The Senate oversight hearing of Dr Anthony Fauci last week offered a rare and bracing spectacle: a man once hailed as the embodiment of scientific authority (“I am the science”) reduced to invoking the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. The immediate catalyst was the release, days earlier by Republican Senator Rand Paul, of over a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Those entries, near-daily jottings of a public official at the height of his influence, contradict much of what he told the American people and Congress about masks, school closures, infection fatality rates and the origins of the virus itself. What had been presented as settled science now appears as a series of improvisations, self-promotions and strategic omissions.

Fauci’s private record versus public assurances

Consider the school closures that scarred a generation of children with learning losses estimated in years rather than months. In 2022 interviews Fauci insisted he had “nothing to do” with them. Yet a March 15th 2020 diary entry, emblazoned “BIG DAY!” in red ink, records how he “convinced” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight”. The same day he spoke with Ann O’Leary, chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom, Fauci noted, “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants” on the strength of the doctor’s television appearances. Later entries show Fauci urging delays in school re-openings even as data revealed children faced minimal risk and schools were not major vectors of transmission. He privately criticised governors who sought to reopen, calling Florida governor Ron DeSantis “a jerk” and “a complete disgrace”.

The human cost — speech and language delays from prolonged masking, surging mental health crises among adolescents — was waved aside in the moment of technocratic exhilaration. Fauci’s public denials of responsibility cannot erase the contemporaneous record of his enormous influence. Similar discrepancies appear on masks and infection rates. Early public statements dismissed the utility of masks for the general population; private notes later assert that officials “probably were too strong in saying masks do not work”. Diary entries also suggest Fauci’s private estimates of Covid’s infection fatality rate were lower than the figures he emphasised in congressional testimony and media appearances that fuelled public panic.

On the virus’s origins, notes from January and February 2020 reveal him privately entertaining the possibility of a laboratory incident linked to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research his own agency had helped fund through intermediaries — while publicly dismissing such notions as conspiracy theories. When pressed at the hearing on these inconsistencies, Fauci chose silence. Truth, it seems, is a luxury one can afford only when the cameras are off and the diary is locked away.

Parallel reckonings in climate science

The Fauci affair finds a striking parallel in the legal unravelling of climate scientist Michael Mann’s suit against Mark Steyn last year which was covered in these pages (see here and here). Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ chart, which flattened a millennium of natural temperature variation into a dramatic 20th-century uptick, became the iconic image of catastrophic anthropogenic warming and a staple of IPCC summaries, school textbooks and political rhetoric. When journalist Mark Steyn and writer Rand Simberg criticised it as fraudulent in construction and deployment, Mann sued for defamation in the District of Columbia courts. A jury in 2024 awarded him $1 million in punitive damages against Steyn and a smaller sum against Simberg.

Yet subsequent rulings by Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. turned the tables decisively. The judge found that Mann and his counsel had acted in “bad faith” by presenting the jury with a demonstrative exhibit claiming nearly $10 million in lost grant funding when the corrected figure, known to them during discovery, was $112,000. Judge Irving described the misconduct as “extraordinary in its scope, extent and intent”, reduced the punitive award against Steyn to a token $5,000, sanctioned Mann and ordered him to pay hundreds of thousands in defendants’ legal fees. The court effectively found Mann and his legal counsel untruthful in the conduct of his own case.

The cases of Michael Mann and Anthony Fauci are not mere personal comeuppances of hubristic figures. They illuminate a deeper pathology: the twin mass hysterias of COVID-19 and climate change, each cultivated by a constellation of bureaucratic, academic, philanthropic, media and corporate interests that derived moral authority and material benefit. In both domains, the vast majority of ordinary people — workers facing lost livelihoods and shuttered businesses, parents confronting closed schools and developmental setbacks for their children, developing-world populations denied reliable and affordable energy — bore the costs while a relatively small elite harvested prestige, research grants, consulting contracts, green subsidies and regulatory rents. The pattern is familiar from earlier episodes of ideologically driven planning, from Soviet Lysenkoism to the influential Club of Rome’s resource-exhaustion forecasts that never materialised.

Twin hysterias and the machinery of silencing

Public health orthodoxy before 2020 emphasised focused protection of the vulnerable and the preservation of societal functioning. The Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020, drafted by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, simply restated that wisdom: shield the elderly and infirm with targeted measures, allow the young and healthy to live, work and build population immunity, and thereby minimise collateral damage. It was met with an orchestrated campaign of character assassination. NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating published take down”; Fauci circulated critical pieces and helped frame the authors as fringe epidemiologists. Social media platforms censored discussion; professional associations issued denunciations.

