Senate committee sets Fauci contempt vote as experts warn of fallout

Public health leaders fear harassment could deter future government service

The committee’s planned vote comes as the administration addresses outbreaks including measles, whooping cough, cyclosporiasis and Ebola. The proceedings have also renewed debate over the use and politicization of public health expertise during the pandemic.

Sen. Rand Paul released contemporaneous notes Fauci took while in public office. Paul called the material Fauci’s diary and said it showed the confusion and fear of the period.

Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University, said focusing on Fauci shifts attention from the Trump administration’s role in the pandemic response.

“By focusing entirely on one human being and by calling him all sorts of names, including ‘evil’, and by calling for him to be jailed, it abdicates Republicans’ own responsibility in the US response to the pandemic, which was under President Trump,” Yamey said.

“This is an extraordinarily good way to distract people from the very deliberate destruction of the US public health system,” Yamey said.

Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and wife of Stephen Miller, was involved in the White House COVID-19 response while serving as communications director for then-Vice President Mike Pence. She relied on Fauci during the pandemic, when he was director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease and chief medical adviser to seven presidents over three decades.

Fauci wrote that Miller was “great (tough, smart, but great)” on March 25, 2020, and that they “laugh at each other” in the situation room on May 6, 2020. When Miller tested positive for COVID-19, Fauci wrote that he called her several times a day and contacted her pediatricians about the baby’s care.

Miller later criticized Fauci. In September 2025, she wrote that “Fauci cared more about virtue signaling than science.” In June, she said “he should be in jail.” After Fauci’s notes became public, Miller claimed he used the pandemic to “maximize his popularity” and endorsed calls to prosecute him.

Miller told Notus she kept Fauci close so that he “did not leak against me or my husband.” On Thursday, she wrote that Fauci “weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself” and that “this man should be in prison.”

Céline Gounder, editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News and a member of the COVID transition team under Biden, said Miller’s private access to Fauci contrasted with limits placed on his public appearances. In February and March 2020, Fauci was told to stand down on media appearances until he received clearance, an episode Gounder called “muzzling Fauci.”

“The same expertise: she’s rationing public access, but it’s available to her in private,” Gounder said.

Gounder said pandemic politics also affected school reopening decisions. By fall 2020, “local partisanship predicted which districts would remain remote better than local Covid incidence did,” she said. Those decisions were made by about 13,349 public school districts, she said, rather than by Fauci.

Gounder also pointed to early access to experimental COVID-19 treatments for former President Donald Trump and his inner circle, nearly two months before the treatments were available to the public.

“A president publicly minimized a virus he was privately treated for with a drug the public couldn’t get,” Gounder said.

The public health workforce has also faced harassment and burnout. Gounder said there were 1,499 harassment events across 583 local health departments between March 2020 and January 2021, and that 222 officials left the field because of the targeting. A 2024 survey found that 71% of public health workers reported at least one symptom of burnout, while 20% reported near-constant symptoms.

Three senior CDC leaders resigned last August over politicization of the agency, Gounder said. One was fired after refusing to “rubber stamp” Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine policies.

That same month, a man fired more than 180 rounds into the CDC campus because of misinformation about the COVID vaccine. The man killed a police officer, David Rose.

“If you’re 40 and choosing between US government service and industry, that’s now part of the math, not just the vast differences in compensation,” Gounder said.

Yamey said he worries that the proceedings against Fauci will discourage future public health leaders from entering government service. He said the country faces current public health crises and decades of repair, but added: “But we will get there. We will all roll up our sleeves and build back, and hopefully build back better.”

As MSI previously reported, the Senate committee’s Thursday contempt vote follows Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment during a hearing focused on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The earlier report described the committee’s planned action.