was released by Rand Paul, was that most of the scientists on that call, leading scientists, were pretty suspicious it did come from the lab. And Fauci himself at one point said, well, it looks like it didn't come from the wet market. And the wet market was the main theory for if it did hop over from animals, that's the likely place because that's where it spread a lot in the city. So how did they go from all being pretty worried about what was going on in Wuhan, thinking it was pretty likely the virus or at least highly possible the virus came from a lab to. Six weeks later the same scientist published this paper, the famous proximal origin of SARS CoV2 paper that said there was no plausible, any kind of lab based scenario was not plausible, it had to have come from animals. How did they Go there. And that's where I believe we really are looking at something like a conspiracy here. There was an organized effort to deflect attention from the long history of American researchers and American funding going to the lab. It was too embarrassing, it might hurt. They probably justified it to themselves if this is how it happened, by saying, we have such important work to do, we're in the middle of a crisis. Having all this stuff come out about this controversial, which some of us were involved in, would be too distracting. There'd be a backlash. You know, these crazy Trump people would be all over it. Let's just sweep that under the rug. Let's just steer people away from it. And they did that very, very effectively over the next. It took about a year before the Lab League questions resurfaced in a, in a major public way. And as you say, not only did they, did they get the press to drop the story, they really intimidated other scientists into dropping or they thought, oh well, all these leading people say there's a clear scientific explanation, that it must have come from animals. So I don't need to look into it because they've already settled the question. You know, scientists can, you know, first, they have a lot of self protection because they get the NIAID was the major source of grant funding in this field. But also nobody wants to be a total outlier and isolated with an unpopular opinion. Very few people are willing to do that. So this conspiracy of silence was very, very effective. And to some degree, even though they've gradually dragged this information out by any means necessary, after Fauci and his crew tried to hide it to some degree, this sort of quasi cover up is continuing to this day. If you look at how the media covered the hearings yesterday,
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Well, John, let me just jump in on one little thing. The Great Barrington Declaration was focused on shut down school closures and the social impact of those. The lab leaks thing was a slightly different thing, but the point stands. Those guys are really treated like wacky outliers. And it was hard to stand up and say, hey, we need to look at this.
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I was going to say, John, as someone who traveled a similar path to yours, I think you're being a little harsh on yourself because don't forget, while there were serious dissenters of the dominant narratives, there were also very popular crazy crank critiques that are still circulating. Everything from Bill Gates is gonna put something in the vaccine to this entire thing was planned to sort of change the social organization of the world and create a world government or something and everything in between. So there was reason to be discerning and cautious and just something I want to touch on in talking about the original lab leak origin switcheroo. Is that the other maddening thing about this? Well, two more maddening things about this. One is that it let China off the hook for its mishandling and deception of the mishandling. That's a serious problem. And the other is don't forget about the crackdown on dissent in terms of social media platforms where you would be silenced, taken off or whatever, you know, shadow banned or whatever. Else for a dissenting opinion on this. Even those dissenting opinions that turned out
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to be right, and even more important, that they were directed to do so by the federal government, which was suppressing the speech, was actively working under the grounds that we were in an emergency condition in which tens of millions of people would die if people didn't behave the right way. That the federal government was directing private companies to suppress the speech of Americans. That was one of the two things that had, I think, all of us going, oh, wait a minute there, buddy. That was one. And the other was. And this pops up in the Fauci diary when the mask slipped from the. We need to control everybody because the disease is gonna spread. There were these moments of mask slippage, and Andrew Cuomo was the king of the mask slippage, right? So he was having these daily briefings. He was a hero. And then he would announce that he was going to allow bars to open in the summer of 2020, but only if they were 25%. If the occupancy hit 25% of the sort of fire code. And they couldn't serve food. They could only serve and had to serve food.
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Oh, they had to serve food.
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Oh, they had to serve food. That's right. I'm sorry. They had to serve food.
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And.
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And they had to close by 10pm so the virus could go to sleep.
