Acting CDC Director Accuses Fauci of Abusing Power During Pandemic

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now serving as both director of the National Institutes of Health and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leveled a direct accusation at his predecessor this week: Dr. Anthony Fauci abused the authority granted to him during the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking to CBS News chief correspondent Matt Gutman on Wednesday, Bhattacharya described Fauci's conduct as an exercise in power that extended far beyond his actual mandate.

Fauci, who spent nearly four decades leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, held no formal position as the nation's chief public health officer. Yet during the crisis, he functioned as one—a role Bhattacharya argues he should never have assumed. "He was the head of a research institute, he wasn't the head of public health, yet he acted as if he were the head of public health in this country," Bhattacharya said. The core complaint was not about Fauci's scientific judgment alone, but about how he wielded influence. Bhattacharya alleged that Fauci's primary abuse involved shutting down scientific debate and attacking scientists who disagreed with him, including Bhattacharya himself, simply for the act of disagreement.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford University School of Medicine professor during the pandemic, had been vocal in his opposition to lockdowns and mask mandates—positions that put him at odds with the federal government's approach. Now, with access to Fauci's private journal entries, which were kept on government servers, Bhattacharya sees evidence of a gap between Fauci's private thinking and his public pronouncements. He supported the release of these diaries, arguing that they belonged in the public domain given Fauci's enormous influence over the lives of Americans and people worldwide. "The way he was thinking in private regarding all of the advice he was giving to tremendously powerful people, and what he showed in public, were very different," Bhattacharya said.

School closures became a focal point. In early 2020, Fauci recommended that schools be shuttered. Bhattacharya contends this decision ran counter to the evidence available at the time, and that Fauci presented his recommendation with a certainty his own diary entries later revealed he did not possess. When asked about this in a separate interview, Fauci acknowledged that while initial closures were justified, keeping schools closed for a year was a mistake. He also noted that he had consistently advocated for opening schools as quickly and safely as possible, even as bars remained closed.

The timing of Bhattacharya's accusations was pointed. They came hours before Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee under subpoena. Rather than answer questions, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, citing the committee chairman, Republican Senator Rand Paul, as the reason. Fauci said Paul had made public pledges to see him imprisoned, and that Paul was attempting to extract statements that could be used to vindicate those threats. Paul, a longtime Fauci critic, had retired in 2022.

On the question of COVID's origins, Bhattacharya expressed his own view that the virus likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China—a position that remains contested among scientists, many of whom believe the evidence points more strongly toward natural spillover from animals to humans. When pressed on whether Fauci had lied to the American people about the virus's origins, Bhattacharya demurred. "I think that Dr. Fauci's role in the COVID origins is much more complicated than he led on in his public statements earlier," he said, declining to use the word "lie" but suggesting a more nuanced story than Fauci had presented. Fauci has consistently maintained that he kept an open mind on the origins question and never downplayed or misrepresented the research.

The dispute reflects a deeper tension about how scientific authority should function during a crisis, and who gets to speak for the scientific consensus. Bhattacharya's position in the current administration gives his criticism particular weight, even as it raises questions about whether his own pandemic-era skepticism of lockdowns has shaped his current assessment. The release of Fauci's journals may provide some clarity on what he believed privately, but it is unlikely to resolve the fundamental disagreement about whether his public role was appropriate or whether his advice served the public interest.