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Column: Anatomy of a smear — Fauci faces the House GOP's clown show about COVID
Here’s what we know about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci: As a staff member at the National Institutes of Health for 54 years and director of its National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, Fauci was a key figure in the development of therapies for HIV and ensuring that funding was available for the search for a cure.
Under his leadership, NIAID invested billions of dollars in research that resulted in the development of mRNA technology, which in turn resulted in the development of COVID-19 vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives.
Under Fauci, NIAID also sponsored research into treatments for pandemic flu and the Ebola and Zika viruses. When COVID struck, he was tapped as a top advisor to then-President Trump — one of seven presidents he has advised during his career, from Reagan through Biden.
There have been credible death threats leading to the arrests of two individuals, and ‘credible death threats’ means someone who clearly was on his way to kill me.
— Anthony S. Fauci
He’s revered in the communities of immunologists and virologists; even after Trump sidelined him because he was speaking truths about COVID that Trump didn’t like, he was a prominent spokesman for a scientific approach to the pandemic.
Here’s how he was depicted by Republicans during a hearing Monday of the GOP-dominated Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus: as the mastermind of “dogmatic” policies that resulted in school closings and business failures, of forced vaccinations, of “one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the U.S. has ever seen.”
As the financial sugar daddy of research overseas that created COVID. As the sponsor of policies that are “fundamentally un-American.” As a liar and hypocrite.
None of those accusations, which were aired Monday by subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and other Republican members, has the slightest relationship with truth.
They’re all elements of a campaign among Republicans and right-wingers aimed at painting Fauci, 83, who retired from NIAID in December 2022, as “a comic-book supervillain,” in the words of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
Why are they doing this? One answer must be that conspiracists always need a target to attack in order to attract followers.
At the core of this campaign is the Republican conviction that COVID escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Since there is absolutely no evidence for this theory that anyone has yet produced, Plan B has been to smear anyone in the firing line. Unfortunately for Fauci, he’s the designated “it.”
As I’ve reported many times, according to reputable scientists who have studied the origin of COVID, scientific evidence suggests that it’s overwhelmingly more likely that COVID reached humans the same way most viruses do, as spillovers from wildlife — in this case, via a thriving trade in China in animals susceptible to the virus.
Let’s look at the particular rabbit holes into which the subcommittee has burrowed to smear Fauci, as set forth during the 3½ hour congressional hearing Monday and in a 15-hour interrogation of Fauci by the subcommittee in January, a transcript of which was released over the weekend along with a memo that misrepresented and cherry-picked his answers.
The committee members are fixated on the notion that Fauci “suppressed” discussion of the possibility of a lab leak. Why would he do that? Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) proposed an answer.
“It’s obvious to everyone,” he said, “that you and your organization, NIH, had a lot to lose if the American people were to discover that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and that you … actually funded this research.”
The problem there is that, first, Fauci has to this day stated that he is open-minded about the origin of the pandemic.
More to the point, documentary evidence in the subcommittee’s possession shows that in the early days of the pandemic — January and February 2020, when scientists saw features of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID that they didn’t recognize as coming from nature — he urged them by email to report their concerns, if validated, to “the appropriate authorities,” meaning the FBI in the U.S. and MI-5 in Britain.
“It is inconceivable,” Fauci said in his opening statement to the subcommittee, “that anyone who reads this e-mail could conclude that I was trying to ‘cover up’ the possibility of a laboratory leak. “I was advocating for a prompt and thorough examination of the data and a totally transparent process.”
As it happened, further scientific scrutiny convinced the scientists that “any type of laboratory-based scenario” was not “plausible,” as they reported in Nature in March 2020. Their conclusion has held up over time.
The subcommittee Republicans tried hard to contradict the notion that the lab leak hypothesis is a “conspiracy theory.” Fauci played along, up to a point. He acknowledged that speculation about a lab leak is not in itself a conspiracy theory, but that doesn’t go for the elaborations that many of its adherents have made of it.
“What is a conspiracy theory is the kind of distortions of that particular subject, like, it was a lab leak and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak,” he said. “That’s a conspiracy.” He was referring to a ludicrous accusation published in September, with great fanfare but no factual support whatsoever, by none other than Wenstrup.