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So one point it was 25%. Another point it was 30. And you could see how it was like he was sitting like a general with a map with little warplanes and little tanks, moving them around to see how he wanted to control the businesses and populations of New York State. And Fauci has these moments in the diary and had his own moments, like when he said, I'll declare the pandemic over when 80% of Americans get both shots. In the diary, he says he was told by whoever it was that told him that the second shot was largely unnecessary, that in fact, it did not have a preventative effect. It only had a lengthening effect on the efficacy of the Moderna virus. Remember that we were still in pandemic conditions for a year on the grounds that we weren't hitting the proper numbers that were totally invented. 80%, 90%, 60%. We weren't hitting the numbers properly for the federal government to take its boot off the throat of American businesses, American education and all of that. And that's one of the salient details in the diary that reveals that there was extraordinary bad faith, I think. So that's my take. Jim, do you have an overall take aside from the obvious comic vanity stuff that everybody is, you know.
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Yeah. Well a lot has come out in the last few weeks. There was the release of the diaries, which I wanna know, we call em diaries. They were, they were records made on his work computer stored on a database at work.
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That's why we have them. We have them because they were not his private. They were. Yeah, he wrote them on a government computer.
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You know, he's acting like it's some great violation of his privacy. But these are work records of, you know, his meetings and stuff. And then we also have this trove of slack messages between his ad hoc crew of top virus advisors. And these include the authors of the proximal origin paper. A lot of the people who were on that February 1st call, top leaders in the field and their communications are just jaw dropping. First of all, how kind of vicious and vindictive they are. Anyone who questions the. They were doubting the lab leak theory. Nonetheless they were pushed, cajoled, whatever into writing this proximal origin paper to stress no lab scenario was plausible. There's evidence that a lot of that pressure came from Fauci and from Collins, the overall head of nih, who they called the Bethesda Boys, that they were really orchestrating this. And then if anybody but they had all these doubts but then they, in public they were in lockstep that the lab leak thing was impossible. And then when anybody came out with some questions about it and one of the principal one is this remarkable woman named Alina Chan. And I've quoted her many times in commentary columns, city journal pieces. She co wrote a book with Matt Ridley early on about the origins of the virus. And she was a postdoc at Harvard, MIT Broad Center. great risk to her career, she started looking into this. She published an early paper asking questions about the genome, whether it had been manipulated. So she was one of the first to kind of as a scientist break this out. They are vicious to her. They call her an idiot. They at one point even imply violence to her, I assume kind of joking. But the nastiness is just, it's so much not what you want to hear from science leaders. You know, you know that these things get personal. But it's kind of stunning. And you know, I use the word conspiracy to describe this. It really, you know me, I'm a. I've spent a lot of my career arguing against nine, 11, you know, truthers and stuff. But conspiracies do happen. And this was one. Not a conspiracy to make invent Covid, not a plandemic, but to hide the associations between are public health institutions, grant making organizations and leading scientists. And this research that was going on in the Wuhan lab. And you can see them working kind of behind the scenes to talk about how to marginalize people, how to take down ideas that they didn't like, how to shut down discussions. And I have to say I started out seeing Fauci and I think earlier in his career he was a well intentioned public servant, but over the years he accumulated so much power that when this hit, he felt that it was his job in this sort of imperious fashion to really be the czar of not just Covid, but Covid information. You know, Covid and he, you know, he personally visited other agencies and leaned on them to take certain positions, to censor certain kinds of speech. And when the Biden administration came in, they went whole hog on this stuff. So it is a pretty shameful episode. And I had one of those conversations myself with a friend the other day and I was talking about some of this. He goes, well, no, I just think they were, you know, they were doing their best in a difficult situation. They meant well. I no longer think that. I no longer think they meant well. I think they were attempting to protect their own prestige and power and avoid bad publicity for some terrible decisions that had been made earlier that, that may have contributed to this worldwide scourge. I mean, that is, it's kind of outrageous that six years after the pandemic, we still haven't had a full investigation. You know, after the space shuttle, immediately, Reagan ordered this blue ribbon commission. Neil Armstrong was on it. I mean, you know, all these top people, Feynman, you know, the most famous physicist, all these top people were on this committee to investigate the space shuttle thing. NASA totally opened their books. They were, they wanted to get to the bottom. There was complete transparency. The opposite happened here. The exact opposite. Covering up, avoiding Freedom of Information act request, figuring out how to sidestep things, stonewalling Congress. I think it's a real shameful story.