Yet Sweden’s lighter-touch approach, closer in spirit to the declaration, produced mortality outcomes comparable to or better than those of heavy-lockdown jurisdictions, without the educational catastrophe that left millions of children behind, the excess non-Covid deaths from delayed care or the economic scarring that continues to weigh on growth, public finances and social trust.

Climate policy has followed a comparable arc of exaggeration and institutional capture. For more than a decade the most extreme emissions pathway — RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 — served as the default ‘business-as-usual’ scenario in IPCC reports, alarmist media coverage, corporate risk disclosures and government planning documents. It assumed a world of surging coal consumption to levels several times current use, projecting warming far beyond any trajectory consistent with observed energy trends.

That scenario underwrote claims of imminent ‘global boiling’, justified Net Zero mandates that have accelerated deindustrialisation across Europe, raised energy costs for households and industry, and diverted trillions into intermittent renewables while reliable baseload capacity withered. Developing countries, for which cheap energy remains the ladder out of poverty, were lectured on restraint by nations that industrialised on fossil fuels.

The committee designing scenarios for the next IPCC assessment cycle recently retired the RCP8.5 and related high-end pathways as “implausible”, citing observed emissions trends, the falling costs of low-carbon technologies and the existence of climate policy. Roger Pielke Jr. and others had demonstrated the fantasy character of these pathways years earlier; the establishment’s belated correction is welcome, if long overdue.

The machinery of silencing dissent operates with equal efficiency in both spheres. Professor Norman Fenton, a mathematician of international standing whose expertise in Bayesian networks and risk analysis produced more than 400 peer-reviewed publications, discovered the limits of institutional tolerance when he applied rigorous statistical scrutiny first to IPCC confidence statements in a BBC documentary and later to Covid infection fatality rates, PCR testing protocols and vaccine risk-benefit calculations. Colleagues distanced themselves, papers were rejected without review, and an invitation to address an NHS Health and Care Analytics conference was withdrawn on the eve of the event because of his “controversial views” on vaccines and climate.

In December 2022 he was forced into early retirement from Queen Mary University of London amid student activism and administrative pressure. The tragic case of Prof Fenton’s cancellation was covered in the Daily Sceptic. It reads like a modern Galileo narrative: evidence subordinated to orthodoxy, career destroyed for the crime of asking inconvenient questions about both climate and Covid. Similar treatment was meted out to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and to countless physicians and scientists who questioned the Covid lockdown and ‘climate emergency’ orthodoxies.

Truth will out: towards evidence and realism

Historical analogies are instructive. The Lysenkoist corruption of Soviet biology subordinated empirical genetics to political ideology with catastrophic consequences for agriculture. The Club of Rome’s ‘limits to growth’ forecasts of the 1970s predicted imminent collapse that never arrived. Successive panics over global cooling then catastrophic warming reveal the recurring temptation of elites to manufacture hobgoblins that justify the expansion of their own power and the constriction of others’ freedoms.

Covid models that predicted millions of deaths in the absence of lockdowns were falsified within months by actual data; climate models that have consistently run hotter than observed temperatures continue to shape multi-trillion-dollar policies long after their excesses are documented. In each case the institutional incentives — funding streams tied to alarm, career advancement for those who reinforce the narrative, moral signalling opportunities for the politically aligned — favour exaggeration over calibration.

Yet the tide may be turning. The Fauci diaries and the Mann sanctions are visible markers that truth will out. Governments that ruled by hysteria now confront its fiscal, educational, social and geopolitical bill: stagnant productivity in the West, educational deficits that will echo for decades, eroded public trust in science and institutions, and the relative rise of energy-abundant powers less encumbered by self-imposed green constraints.

A realist response begins with the primacy of cheap, reliable energy as the indispensable foundation of human welfare and economic development. It recognises that market signals, technological innovation and the dispersed knowledge of millions of individuals outperform central planning, whether the planners wear white coats or green ones. Classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek understood that complex systems cannot be managed by a cadre of experts claiming monopoly on truth; the same principle applies with equal force both to the pandemic response and to Net Zero policies.

The parallel between Covid and climate is not that both threats were illusory — viruses do kill, a changing climate can cause hardship, particularly for poor societies where adaptation is difficult — but that both were systematically inflated into existential emergencies requiring the suspension of democratic norms, economic rationality and open scientific debate. The interests that prospered from these ‘emergencies’ will not surrender their narrative easily. But the evidentiary record, once sealed in private diaries or buried in courtroom exhibits, is now public. For the sake of prosperity, of children’s futures, of the developing world’s right to energy abundance, and of the integrity of science itself, the reckoning must continue. Truth, however delayed, has a way of asserting itself against even the most formidable constellations of power.