The members spent an inordinate amount of time Monday on the question of whether Fauci’s institute funded so-called Gain of Function experiments in China, so a brief primer on this issue is in order.
“Gain of Function” has become something of a shibboleth for lab-leak adherents, the way “critical race theory” and ESG have become dog whistles for activists trying to undermine, respectively, the public educational system and environmental and social concerns for investors — in this case, giving the term a uniquely sinister connotation.
Generically, however, it refers to laboratory work that augments natural qualities of a microbe to facilitate experimental scrutiny or achieve a necessary goal, such as allowing microbes to produce a flu vaccine or bacteria to produce artificial insulin.
From 2014 to 2017, the U.S. suspended gain-of-function experiments to develop a standard identifying research that might produce “potential pandemic pathogens.” The lab-leak camp asserts that NIAID funded experiments that gave a virus in the Chinese lab the features necessary to make it infectious for humans.
The work that NIAID funded in China was analyzed according to that standard, and it was determined by NIH not to fall into that category, as Fauci has testified before. The subcommittee peppered Fauci with questions aimed at eliciting an admission that the NIAID-funded work qualified under the broad, pre-2017 definition, but he made clear — and is supported by the public record — that the work did not fall into that category.
Much of the hearing was devoted to trivialities. The Republicans blamed Fauci for imposing a regulation on Americans specifying that effective social distancing required a six-foot space between individuals. The GOP members maintain that no scientific research validates a six-foot standard, and cited a 2020 peer-reviewed paper as confirmation.
This assertion is self-refuting, however; the paper actually says that under some circumstances, six feet may not be enough. When Fauci was asked about the issue in January, he explained that coughing, sneezing, wind and other conditions could play into the efficacy of social distancing at any distance. At that point his questioner, GOP counsel Mitch Benzine, acknowledged, “I didn’t think that through, I guess.” But the Republicans masticated the issue endlessly Monday nonetheless.
In any case, Fauci never had the authority to impose public health mandates — whether for masks, social distancing, vaccination or anything else. These were a product of state and local policy decisions. To the extent they relied on government recommendations, those came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a government body with which Fauci had no official connection.
The fundamental theme of Monday’s hearing was that Fauci should be blamed, even pilloried, for doing the best anyone could in dealing with a virus that no one had seen before, with means of transmission that were not understood for months or more and therapies that took more than a year to figure out.
It’s Fauci’s burden that ignorant and irresponsible politicians and their followers have chosen to turn their gunsights on him, for reasons that remain unclear.
“There have been everything from harassments by emails, texts, letters, of myself, my wife, my three daughters,” he said. “There have been credible death threats leading to the arrests of two individuals, and ‘credible death threats’ means someone who clearly was on his way to kill me. It’s required my having protective services essentially all the time.”
Is this how we wish to treat our most devoted public servants — by smearing them to the point that promising scientists choose not to place themselves in the firing line by entering the public health field?
At the close of the hearing, Wenstrup said his panel’s “goal is to take a hard look at the facts.” But there were few “facts” elicited Monday, just disinformation and character assassination.
Was that really the goal? There are no signs that the Republicans learned a thing from their 3½ -hour inquisition. In January, during Fauci’s interrogation, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) tweeted, “While many lost their loved ones, their businesses, and livelihoods, Dr. Fauci made millions and enjoyed the media spotlight. It was his most successful year.”
Monday, I asked Cloud if he still believed that. He replied, “I 100% stand by this tweet. Dr. Fauci received more money and glowing media coverage than he had ever received in his life, and if you can’t pick up that he both enjoyed it (and fed into it), then that is on you.”
Let’s give Fauci the last word on that. In January, he lamented that in 2020 he “became the villain number one of the extremists in the population,” which made it “one of the worst years of my life.” Shown the tweet, he remarked, “A congressman tweeted that?” When he was told, “Yeah.”
He replied, simply, “Jesus.”
Rocket Lab took a big step Monday to better compete with rivals SpaceX and Amazon, announcing an $8-billion acquisition of satellite communications company Iridium.
The Long Beach rocket-and-satellite maker is buying a company that provides critical communications services to pilots, mariners and others, while giving Rocket Lab a foothold in the emerging satellite-based mobile phone market.
“We are going to absorb it, optimize it and scale it into something that is really truly fantastic,” said Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck in a YouTube presentation of the deal.