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It was actually nature. Actually it was nature medicine, but same idea.
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I'm sorry. Anyway, so they sent this letter saying there was no chance of a lab. They with foreknowledge of the fact that there was no way to say that it wasn't a lab leak. Let's just give them the benefit of the doubt and say they thought maybe the preponderance of evidence suggested that it wasn't a lab leak. Though in fact, it seems to me the preponderance of evidence suggested the opposite. But even if you believed otherwise, you can't say there's no way that it was a lab leak. That's crazy. Like, you know, that's not science. Like there was no determinant. It had barely started spreading yet. They were already covering it up before everybody started to get sick. People started to get sick in America in March, not in February and not in January.
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And they were already. Fauci was already calling it a conspiracy theory.
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Your column, Jim, has dates that as dates that. To February 1st of that year, February 1st, 2020. So really early, you have Fauci organizing that call of all the virologists and everybody, and signing and putting out a statement, a combined statement, saying essentially there's no way this would. There's no evidence this could have been a lab leak on February 1st. So the talking points.
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The statement came out March 16th. The letter was published March 16th.
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D
But.
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E
Right. It was incredibly early to be fighting this action. You know, to answer a question that very few people were even asking yet.
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I mean, it was. I think it was either March 13 or March 15 that everything shut down. It was in New York. That was when the theater shut down. That was when the Madison Square Garden shut down. And that was the moment when everything changed. So we're talking about six weeks earlier now. I went to a bat mitzvah that weekend, like March 7, something like that. And five or six people at that bat mitzvah who had been at the big AIPAC meeting in Washington two weeks earlier. Five or six people got really, really serious, life threatening cases of COVID So it was like one of the first super spreader events. Two close friends of mine were like, in the ICU at Mount Sinai. One of them really did nearly die. They already. They were pooh, poohing the danger of COVID in February. That's the other part that we forget. It's not like I was hearing from friends of mine who do risk assessments for like, hedge funds who were saying, sell, you know, like, everything's gonna go. Everything's going haywire. That's what we're hearing from our people in China and all of that. And de Blasio is telling people to go shop in Chinatown. There was no sense of impending doom at all in February, except Fauci and the virologists seemed to know that doom was coming soon. And what they needed to do was, was rather than warn and start organizing, including ventilators and all of that stuff that we ended up getting so crazy about, they decided that they needed to create a phalanx to advance one simple view and go with that.
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C
It's funny, I have so many. I still have questions about the ventilators because people forget the ventilator madness. We didn't have enough. We had to start manufacturing them. And then they just stopped using them anyway. I mean, well, they were, they were bad.
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It turned out that the ventilators were.
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C
That's what I want to know is
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how bad they weren't. They weren't killing. But I mean, they were, they were kind of. They're very. Making people worse. It's like apparently it's a very extreme thing to put somebody on a ventilator and, you know, like triggers your immune system and does all kinds of things. But that was. Yeah, so we were obsessed with ventilators. We were washing our groceries, we were covering our hands instead of our mouths. Then it turned out that the masks were ineffectual, but you still had to wear them. That's what I mean about the intimidation stuff. We were already. Masks were nonsense in August of 2020 and my kids went to school for a year in masks. I did not believe in the efficacy of masks, but I was wearing them. We were all wearing them. We were on subways wearing them. We were everywhere. We were wearing them. Our kids had to wear them. You had no way of being sort of like the village atheist. You would be ostracized, you would be, you know, your kids wouldn't be allowed to go to school.
