Bernie Moreno

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- More than six years after COVID-19 turned the country upside down, Washington is still fighting the pandemic — only now the battle is less about public health than political score-settling.

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno made sure of that this week.

During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, Moreno unloaded on Dr. Anthony Fauci in a profanity-filled exchange that quickly ricocheted across cable news and social media. The confrontation became one of the central topics on Thursday’s Today in Ohio podcast, where the hosts dismissed it as a made-for-the-cameras spectacle.

The hearing itself was combative from the outset. Fauci, who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and said he has testified before Congress more than 200 times, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times. Moreno said the government’s pandemic response was what drove him to seek public office, questioned why Fauci had hired a prominent criminal defense attorney, asked whether he felt he was “in deep doo doo” — though Moreno used considerably stronger language — and ended with a blunt challenge: “Who the F- do you think you are?”

Lisa Garvin wasn’t buying any of it.

“He looked like he was doing a performance for his lord and master, Trump. That’s exactly what he was doing.”

Whether the hearing produced answers is debatable. It unquestionably produced attention. Clips spread rapidly through conservative media, Moreno dominated another national news cycle, and the political incentives behind the confrontation seemed obvious to the podcast hosts.

Host Leila Atassi argued that the hearing also ignored the reality of the moment Fauci faced in early 2020. Public health officials were confronting a virus no one fully understood. Vaccines didn’t exist. Effective treatments didn’t exist. Hospitals were filling with desperately ill patients.

“We lost more than a million Americans, even with extraordinary public health measures,” she said. “Imagine the death toll if we’d simply shrugged our shoulders and let the virus rip through nursing homes and workplaces before vaccines were available.”

The hearing wasn’t the only controversy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also turned over Fauci’s personal notes — retrieved from government servers — to Sen. Rand Paul’s committee, which then made them public. The entries, written between 2020 and 2022, include Fauci’s private reactions to lawmakers, including Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan. After one contentious 2020 hearing, Fauci wrote that he believed he had “made him look silly.” Jordan later fired back on Newsmax, calling Fauci “a joke from the beginning.”

For Atassi, the bigger issue wasn’t the back-and-forth itself. It was what comes next.

“What message do you think this sends to the next generation of public servants? If you’re asked to manage the next pandemic, are you going to keep honest notes and wrestle openly with uncertainty if Congress might subpoena your private diary six years later?”

Listen to the full episode here.

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