Diane Mufson: Fauci inquisition was a distraction from GOP failings

Diane Mufson's column asks us to believe the Fauci hearings were a distraction manufactured by people incapable of governing, and that the real story is somewhere else entirely. Fine, but distraction from what, exactly? The gain-of-function funding questions, the shifting mask guidance, the six-foot rule Fauci himself later admitted wasn't based on much science, the school closures that cost a generation of kids a year or more of learning. Those aren't sideshow topics. They're the actual policy decisions that shaped millions of American lives for two years, made by an unelected official who rarely had to answer for them in real time.

Calling it a "media circus" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Congressional oversight of a public health official who spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and set mandates for the entire country isn't circus behavior, it's the bare minimum of accountability. If the hearings were performative or repetitive at times, sure, that happens in Congress on both sides of the aisle. But dismissing the substance because you don't like the tone is how you avoid answering the actual questions.

The piece leans hard on "GOP failings" as the real issue, without naming what those failings are beyond implication. That's a rhetorical move, not an argument. You can think Republicans have plenty to answer for and still think Fauci does too. Those aren't competing claims, they're both true at once, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of framing that lets people dodge scrutiny by pointing at the other guy's mess.

What's missing from this take is any acknowledgment that trust in public health institutions collapsed for real reasons during COVID, not because Republicans staged a spectacle but because the guidance kept changing and nobody in charge wanted to say so plainly. Asking Fauci to explain that isn't a distraction. It's the job.