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C
I just want to touch on Jim's point that he, at some point he came to believe that certain officials were no longer doing their best, but, you know, but didn't have complete knowledge or whatever, you know, one of the details of Fauci's diary or records or whatever it is. You know, there are all these entries showing his preposterous self regard and vanity. And it's safe to say I'm one of the five most important talked about people in the world. And then I'm a sex symbol. And you know, and all this stuff. And that's not a sideshow to the main story, you know, to the, to the deception. It's the same story because it shows how. And Andrew Cuomo also falls into this category. It shows the mindset that allowed these people to act as if they could wave their magic wand, pronounce anything, say anything, set anything in motion and it's going to work and people are going to buy it. The self regard is a big part
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D
of the deception and the way it caught on. There's a 2021 clip of Gretchen Whitmer, who is governor of Michigan, talking to cnn and in the background there's a Fauci throw pillow.
- [41:16]
A
Well, that is very true. And it's Important because of the loop, the feedback loop, which is Fauci. They say we're closing the schools. Was there a nationwide. What are you crazy? You can't close schools. Our kids are going to have learning loss. How am I going to take care of my kids and do work if they're not allowed to go to school? What are they going to learn? How is this going to happen? The feedback loop was everybody who was telling you that schools need to be closed were making heroic decisions to save millions of lives, and you were gonna complain that it was a little inconvenient for you not to have to figure out how to deal with your kids at home. This was gonna kill the planet off. And so they. There was no brush back. There was no blowback. There was merely a consensus that they were partially architects of, to protect themselves to. You know, and then weird things happened like Cuomo's. You know, basically Cuomo's ouster as governor of New York, which nominally came as a result of his, you know, sexual harassment of women. I think that was a cover for the fact that the nursing home scandal in New York State had completely, had gone viral among people and had made him finally vulnerable for his actions and his behavior. When people learned about the nursing homes and the suppression of data from the nursing homes and all of that, and that made the press uniquely for the first time, able to start publishing critically about Cuomo. And then that was a sort of a boulder that started rolling down the hill. That never happened with Fauci. And I think one of the reasons is that the distorting figure of Trump. So we should maybe just. Trump was president. He was making those press conferences. He was saying, what about bleach or what about showing white light down people's throats or whatever seemed inconstant and nuts. But I'll tell you another story, which is that Trump said, what about this hydrochloroquine, this possible, this medicine that you could take that would alleviate the symptoms of COVID or cure you from COVID And he mentioned it and there was this explosion. He's so irresponsible. What does he do? This is horrible. How dare. What? This is crazy. So it just happens. I have a friend, I'm not going to say who it is. Commentary, contributor, doctor, Very, very, very senior, very distinguished medical professional of very long standing who got Covid and his son in law got Covid and his daughter got Covid and He prescribed all three of them hydrochloroquine in May of 2020, and they were cured. I knew this, this happened like this happened to the opposite of a crazy person. And he was like, why not? You know, I'm 90, I'm not harming myself because if it goes wrong, it goes wrong. And I don't think it'll harm my son in law and my daughter. So even Trump, everything Trump said was deemed crazy. And even this hydrochloroquine thing became a. That was evidence of madness.