Rocket Lab is paying $54 a share for McLean, Va.-based Iridium — $27 in cash and the rest in shares. Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo are providing $3.6 billion in financing in the deal, which is expected to close next year.
Iridium’s 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites provide voice, data, navigation and other services to remote regions and across the globe to 2.55 million government, defense, aviation, maritime and commercial subscribers.
Iridium reported net income of $114 million in 2025, up 2% from the previous year. Revenue climbed 5% to $872 million.
The market for mobile cellular and other satellite-based communications is growing rapidly.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX spent $17 billion last year to acquire spectrum from EchoStar and then followed it up with a $2.6-billion purchase. The spectrum will allow its Starlink broadband satellite network to provide mobile phone service worldwide.
In April, Amazon agreed to acquire satellite operator Globalstar in a roughly $11.6-billion deal that would expand the services of its satellite system and the so-called direct-to-device smartphone market.
The competition has raised concerns about Iridium’s ability to compete.
SpaceX went public this month in the largest initial public offering ever, raising $86 billion, with the company now valued at more than $2 trillion.
In February, Iridium Chief Executive Matthew Desch said the company has shown it’s not “in decline,” dismissing concerns that it couldn’t compete with Starlink, according to Morningstar.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, Rocket Lab moved to the U.S. a decade ago and opened its Long Beach headquarters in 2020. It has manufacturing and mission operations in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto and New Zealand.
The company manufactures a small rocket called Electron that has launched 262 satellites into space, making it the second-busiest U.S. launch provider behind SpaceX. Rocket Lab is developing a larger rocket called Neutron, and it also makes satellites, subsystems and space components.
Beck said the acquisition of Iridium will propel Rocket Lab into the satellite communications business. That would otherwise be a slow process, requiring the acquisition of spectrum, satellite development and establishment of a customer base.
“We think we’ve found a little bit of a shortcut here,” Beck said, noting the combined company will be vertically integrated, able to design, build, launch and operate its own satellites.
The deal is “very strategic” for Rocket Lab, William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma said in a note to clients, according to Morningstar.
Rocket Lab has announced multiple contracts this year.
Last week, the company said it would launch Electron rockets for three NASA missions from its New Zealand site.
In May, Rocket Lab announced a $30-million contract with Costa Mesa defense contractor Anduril for multiple hypersonic test flights in Virginia using Rocket Lab’s HASTE launch vehicle.
The company is among scores of businesses that have revitalized Southern California’s aerospace and defense industries since SpaceX was founded in 2002. SpaceX, now headquartered in Texas maintains operations in Hawthorne.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited Rocket Lab’s headquarters in January during a stop on his tour of defense contractors in Southern California and across the country.
“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” Hegseth told several hundred cheering workers. “The future of the battlefield starts right here with dominance of space.”
Iridium investors cheered the news. Its shares gained 25% to close Monday at $54.59. Rocket Lab shares jumped 16% to close at $97.95.
With SpaceX’s historic initial public offering minting a small army of new millionaires overnight, the Southern California housing market is bracing for a big wave of buyers looking to upgrade their digs or perhaps snag a second home, potentially driving up prices in some in-demand neighborhoods.
Shares of SpaceX started trading June 12 and ended the day having raised $75 billion and making founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It was by far the largest IPO on record, more than double the 2019 offering by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco.
At least 4,000 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires, with about 400 of them earning $100 million or more, said Andrew Benson, chief executive of Hill.com, an investment platform for trading stock in pre-IPO tech companies.
SpaceX’s compensation philosophy historically favored equity over cash salaries, so this windfall extends well beyond executives and engineers to include nontechnical staff, entry-level workers and even cafeteria employees.
Because SpaceX has its highest concentration of employees in humble Hawthorne south of the 105 Freeway, the homebuying spree is expected to be most pronounced in the sandy South Bay and the “Silicon Beach” tech corridor that includes Venice and Santa Monica, but it may also appear in other upmarket Los Angeles-area neighborhoods or even farther away in the form of second homes.
One SpaceX buyer has been eyeing a $32-million pocket listing of his in tony Brentwood for months while waiting for the IPO, according to real estate broker Cory Weiss of Douglas Elliman.
