The following article by Stephen Millies, a retired railroad worker and longtime writer for Struggle La Lucha, reports on the vote by a US Senate committee on 6 August to hold Dr Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. It is the culmination of a campaign that has rather less to do with public health than with the New Cold War on China.
Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and who convened the hearing, has spent five years insisting that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Fauci’s real offence is that he has declined to supply the testimony that theory requires. As Millies puts it, the targeting of the 85-year-old scientist “is part of his campaign to blame the People’s Republic of China for the COVID-19 pandemic”.
The ‘lab leak’ story never had evidence behind it. The joint study conducted by the World Health Organisation and Chinese scientists concluded in 2021 that a laboratory origin was “extremely unlikely”, and the successive US intelligence reviews commissioned to overturn that finding produced nothing. As Robert Griffiths set out in the Morning Star, and as Joshua Cho documented for FAIR, the theory was a political construction from the beginning – a means of deflecting attention from the West’s own catastrophic handling of the pandemic, and, as we argued at the time, a racist trope.
Millies’ comparison with the McCarthy period is apt. A major part of the organising logic of the original McCarthy witch hunt was the issue of “who lost China?” The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 had to be explained as a betrayal from within rather than as something the Chinese people had accomplished for themselves, and so the State Department’s China specialists – John Service, John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies – along with the scholar Owen Lattimore, had their careers destroyed for the crime of having reported accurately that the Guomindang was losing.
Three-quarters of a century later, a Senate committee is once again demanding that an inconvenient truth about China be recanted, and once again threatening a witness with prosecution for declining. Then the unbearable fact was the fall of Chiang Kai-shek; now it is that socialist China contained the virus and saved millions of lives while the United States lost more than 1.2 million people.
Obscuring that contrast is precisely what the inquisition exists for, and Millies supplies the answer that Senator Paul’s committee took care not to look for. The reason the US death toll so far exceeded China’s – and Cuba’s – has nothing to do with Wuhan and everything to do with 50 years of hospital closures, a health system organised around profit, and a systemic racism that largely determined who died. The elimination of “excess” hospital beds, as he writes, “amounted to social murder”.
This article first appeared in Struggle – La Lucha.
Capitalism vs. public health
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on July 29 was a throwback to the days of Joe McCarthy and the witch hunt.
The retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was allegedly called before the panel to account for his actions during the coronavirus pandemic. It was really a trap set by committee chair, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
The aim was to get the 85-year-old scientist to contradict his earlier testimony and then have him indicted for perjury or obstruction of justice. That’s an old tactic used during the anti-communist hysteria during the late 1940s and 1950s.
Richard “Watergate” Nixon jump-started his political career by framing former State Department official Alger Hiss as a “Soviet spy.” Hiss was actually convicted — in his second trial, the first one ending with a hung jury — of supposedly lying about whether he knew the informer Whittaker Chambers.
Like many of the witnesses badgered by Joe McCarthy, Dr. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer the Senate committee’s baiting questions. Rand Paul kicked Anthony Fauci’s lawyer out of the committee hearing and is demanding that Fauci be prosecuted for “obstruction of justice.”
On Aug. 6, the Senate committee voted 8-5 to hold Fauci in contempt. This right-wing offensive includes the red-baiting House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaing BreakThrough News, The People’s Forum, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.
The attacks on Dr. Fauci are capitalist revenge for any interruption to their profit-making, even during a deadly global pandemic. On March 25, 2020 — at the beginning of public health measures to contain the coronavirus — The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial and three opinion pieces demanding their end.
One of these articles, co-authored by Jay Bhattacharya — who is now Trump’s director of the National Institutes of Health — was entitled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” Over 1.2 million people in the United States would eventually die of the virus, with at least 7 million people dying worldwide.
Refrigerator trucks filled with bodies lined up outside Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York. Meanwhile, socialist China shut down much of the country, saving millions of lives.
What wasn’t asked
What needs to be investigated is why the U.S. response to COVID-19 was so inadequate, even compared to other capitalist countries. President Trump was recommending bleach to combat it.
In the early days of the pandemic, nurses and other workers at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai West Hospital were forced to wear Hefty garbage bags as protective clothing. Thousands of health care workers died of the virus.
The United States had a 70% higher death rate than Germany. That’s because Germany had a more universal health care system owing to a stronger labor movement. Despite being economically blockaded by the U.S. for decades, socialist Cuba’s death rate from COVID was less than a quarter of Uncle Sam’s.