- [45:09]
E
It really wasn't. You see this in the lab leak thing as soon as Trump mentioned it. Well, actually, I mean, they started trying to suppress it long before Trump mentioned it. I don't think Trump mentioned the idea of a lab leak until April and. But Tom Cotton had mentioned it as a possibility. Tom Cotton's mention was misrepresented in the Washington Post as if he'd said China deliberately released this as a bioweapon. He said it sounds quite likely that it was an accidental release, but his statement was misrepresented. There was really very little talk about it when this whole idea of suppressing the lab leak possibility went into action. But then over the next couple of years, the idea that it might have been a lab leak was seen as serving sort of a MAGA interest in criticizing elites, criticizing the public health system, which of course we now know really merited that criticism. They were operating very irresponsibly with this gain of function research. Many leading members of that community thought it was irresponsible. But once the, the COVID happened, most of them kind of closed ranks and kept their mouths shut. And what I'm interested in. It took a couple of years, but eventually the arguments for the lab leak got more of a fair hearing. Even the New York Times did some pretty good pieces on the issue. It seemed like we were coming back around to a more balanced view of the question. But it's really interesting what's happened since. Since Fauci retired and wrote his autobiography, a lot of the press has kind of drifted back to their original settings. And you see this in the way that they covered yesterday's hearing in the Times today. There's a columnist compares Rand Paul to Joe McCarthy, you know, on this kind of crazed quest to root out, you know, to destroy the reputation of one man. And I'm not a huge Rand Paul fan in many areas, but, you know, he's right about this. And his efforts to drag out these documents that they've been trying to keep hidden has really served the public interest and he has every right to be, to be fired up about it. But the press has largely covered this as poor Anthony Fauci, this brave public servant, once again dragged to this humiliating ritual and being threatened. And yeah, it's true, a lot of the things these guys say, some of the stuff Trump says is over the top. But the misdeeds of Anthony Fauci and his cohort are serious and they require a sober investigation, which we haven't had. And the press is acting like this is all just some kind of a, you know, a right wing sideshow and a personal vendetta against, you know, basically, nice guy. I don't buy it. I reviewed his autobiography. He doesn't come clean about any of this stuff. He barely talks about the lab leak. He spends maybe two pages on it. He cites. He says, well, it's still overwhelmingly likely it came from an animal. And then he cites two papers supporting the wet market theory, both of which have been, if not debunked, seriously challenged by leading scientists to the degree which it's journalistically irresponsible to cite them without noting that they've been seriously challenged, if not debunked. So he kind of expected readers of his autobiography just sort of go along with his version of events. Many of them did. It got very positive reviews. I remember the New York Times said Dr. Fauci deserves his victory lap. No, he doesn't. No, he doesn't. He had a long career, did a lot of great things. His work on AIDS was really impressive. But he was in that position too long. He acquired too much power. He abused that power when we needed a fair minded, sober, disciplined leader of our public health bureaucracy. More than ever,
- [49:39]
A
I think. Also there's polling in the last couple of days, terrible polling for Trump,
- [49:46]
D
bad
- [49:46]
A
generic polling for the Republicans. But then if you dig into it, the polling for the Democratic Party is equally catastrophic. 70% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. 19% have a favorable view. Why am I bringing this up in this context? Because though there has not been the reckoning, though this phalanx has managed to prevent the 9, 11 Commission, Warren Commission, Challenger Commission kind of approach to this national emergency catastrophe, the public that lived through it, and I think particularly parents, remain angry about what happened. And they know that Trump was president for 10 months of it and Biden was president for four years later, and this lack of faith in institutions, this lack of trust in political parties, they're responding to Republicans and Trump and all that. Based on what's going on in America right now, I believe that data like that suggests that they are responding to the condition of the United States as a result of what happened in the 2000s. And Covid remains the most important thing that happened in this country in the 2000 and twenties, possibly in this century, given what we seem to know about how damaging this was to people, Americans between the age of 7 and 15 who were alive, you know, who were so and what it means in terms of their learning loss, their emotional fragility, the mental health crisis that was epidemic in the United States among teens because of the social isolation and the acceleration of the use of social media as a substitute for personal interaction that turned out to be not only unsatisfying, but also maybe character destroying. And so I do think that that reckoning you're talking about hasn't happened, but it happens anyway without us seeing it or without it being organized. And I thought was striking about Paul in the first 15 minutes of the hearing was how sober, judicious, and disciplined he was in his approach to Fauci, who began by insulting him and made a statement before he said, I'm taking the Fifth. So he actually got a lick in before he said, I'm not going to speak anymore. And Paul just asked him the questions that he was going to ask him in his time as chairman of the committee. And they were all perfectly reasonable questions that any sober person could have answered. And that is why he deserves surprising respect from us. I think he's a reckless