TUESDAY: Wehner and Jha tilt different ways!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2026

One cable star knows for sure: Yesterday afternoon, we took a look at the David Wallace-Wells opinion column about the Senate hearing in which mountains of rage were directed at Dr. Fauci 

In print editions, the column appeared in last weekend's Sunday Times.  Online, the headline on the column says this:  

Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.   

Is the first part of that headline true? Does Dr. Fauci actually "have a lot to answer for?" 

We have no clear idea. The issues involved in the GOP's accusations were scientific—technical. It's hard for non-specialists to make assessments with respect to topics like that.   

Wallace-Wells is typically very sharp. But in an assessment for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner seems to feel that Dr. Fauci was mugged by a lack of reality, which is largely the way it looked and felt to us. 

 The start of Wehner's piece suggests his general drift, which may well be perfectly accurate:

Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci   

Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live...   

Then it all came apart.

Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.   

It's a bit like what Woody Guthrie wrote in his ballad, Pretty Boy Floyd:  

"And every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name."   

Every crime was added to Fauci's name at the Senate hearing. But had he actually committed the crimes in question? 

It's extremely hard for a layperson to know. In a wide array of subject areas, this has become a growing problem for our flailing political culture.   

Wehner was a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush. He didn't much like what he saw the Republicans doing at that rage-filled Senate hearing. His portrait starts like this:  

[continuing directly]  
The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it. 

Wehner seems to be placing those two accusations in the basket of claims marked "ludicrous." As his column proceeds, he dispatches matter #1 in two quick paragraphs. A bit later, the claim that Dr. Fauci lied also meets a quick death.    

Wehner's analyses may well be perfectly accurate; we aren't saying they aren't. But along the way, Wehner says this about where the Covid virus came from:   

As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.  

However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin.    

And so on from there. That too may be an accurate assessment. But nine days ago, on CNN's State of the Union, Dr. Ashish Jha seemed to surprise Dana Bash when he stated a different view.

Dr. Jha served as White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator under President Biden. Here's what he told Bash as she tried to recover from 22 minutes with Robert Kennedy Junior:

BASH (8/2/26): Before I let you go, you reshared a tweet that said...Well, let me say it this way:

You said that the available evidence points towards research-related incidents in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted.

You agreed with that.

JHA: I did. This is going to surprise some people. When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.  

Here's the bottom line: No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are officials in China, and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I'm not suggesting I know for sure, but I'm saying my best assessment is that it probably was a lab leak.

BASH: That is definitely news to hear that from you, for sure, and shows that we're just—we're still learning, which is really important.

For the record: If it was a lab leak, was that somehow Dr. Fauci's fault, if only in some absurdly tangential way? As with almost everything else, we can't exactly tell you for absolute sure.

That said, Dr. Jha was clearly wrong on one key point. At least one person in this country really does "know for sure!" We've seen the all-knowing Greg Gutfeld say, with absolute certainty, that we do know that the Covid virus emerged from the lab.  

Fox sends him out, twice a day, to make a joke of our culture. On the brighter side, profits are good.