Senator Paul and his fellow witch hunters never asked about the greater death rates for Black, Indigenous and Latine people. During the pandemic, life expectancy for Black and Latine people dropped by three years. In the Navajo Nation, 1,771 people died of Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19 (COVID-19).
Enemies of the people
Nobody should be fooled by Rand Paul’s occasional anti-war noises. His targeting of Fauci is part of his campaign to blame the People’s Republic of China for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The senator is a vicious reactionary who, when he first ran for a Kentucky Senate seat in 2010, said that companies had the right to racially discriminate.
Black lung disease kills in a horrible way by strangling miners’ lungs with coal dust. Miners in Kentucky and other states are suffering from the disease at a 50-year high rate. Yet Rand Paul opposed legislation to tighten safety regulations to combat it.
Last year the Kentucky statesman introduced anti-labor legislation to make the Taft-Hartley state-by-state ban on union shops mandatory in all 50 states. Rand Paul’s daddy — longtime Texas congressperson, presidential candidate and all-around nut job Ron Paul — published racist newsletters.
Paul’s fellow committee member, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, is no better. Running against Mandela Barnes, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor in the 2022 election, Johnson ran bigoted ads attacking Barnes.
The Wisconsin senator should be inquiring why Black babies in the Badger State are more likely to die before their first birthday than anywhere else in the United States. State Representative Shelia Stubbs declared that “Wisconsin is the worst place to raise a Black family.”
Hospital closings = death
Nobody on the Senate committee inquired about the 50-year-long campaign to close hospitals across the country. Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, who had been Malcolm X’s lawyer, led 5,000 people in a march to save Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital on March 25, 1976.
Sydenham was saved then, but in 1980 Mayor Koch closed the first hospital in New York City that allowed Black physicians to admit their patients. Koch shut down other municipal hospitals while across the country 190 hospitals were eliminated in the next seven years.
Just in New York State, more than 30 hospitals have closed since 2000. Several of them, including St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, have been turned into luxury condos. That’s also happening to Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University Hospital, which shut down in 2019.
It’s even worse in rural areas, where from 2005 to 2023, 146 hospitals closed or eliminated overnight stays for patients. This wave of hospital closings went hand-in-hand with millions of factory workers losing their jobs.
Those beds were necessary, as the largest pandemic in a century proved. There has to be an “excess” of hospital beds in order to handle emergency situations. Their elimination amounted to social murder.
But the billionaire class was determined to eliminate hospital beds while they slashed social programs and benefits. Leading the charge was the ultra-right Manhattan Institute, with financial backing from Richard Mellon Scaife.
The slimy New York Post — which, like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, is owned by the Rupert Murdoch family — campaigned for more hospital closures.
So when the coronavirus swept New York, there were nowhere near the beds that were needed. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a sexual predator, shoved thousands of seniors with the virus into nursing homes to open up hospital beds.
COVID-19 spread like wildfire, killing thousands of elderly patients. Hospital closings kill.
Struggle pushed back AIDS
Dr. Fauci was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984 as the HIV/AIDS pandemic was surging. Over 44 million people have died of it. Two-thirds were Africans.
The Reagan administration treated this immense tragedy as a joke. Bigots stoked homophobia as fascist preachers like Jerry Falwell blamed those who died. Haitians were demonized.
But the pandemic wasn’t confined to the poor and oppressed. AIDS was killing members of the well-to-do set as well.
Dr. Fauci’s appointment as head of NIAID reflected that. Yet it was thousands of activists in ACT UP and other organizations — many of whom were dying — that forced the government to do something.
Transgender people were not included in early studies and reports.
Despite people living in Jersey City having a higher rate of HIV infection than Haitians, Haitian people were barred from donating blood. Dr. Fauci went along with this racist prohibition.
It was 60,000 Haitian people marching across the Brooklyn Bridge on April 20, 1990, that smashed the Bush Administration’s refusal to accept Haitian blood. Even after this mobilization, the New York Times ran an editorial endorsing a ban on Haitian blood.
People have a right to be skeptical of a capitalist public health system that conducted the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which killed at least 100 Black men. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore stole cancer cells from the dying Black mother Henrietta Lacks.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the better-known figures of the $4 trillion medical-industrial complex, although the real power is in the corporate boardrooms.
Senator Rand Paul is not our friend. Neither are quacks like Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz. These criminals support the Trump regime kicking millions off Medicare and Medicaid and ICE rounding up Haitian and other immigrant caregivers.
Health care is a human right. We have to overthrow capitalism to make it so.
