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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.”
Comcast is spinning off its NBCUniversal entertainment and news media businesses into a separate publicly traded company, a move that would unwind an audacious play the cable giant made for the storied Hollywood assets 15 years ago.
The plan would put broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, NBC News, cable network Bravo, streaming service Peacock, the Los Angeles-based Universal film and television studios, Universal theme parks and British TV service Sky in a new stand-alone company.
Philadelphia-based Comcast would remain in its core business of distributing pay-TV channels, broadband internet and wireless services.
The spinoff would be the second such move by Comcast in two years. Late last year, the Brian L. Roberts-controlled company cast off most of its cable portfolio, including CNBC, USA Network, MS NOW and Golf Channel to form a new entity called Versant.
But the maneuver failed to budge Comcast’s listless stock, which has languished for years as its primary business lost thousands of broadband customers.
Comcast executives needed to make a bolder move to mollify frustrated investors.
Comcast stock peaked at nearly $26 per share Monday before closing at $24.22, up roughly 4.5% from Friday. Still, the stock remains below its 52-week high of $34.34.
The plan announced Monday would unravel Comcast’s bold decision to acquire NBCUniversal from General Electric Co. in 2011. At the time, Comcast saw tremendous value in marrying NBC’s entertainment operations, including its then-lucrative cable channels, with its cable TV distribution service that Roberts’ late father, Ralph, launched in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963.
“They were two distinct businesses,” longtime cable analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a Monday note to investors. “Having them under the same roof didn’t make either better.”
Consumers shifted to streaming, and Comcast’s attempt to build a top-tier digital service, Peacock, has fallen well short of its goal. Peacock lags behind rivals despite billions of dollars in investment from Comcast.
The concept of unwinding its NBCUniversal operation began in earnest in the fall, when Comcast joined the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. Comcast executives knew they could ill afford to spend billions to buy a rival; Wall Street would have pummeled the company.
So Comcast offered to spin off NBCUniversal and pair it with Warner Bros., turning two original Hollywood studios into a new media colossus.
But 43-year-old billionaire David Ellison prevailed in the bidding, agreeing to pay $111 billion to capture Warner Bros. Discovery. Losing the auction forced Comcast to find a different path forward.
On a call with investors, Roberts said the separation would bolster the two firms as they navigate increasing competitive challenges while technology companies continue to transform entertainment.
“We asked ourselves three basic questions,” Roberts said. “One, can these businesses stand alone and have the heft to stand alone in separate companies? Two, do they have a clear, viable capital allocation path to invest? And three, is now the right time? And the answer we came back with was yes to all counts.”
A free-standing NBCUniversal, home of the “Minions” and “Jurassic Park” franchises, probably would be an acquisition target, as media companies have been consolidating in an effort to get more content and mass distribution for their streaming services. Ellison’s Paramount is on track to close its Warner Bros. purchase, which would combine such media assets as HBO Max, CBS, CNN, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. studios.
With its Sky business, NBCUniversal has a toehold in Britain and Europe at a time when Amazon and Netflix are flexing their global distribution muscles.
Comcast would be positioned to combine with another cable and internet provider, such as Connecticut-based Charter, which owns the Spectrum television service. Charter is in the process of buying the smaller Cox cable service, which also has operations in Southern California.
Comcast is expected to complete the spinoff next year and will retain an 19% stake in the new entity.
The timetable could put NBCUniversal up for grabs by 2028 — when the company is set to broadcast the Summer Olympics, which will be held in Los Angeles.
Comcast acquired NBCUniversal in 2011. The industry-reshaping deal combined the largest distributor of TV channels with a provider of top-rated TV channels and a movie studio. But the streaming revolution has decimated the cable television business. Traditional TV viewing has been in a steady decline over the last decade. NBC has relied heavily on NFL broadcasts, and more recently, NBA and Major League Baseball games to remain relevant.
NBCUniversal has invested heavily in its streaming service, Peacock, but has been unable to reach the scale necessary for profitability. Comcast‘s stock price has struggled as a result.
Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, will continue to be involved in the leadership of Comcast and NBCUniversal, working in partnership with the CEOs of both companies.
Mike Cavanagh will remain as CEO of NBCUniversal, and Comcast’s former chief financial officer, Michael Angelakis, will return to run Comcast after the spinoff.
“Perhaps the best part of today’s welcome announcement … is that Mike Angelakis is coming back,” Moffett, the analyst, wrote. “He will now helm the cable business, [which] is unequivocally good news. With Mike Angelakis’s return, Comcast has come full circle.”
Moffett added that, despite Monday’s announcement, the 2011 combination was not a complete bust.
“The deal to acquire NBCU from GE was financially brilliant,” he said. “It was structured so that Comcast paid for just half of the acquisition and then let NBCU’s own cash flow pay for the rest.”
Over the years, Comcast has raked in billions in profit from its media holdings.
Comcast executives on the analyst call played down the notion that the two companies were being positioned for another deal.
“Absolutely not,” Roberts said. “This is the right move to put each company in the strongest position to create value, fully monetize its assets and aggressively pursue its own organic growth strategies.”
Cavanaugh, who has been running the combined company for three years, sounded more like a buyer than a seller.
“Our plan for NBCUniversal and Sky is to build and invest for growth,” he said. “We have the freedom now to explore adjacent businesses where we have the right to play, and that’s thanks to the stability of our company and management team.”
The spinoff announcement comes a week after Fox Corp. announced its deal to purchase the streaming platform Roku for $22 billion. The deal is aimed at ensuring that Fox has a means to get its portfolio of sports, news and entertainment channels into viewers’ homes as the traditional pay-TV business continues to erode.
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.”
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