and irresponsible person on foreign affairs and other questions. But this was something else. And if you watched it, which most people, I'm sure how many of us actually watched the opening statement of the, the chairman of the committee, they saw clips of Fauci taking the Fifth. But if you watched it, he was getting the better of the exchange only in the sense that he was asking a personal, perfectly reasonable question. Then Fauci said, I take my, you know, on the advice of my attorneys, I am, you know, fifth Amendment, on the advice of my attorneys, Fifth Amendment. And then it looks bad and that will have lingering consequences. It's also worth noting that Jay Bhattacharya is now head of the National Institute of Health, the person that I was too chicken to book on the Commentary podcast back in 2020. So that's also a way in which there's some kind of self correcting mechanism, even if it is trolling, even if it's sort of Trump trolling by picking,
- [54:33]
D
I mean, but, but also it's like, you know, they, they, I, we were, we were having this discussion the other night with friends about the. Somehow the Chernobyl miniseries came up, the HBO's miniseries, which is fantastic, really, really great. And I, I can't. I haven't been able to stop thinking of COVID and that because the lying for some kind of. First of all, the noble lie. Second of all, the belief that you. You couldn't trust the people. Third of all, the belief that if you, if you angered the wrong person in the government, who knows what would happen? You know, this guy wanted to hear good news. This guy wanted to hear this kind of news that blah, blah, blah. And the, the What I saw, what was just how much. Just how Soviet the COVID response looked. Now, I don't want to over. I don't want to over sell that because unlike China, we did not literally seal people inside of apartment buildings, which China did. I mean, China did actual totalitarian stuff that would haunt your dreams. We didn't do that. But, you know, the, the attempts to dispose of the bodies of seniors, you know, outside of hospitals in New York and things like that. I mean, there were these moments where it was like we kind of tiptoed up to a line where I think people and other types, people who live under other types of government might recognize it, I guess, is what I'm saying. And I think that lingers with this idea that, you know, I don't like how Soviet this looked. Not that, you know, not that they took it to all the way to 10, but, you know, a six on the Soviet scale is pretty horrific for a free country to, you know, or something like that. And the worry that, you know, some people have said their worry about Trump is less Trump and more that he has paved the way for somebody who would be better at doing the things that Trump wants to do, you know, did. To take it, dismantling the government, being corrupt, whatever.
- [56:41]
A
Yeah.
- [56:42]
D
And I think you have to worry. This may have the same worries about what happened with Foushee and the movement that he was at the top of, which is, you know, there were. Not that it was a practice run for a planned. Again, to be clear, this is not plan Demic conspiracy theory nor, you know, but that you have to worry that people will get better at managing the public in this way. And that's one of the reasons we have to have this reckoning. Just to say, like, it's not that we necessarily want people thrown in jail. We need to have. We need to all be on the same page with, don't do the noble lie again. Trust the public, be honest with the public. These are Things that in the future have to be done. I don't need you rotting in a cell. I just need to know that we all recognize that it shouldn't have looked like Chernobyl at any point in the process.
- [57:35]
A
I want to bring, I mean, an interesting point here is that this happened naturally, without us knowing it also. So let's talk about the vaccine. So we had this heroic development of the MRNA vaccine, you know, coming basically into use 10 months after the, after the outbreak of the pandemic operation. Warp speed, right? And you know, we all remember desperately trying to find a site to get our vaccinations. I had to go to Aqueduct racetrack to get mine, you know, two months after I could get the appointment, all of that. So if you were doing the Moderna vaccine, you had one and then you had the second, and you had to have both. And you had a, you know, card, you put it in your wallet, showed that you had had both vaccinations and all that. And then, you know, a year, however long passes and people are noticing that people are still getting Covid even though they've been vaccinated. And so the response was, get another vaccination, you need a third vaccination. And at this point people went, eh, all right, beat it. You know, if you were over 70 or over 75, you got the third vaccination. But people were like, you know what? I know what vaccination is supposed to prevent disease. I understand your argument that this, you know, this mitigates the effect of the disease, it lessens the effect of the disease if you get it. And it did have an effect in, you know, weakening the virus and all of that. But you over promised here, and your response is that I'm supposed to just keep going to the doctor and getting a needle in my arm or having my kids go get a needle in their arm and I'm done with you. And that happened without the reckoning, that happened without the trust. The people, the people were incredibly obedient. Obedience on maybe were incredibly responsible based on the information they had. Incredibly responsible. And then two years passed and they were like, enough. And mysteriously, it was enough. The Biden people backed off. Fauci backed off. They all. But they felt the change in the atmosphere. The New York Times stopped publishing the death toll on the front pages every day. All of that because they had gone too far and their answers had stopped being relevant. And their insistence that people do things that they did not understand why they had to do was no longer enough to direct the population to behave in ways that the elites wanted them to behave.