“People are starting to look,” he said, and most will spend $5 million or more.
Melissa Pilon, a real estate agent in the South Bay with Compass, heard from one SpaceX buyer the day the company went public on a property in north Redondo Beach, and expects to hear from more would-be homeowners.
“I’m not sure how this will play out, but I think real estate agents are feeling optimistic,” Pilon said. “I think there will definitely be an uptick, but I don’t know if it will be a sustainable thing. There might be some superficially inflated prices.”
The SpaceX IPO and planned initial public offerings of OpenAI and Anthropic could generate millions in capital gains tax revenue for the state over years as shareholders cash out.
Even without inclusion of those IPOs, state finance officials this year upped their forecast of capital gains income Californians would earn due to the huge run-up in the stock market driven by AI companies. On average, gains are taxed at 10%.
While SpaceX shares have fallen recently, current and former employees who were granted shares or options still would come away winners given the stock remains above the $135 IPO price. Shares closed Friday at $153.23, up 0.15%.
It could take several months for the housing market to feel the full effect of SpaceX millions, said Paul Habibi, a UCLA lecturer and real estate expert witness at Grayslake Advisors.
The most significant buying boom is likely to take place early next year, he predicted, after the standard lockup on stock sales is fully ended in December. Batches of limited stock sales will be allowed in the coming months, however, and some real estate agents and bankers are putting together workarounds to help expectant millionaires leverage their future gains to secure loans.
Habibi expects the largest concentration of purchases to be focused in the South Bay, primarily Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, with some spillover into Culver City and possibly north Orange County.
The gush of new money stands to drive up the cost of homes in neighborhoods already in hot demand, echoing a pattern that has occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“A place like Manhattan Beach has roughly 11,000 housing units, so there could be a pretty significant impact if a lot of those folks decide that they want to go buy houses in those neighborhoods that have such a supply constraint,” Habibi said. “Those markets are already among the priciest in Southern California and I can only imagine that will continue with this new wealth creation.”
Hermosa Beach real estate agent Ed Kaminsky agrees interest will center in the South Bay, including Palos Verdes, and he has already heard from prospective SpaceX buyers. Their dream houses have ocean views, swimming pools and four or more bedrooms, which may be hard to find.
“There are a lot of buyers that were in rentals from the Palisades fire looking to buy now and combined with all of the IPOs this summer, I think inventory in South Bay could be tight,” Kaminsky said, “The question is whether we have the kinds of properties on the market that they’re looking for.”
The concentration of buyers looking to purchase property in the South Bay could temporary inflate prices in the area, similar to when Snap Inc., social media platform Snapchat’s parent company, went public in 2017 valued at $24 billion, Habibi said. SpaceX by comparison was valued at $1.77 trillion.
“What’s interesting about Snap is that the workforce was largely clustered on the Westside, and you could see almost immediate effects in Venice and Santa Monica within months of the IPO,” Habibi said. “That was a pretty notable and significant effect on that local housing market” that temporarily inflated prices in an already hot market.
“The amount of wealth and how it comes into L.A. is always very different and vacillates,” Weiss said. “I’m not saying this is groundbreaking and nothing like L.A.’s ever seen before, but I do know that there are people who have been waiting for this to happen.”
Among them are potential buyers who have toured condominiums in Century City, where some of the region’s most luxurious condo towers stand, he said.
Certain buyers may want to buy a condo in a fancy full-service building in L.A. to use as a pied-à-terre, Weiss said, while moving their families to a distant city or state where they could commute by plane on weekends.
San Diego County should see an influx of new buyers with SpaceX dollars, said Del Mar real estate agent Kristina Quesada, co-owner of the Yost Quesada Team at Douglas Elliman. They’ll join a recent wave of house hunters from the Bay Area flush with new tech fortunes and an appetite for second homes or vacation properties near the ocean.
Buyers want to “obtain that coastal lifestyle” for less money than it would cost in other California waterfronts, she said. Popular San Diego County locations run west of Interstate 5 from Carlsbad south through such seaside communities as Encinitas, Del Mar, La Jolla and Coronado Island. Prices start around $2 million.
San Francisco real estate agent Butch Haze of Compass has seen tech booms followed by ravenous bursts of homebuying since the first internet gold rush of the late 1990s.
