Well, It's Not Like He Isn't an Admitted Serial Liar

US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) wants the US Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for allegedly lying to Congress about NIH funding of "gain of function" research.

Personally, I have trouble working up much outrage when someone lies to Congress. After all, Congress as a group, and most or all of its individual members, lie to the rest of us all the time. And when someone tells Congress a lie it wants to hear and promote, there's seldom any penalty.

That said, it's not hard to believe that Fauci lied. After all, he's lied -- or at least publicly claimed to have lied (and if the claims weren't true, then they were lies) -- to the public several times during, and about, the COVID-19 pandemic.

• In March of 2020, Fauci (so far as I can tell, truthfully) claimed that "the science" doesn't support the idea that wearing masks reduces the spread of viral disease. Then he changed his story, and when asked why, he claimed he'd just said that so that there wouldn't be a run on masks (in other words, he claimed that he'd been lying the first time).
• Then, he changed his story on the vaccination rate required to achieve herd immunity, and when challenged on the change, he replied "When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85." In other words, he was lying at least one of the two times.
• When the UK adopted a "get everyone a single shot of vaccine before worrying about second shots" strategy, Fauci opposed that strategy for the United States, claiming that "the science" didn't work and that such an approach would encourage variants. When challenged on that later, once again he claimed -- you guessed it -- to have been lying before, and said that the real explanation was that "changing our story" might make people less confident in the already adopted strategy.

I don't know if Fauci lied about this particular thing. But it's hard to make a case for the guy as some kind of pillar of loyalty to the truth.