- [60:43]
D
Yeah. And also there's a responsibility in. I mean, along those lines. Right. There were other instances where people in the moment reacted responsibly and should have told us that we were better prepared and maybe more trustworthy as a people. I mean, one of the most incredible things about COVID and it really is incredible, I watched. I. I would come home from work and. And throw on whatever sports was on right. On the TV in the background. And so I happened to be watching the ESPN double header in NBA doubleheader on March 11, I think it was. Right. And that was the day that Covid arrived, essentially. Not a government official, but Rudy Gobert, a player for one of the teams, tested positive at courtside for Covid. The teams got together at tip off and said, I think we have to cancel the game. There was a second game of the doubleheader that was supposed to go on afterwards. The crew was all there and the stadium was full and they didn't know what to do. And they talked with the refs, they talked with the coaches. They had the halftime performer perform his halftime performance now, before tip off to buy time to figure out what was going on. And the whole time. And this was really something almost like only in America, in a way. Scott Van Pelt was the anchor for the NBA season on ESPN at the time.
- [62:26]
B
His.
- [62:27]
D
His broadcast is a. Like Walter Cronk, Cronkite belongs in a museum of American history sort of thing, because he has. He's not a news guy and he's not a science guy. He's a sports guy. And he. He is introducing the pandemic and its consequences to the country, because that's what they were watching at that moment.
- [62:54]
A
Well, Jim, I want Jim to conclude this, because this takes us back to Jim's origins, the Jim Leak origins of Jim Megs and Commentary, now that Jim Meigs is no longer, sadly, a monthly columnist for Commentary. But this was the subject of your early work for the magazine.
- [63:22]
D
Yeah.
- [63:23]
A
Which is.
- [63:23]
E
Yeah, yeah, I thought about that when you mentioned the overreaction of the authorities. I did a piece in China 2020 about the response to the big earthquake in Alaska in the early 60s and how the public all came together and helped each other and saved people and searched buildings. But the police department was more worried that they were all going to go rampaging through downtown, and they sent their people out to protect, you know, the downtown shops and stuff from the wave of misbehavior they expected. And people who study disasters call this Elite panic. It's a slightly melodramatic term, but it's very common for people in positions of authority when there's a disaster to, instead of focusing on the disaster, focus on the out of control, panicked law breaking behavior that they expect from the public. They have a low opinion of the public. You saw this after Katrina when there was stories of gangs of youth, you know, going around with guns and shooting at helicopters. Not true, but it affected the response. It slowed down the rescue response when people were worried about, you know, having their helicopters be shot at. And we certainly saw it in COVID 19, the idea that the public couldn't handle the truth. And you mentioned when we started in the fall of 2021, realizing there were these breakthrough infections with people who were vaccinated, a big episode happened up in Provincetown, Cape Cod, when there was some kind of big gay festival.
- [65:04]
A
There was a rave, I think.