“Show me a great job market and I’ll show you a really strong real estate market,” he said.
San Francisco’s surging tech industry, which is getting a burst of new business around artificial intelligence, may even have a knock-on effect on Los Angeles-area real estate, Haze said.
After making a fortune through an IPO or acquisition of their companies, “the single tech guys love to move down to L.A. to be closer to the beautiful people,” Haze said. “And they get their beachfront property.”
Tech stocks took another big hit Tuesday as investors sold off shares of companies that have powered the artificial intelligence boom.
Technology companies have been spending billions of dollars investing in data centers and infrastructure needed to support the race to advance AI. But sky-high valuations and geopolitical tensions have some investors questioning whether massive AI spending will pay off, analysts said.
Reflecting the unease, the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite dropped roughly 2%. The Standard & Poor’s 500, a stock market index that tracks the performance of the largest U.S. publicly traded companies, fell by more than 1%.
Share prices for major California tech companies including Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel and Marvell Technology all dropped. Meta Platforms, Apple, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also saw their stock prices slide, though the decline wasn’t as large as the drop in chip stocks.
Shares of Micron Technology, a U.S. memory chip manufacturer, plunged by more than 13% a day before the company was scheduled to report its third-quarter financial results. Anxiety in the U.S. spilled over from Asia, where South Korean tech companies SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, both major computer memory chip manufacturers, saw their stocks plunge Tuesday by more than 12%.
“Investors are just a bit skittish after very strong moves in tech stocks where any hint of caution causes some investors to hit the sell button,” said Dan Ives, an analyst who heads technology research at Wedbush Securities, adding that it’s a “gut-check moment.”
On Monday, SpaceX saw its shares plunge 16% after a record-breaking initial public offering this month. Its share price then rebounded Tuesday, closing up less than 1% to roughly $156.
Tech companies have been making big bets on the role AI will play in people’s work and personal lives. They’ve been improving chatbots that can generate code, words, photos and videos. The companies also are betting that “AI agents” will be able to proactively tackle more in the future, automating repetitive tasks in customer service, online shopping and other industries. They’re releasing more AI-powered hardware such as smartglasses.
Major tech companies are going head-to-head in the race to dominate AI, competing to sway talent and consumers into using their products. Alphabet saw its stock slip after two of the company’s prominent AI researchers left for rival companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
Despite profitability questions, AI use has been growing. Roughly half of U.S. adults use an AI chatbot, according to a Pew Research Center report released this month. They’re using these tools for search, work tasks, entertainment and even companionship. More U.S. adults reported using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, followed by Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta AI.
Amid all the hype and spending, there also have been growing fears about whether AI will take over people’s jobs and whether the boom will lead to a bubble that will eventually burst. California AI startups OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at nearly $1 trillion, are preparing to potentially become publicly traded companies.
“I don’t view this as a bubble,” Ives said. “I view it as we’re going to go through these white-knuckle moments as tech stocks continue to move higher, but the bears will continue to yell fire in a crowded theater when we have these pullbacks.”
Economic factors also could affect how much people are willing to invest in tech company stocks. There’s anxiety over whether the new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh will raise interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money. That could cut into a company’s profit margin or decrease consumer spending. United States’ war with Iran is driving up gas prices while the U.S. inflation rate rose to 4.2% in May.
The AI boom is fueling the demand for memory and storage chips, but prices for them are on the rise, prompting some companies such as Apple to look at raising prices for consumer electronics.
Globally, AI spending is projected to increase to $2.59 trillion in 2026, up 47% year over year, according to a forecast by research firm Gartner.
Driven by AI demand, memory and storage vendors have significantly outperformed the S&P 500 and the SOX index, a global semiconductor and microchip index, since the start of 2025, according to a note to clients from BNP Paribas.
Still, investors are on edge ahead of Idaho-based Micron Technology’s earnings report Wednesday, said Gil Luria, head of technology research at financial services company D.A. Davidson. Since January, Micron Technology’s stock has climbed more than 233% to more than $1,000 per share.
“Any indication of a slowdown in demand for AI is seen as a potential turn in the cycle,” Luria said. “While the overwhelming sense is that demand is still far exceeding supply, investors are waiting for Micron to indicate that is still the case.”
Times staff writer Nilesh Christopher contributed to this report.
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