Chris Cuomo’s Fauci Comments Spark Backlash

Anyone frustrated that Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to answer congressional questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment apparently needs a lecture from Chris Cuomo.

Yes, that Chris Cuomo: the former CNN host, current NewsNation personality and longtime Fauci defender who has never been especially gifted at reading the room.

After Fauci’s appearance before Congress on Wednesday, Cuomo posted a series of videos defending him. The response online was overwhelmingly negative, but that did not stop Cuomo from doubling down.

The controversy is not difficult to understand. In a 2022 CNN interview with Chris Wallace, Fauci said he had nothing to hide and was willing to explain and defend everything he had done during the pandemic. When the opportunity finally came, however, he repeatedly declined to answer questions.

That was striking for several reasons. Fauci was one of the most influential figures in the country’s pandemic response. He shaped federal guidance, appeared constantly in the media and became the public face of policies that affected nearly every American.

Those policies had enormous consequences. Children lost classroom time and fell behind academically. Elderly people died without family members beside them. Businesses closed. Mental health problems worsened. People were punished, shamed or excluded for refusing masks or vaccines. Others were dismissed as conspiracy theorists for raising reasonable questions about the origins of the virus.

Given all of that, it is not unreasonable for the public to expect answers. Cuomo disagreed.

“Is finding him in contempt of Congress going to make Fauci speak? I doubt it,” he said on NewsNation. “And we all know his answers anyway.”

That is a strange defense. During the pandemic, the public was repeatedly told that complex scientific questions should be left to the experts. People without medical credentials were instructed to stop questioning officials and “trust the science.” Now Cuomo argues that Fauci does not need to answer because everyone can simply guess what he would say.

Cuomo also suggested that Congress should grant Fauci immunity if lawmakers truly wanted his testimony. But Fauci had already received a broad preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden before Biden left office. Provided Fauci did not commit a new offense, such as lying under oath, the pardon was supposed to protect him from prosecution for covered conduct.

That makes the refusal to testify even harder to explain.

Cuomo later posted another video in which he portrayed Fauci as courageous for invoking the Fifth Amendment.

“If you were forced by the situation, where people were coming after you, to plead the Fifth and take everything that comes with that, what would you be doing right now?” Cuomo asked.

He said he would probably be curled up in the fetal position, but praised Fauci as “a real one.”

The performance was meant to sound tough. Instead, it came across as defensive and disconnected from the issue. Invoking a constitutional right is legally permissible, but it does not automatically make someone heroic. That is especially true when the person refusing to answer questions was one of the most powerful unelected officials involved in the pandemic response.

Cuomo then argued that Fauci had merely been placed in an impossible position by both the Trump and Biden administrations.

“You want to find out who started COVID? That’s great,” he said. “Are you saying Tony Fauci did? Are you saying America did? Then what are we talking about?”

But that framing avoids the real questions. Congress was not simply asking whether Fauci personally “started COVID.” Lawmakers wanted information about public-health decisions, government communications, research funding, internal discussions and the difference between what officials said publicly and what they believed privately.

Cuomo’s defense also carries more than a little irony. During the pandemic, he regularly interviewed his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in friendly and often comedic segments. Those appearances came while New York faced intense criticism over its nursing-home policies and while families were demanding accountability.

Chris Cuomo later lost his CNN job after revelations about his involvement in advising his brother during a sexual-harassment scandal.

The public remembers all of that. It remembers the nightly panic, the self-congratulatory interviews and the way powerful officials treated legitimate questions as dangerous misinformation.

That is why Cuomo’s latest defense of Fauci has gone over so badly. People are not angry because Fauci is an elderly man facing unfair criticism. They are angry because a central figure in one of the most disruptive periods in modern American history promised transparency, then refused to provide it.

The Western Journal