- [65:05]
E
Yeah, kind of. Yeah, the bears. You know, you can go back and look at Andrew Sullivan's coverage of this. The. And a lot of these guys were vaccinated and they got Covid. And that was an early. It was a warning sign that the vaccine didn't really prevent these breakthrough infections, although it did reduce the intensity of the symptoms. The officials didn't want to talk about it. They pretended it wasn't happening for a long time. And again and again you saw these situations where new information came in, but they didn't trust the public to understand it. Levels of nuance, the trade offs that have to be made or to make their own decisions, they prefer to keep kind of a lockstep. There's a great book on this from my friend David Zweig called An Abundance of Caution. And he just saw his own kids out of school in a little town near where I live in Westchester, his own kids were out of school. And he started asking questions about what the hell was going on, why were they out of school so long. And the more he looked into it, the more outraged he became that there was no science, there was no scientific justification for these extended school shutdowns. Almost immediately, as you talked about at the time a lot, John, was almost immediately the evidence was coming in that children were almost uniquely safe from COVID There was also evidence that teachers weren't at particular risk from being in that environment. And you can understand the initial school closures, but when they lingered on, you know, Europe had gone back to school, Japan had gone back to school, but American kids and men, especially in blue states, were really kept out of schools for a long time. The masking for a long time with no good justification. Fauci could have ended all of that with just a few words. He'll say, well, I wasn't in his autobiography, I wasn't responsible for this. I wasn't responsible for that. But he was the face of the government's COVID policy. He could have said a few words and change the tone so that all these states, all these other agencies would have have been given permission, the permission structure, to use an old commentary podcast term, the permission structure to moderate their policies. He never did it.
- [67:13]
A
Jim Meiggs, I'm so glad that you could join us to illuminate this very interesting week. I don't know where we go from here with this, whether there will be, whether there'll be more revelations to come, what will happen with this question of Fauci being held in contempt of Congress, whatever, but this is an ongoing American story because the consequences of what happened here are generational and we have not, we only scratched the surface sociologically of understanding the effects of the pandemic and the American response to the pandemic. And we'll be living with those analyses, I think, probably for the rest of my life, maybe. Seth, a much younger fellow than I, will something else.
- [68:14]
C
I'm sorry to interrupt your wrap up, but I should say one of the legacies that we didn't really touch on, in addition to the, the lack of socialization and the isolation and the stunted development and all of that, the sort of other side of that is the backlash to everything we're talking about and the wild unbridled wave of distrust that it unleashed across this country. And that's all. You don't put that back in the bottle so easily either.
- [68:50]
A
I mean, very important point here because of course we know that it is very dangerous to our polity, that people have lost faith in the institutions that are meant to be part of the self governing structure of the United States. And therefore their power should be mitigated and their ability to misbehave should be mitigated by our system of checks and balances and by the fact that this is a country in which the governed are only governed by consent and something was interrupted there. And we are now living in a world in which people don't trust the Republicans, they don't trust the Democrats, they don't trust the health system, they don't trust the banks, they don't trust the tech companies, nobody trusts anybody. Except I think people trust the military, they trust the military, and that's really about it. And I think there was a time 20 years ago when if you'd asked, do you trust your doctor or do you trust like the healthcares, not the healthcare system because they don't like the insurance companies, but do you like the American Medical, you know, do you trust your healthcare professionals who you work with? They probably. That would have been very much like the military now. And I just don't think people feel that way even about their doctors now. And so, you know, we don't know how we're going to survive that either. Like that loss of faith in institutions is a loss of faith in our Republican structure, really. And so again, something we're going to be living with forever. So again, Jim Meggs in to be read weekly on the free expression vertical at the Wall Street Journal and in in City Journal, and always a pleasure. And so for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod. Horace. Keep the candle burning.
- [71:08]
B
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak. Yay. Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows, Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [72:05]
F
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [72:39]
E
When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else.
- [72:44]
A
I was at Harvard Law School.
- [72:45]
B
I was. Blah, blah, blah.
- [72:46]
A
I looked up.
- [72:47]
G
Let me tell you something.
- [72:47]
E
There's kids in my neighborhood putting in
- [72:49]
A
Sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.
- [72:52]
C
It is never going to disrupt physical
- [72:55]
A
blue collar trade skill. And the guy just looked at me and he said it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question.
- [73:01]
G
I said it's impossible.
- [73:03]
F
Unless that's Podcast with me Matt ebert watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts
- [73:13]
G
from the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of experience extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.