But will Fauci be forced to abandon his own “ideological bulls – – t” when he testifies next week on Capitol Hill?

When he uttered that recently unearthed line, Fauci was President Biden’s chief medical adviser and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head.

Almost a year after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic first sought his testimony, Fauci will sit early next week for two days of depositions to explain his role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his efforts to debunk the “lab leak” theory, COVID mandates and federal censorship. He will later speak at a public hearing. The subcommittee announced Fauci’s “honesty is non-negotiable.”

But will his memory stage another boycott? When Fauci was deposed in late 2022 for the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit on federal censorship, he claimed 174 times “I don’t recall” — including about damning and quite memorable emails he sent. Fauci will fetch a team of four lawyers to the deposition, rigging the odds against candor. Since 7 million people died worldwide from COVID, Fauci may have a lot to hide.

Fauci spearheaded one of the most brazen coverups in recent history. The US government had been financing gain-of-function bat research at the Wuhan Institute. That type of experimentation genetically alters organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. Such research is extremely dangerous. As MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating, according to the US State Department.

But Fauci believed the “best and brightest” could outsmart Mother Nature. In 2012, he declared it was “unlikely but conceivable” that gain-of-function research would “trigger a pandemic.” He was confident “the resulting knowledge outweigh[s] the risks.” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers professor of chemical biology, recently declared, “Fauci likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic, by first opposing, and then repeatedly and flagrantly violating, US-government policies implemented in 2014 and 2017 to restrict gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens.”

In late January 2020, top federal scientists recognized that the cascading COVID pandemic could obliterate their reputations. Francis Collins, National Institutes of Health chief, wrote in an email that “a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.” But the “conspiracy” was simply the cold, hard facts of the matter.

A top scientist at Fauci’s institute accepted the task of debunking the lab-leak story because, as he emailed a colleague, “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.” At an April 2020 White House appearance, Fauci touted the paper he helped spawn to prove his innocence.

Official bribery may have bolstered that conclusion. In September 2023, a senior CIA analyst told a congressional committee the agency bribed six key analysts to abandon their conclusion that COVID originated in a lab leak.

In congressional testimony, Fauci repeatedly denied that US government funds had bankrolled gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute. But the “budgetary vestal virgin” story was a sham from the start. After Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested prosecuting Fauci for perjury, Fauci howled that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

Censorship polished Fauci’s halo. In June 2021, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, Americans saw Fauci emails exposing his flip-flops on masks and his kowtowing to the Chinese government. A federal-censorship contractor warned Twitter that the official emails were being exploited “to foment increased distrust in Fauci’s guidance and in American public health officials and institutions” — Americans were doomed if they doubted their federal masters. Eric Schmitt, the then-Missouri attorney general who spearheaded a landmark lawsuit against the Biden administration, declared, “When Fauci speaks — social media censors.”

Fauci’s COVID storyline was pummeled last year when both the FBI and the Department of Energy, which runs national-security-focused Livermore Lab, concluded that COVID‑19 likely originated in a Chinese lab. On Sept. 20, the Biden administration belatedly banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving any US government research funding for 10 years as punishment for its risky gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses.

If COVID‑19 had been recognized from the start as the result of one of the biggest government fiascos in history, politicians could not have pirouetted as saviors as they seized sway over Americans’ daily life. Fauci’s fable on COVID’s origin was far more dangerous “ideological bulls – – t” than anything spouted on talk radio or Twitter. Americans deserve the truth, and Fauci deserves justice.

James Bovard is the author of the new book “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”