There's a comic trope beloved by playwrights, novelists and screenwriters about the fighters all suited up for battle, only to discover that their adversary refuses to play.

A real-life example of this stratagem unfolded Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., convened a committee hearing aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into saying something under oath that Paul could use to prosecute him for perjury.

Fauci, who was appearing before Paul's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena, took the weapon out of Paul's hands by simply refusing to answer a single question other than to state — 116 times by my count — "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution."

During the nearly three-hour hearing, Fauci's response left Paul and his seven GOP colleagues on the panel confronting a brick wall. They resorted to the common, if infantile tactic of asking repeated simple but irrelevant questions in an attempt to embarrass their target.

"What day of the week is it today?" Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked. "What color tie are you wearing?" He elicited the same boilerplate response.

Presumably most of the senators were aware that protocol requires a witness pleading the Fifth to plead it to all questions. Certainly Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who participated in this performative charade, knew that. During a 2000 civil deposition in a lawsuit related to the healthcare firm Columbia/HCA, of which he was chief executive until 1997, he pleaded the Fifth at least 55 times, using phraseology almost identical to Fauci's.

(Scott left his post after it was learned that his company was under investigation for filing false claims with Medicare and other government healthcare programs. By 2000, it had paid $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and restitution, which the Justice Department called "by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a healthcare fraud investigation." Scott wasn't charged personally with wrongdoing.)

Trump knows too. At a civil deposition in 2022, he invoked the Fifth more than 440 times.

They all know too that the Supreme Court has upheld the idea that the Fifth protects not only the guilty but also the innocent. So their shtick about how Fauci wouldn't be pleading the Fifth unless he had something to hide is sheer duplicity.

Fauci, 85, and his lawyers presumably knew they had no choice but to turn away all questions. Experience told him that engaging with Paul would merely feed what Fauci, in a brief opening statement, labeled Paul's "unhinged obsession" with blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was left to the Republicans to fulminate into the wind about how Fauci is a "megalomaniac" (Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio) or "a villain" (Scott), or worse. Early in the proceedings, Paul ordered Fauci's lawyer, David Schertler, from the hearing room for trying to make a statement on his client's behalf.

Let's examine the backdrop to Wednesday's farce.

As I have documented many times over the last five years, Republicans and right-wingers are fixated on the notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, escaped from a Chinese lab to infect the rest of the world.

There is not a speck of evidence to validate that theory. Rather, it's the overwhelming consensus of epidemiologists and virologists that COVID originated in wildlife, probably bats, and migrated to humankind via the illicit trade in wildlife in China and other south Asian territories, a process known as zoonosis.

The case against Fauci, who retired in 2022, rests on several false claims. One is that as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he manipulated scientists into downplaying the lab-leak theory in favor of zoonosis.

His accusers base this idea on questions raised by the first scientists who examined the virus in early 2021, literally days and weeks after it appeared and it was a pathogen new to everybody. Some hadn't seen some features of the virus in the wild, so they pondered whether it was man-made.

But they were wrong — the features were familiar to virologists, just not to the ones examining SARS-CoV-2. Following the science, they came to discard the lab-leak theory as nothing more than an exceptionally remote possibility; that conclusion has held up over time. Fauci didn't downplay the possibility of a lab leak in his discussions with scientists, as his enemies claim, but instead urged them repeatedly to follow their research wherever it took them.

Paul's particular hobby horse in this debate is the claim that Fauci downplayed the lab-leak theory because NIAID had provided funding for "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same teeming city where COVID was first seen, which made it complicit in the pandemic. For Paul's purposes, "gain-of-function" is a shibboleth, akin to conservative attacks on "DEI" and "critical race theory"—useful because laypersons don't know what it is but it sure sounds sinister.

Generically, the term refers to laboratory work that augments natural qualities of a microbe to facilitate experimental scrutiny or achieve a necessary goal, such as allowing microbes to produce a flu vaccine or bacteria to produce artificial insulin.

From 2014 to 2017, the U.S. suspended gain-of-function experiments to develop a standard identifying research that might produce "potential pandemic pathogens."

The lab-leak camp asserts that NIAID-funded experiments created a virus in the Chinese lab with features making it infectious for humans.

Professional virologists say that nothing like that is possible given the state of science. A declassified report issued in 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the U.S. had no evidence that any genetic engineering at the Wuhan lab "involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic."

NIAID examined the work it funded in China against the post-2017 standard and determined it did not breach that standard. Paul raised that very issue with Fauci at a contentious July 2021 hearing, but Fauci rejected it forthrightly.

"Sen. Paul, you do not know what you're talking about, quite frankly," Fauci told him.

The other brief against Fauci aired by the GOP majority on Paul's committee is that Fauci is somehow responsible for the anti-pandemic steps undertaken by states and localities across the U.S. in the heat of the pandemic. The absurdity of this contention is manifest, since Fauci never had any authority to impose any regulations on anybody.

No, the damage was done by the virus, not Fauci, and it unquestionably was mitigated by the measures he recommended. Even so, some 1.2 million Americans have died from the disease — many of them succumbing because anti-vaccine agitators have discouraged them from getting COVID shots.

For the right wing, "Fauci" is just a slogan. Here's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, boasting in a 2021 fundraising appeal, "I refused to blindly follow Dr. Fauci ... and allow him to strip Floridians of their God-given freedoms" by resisting lockdowns and school closures. Never mind that Florida emerged from the pandemic with one of the worst COVID mortality rates in the country.

The truth is that while school closures wreaked damage on children's learning opportunities, they almost certainly saved the lives of thousands of children and their family members.

"What would have happened had schools remained open without any mitigation measures?" New York neurologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has asked.

The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pegged at about 2,000, "would have been higher had 60-70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months' time in 2020," Howard reckoned. "It's reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died."

Fauci plainly understood that anything he said at the hearing would only be weaponized against him through selective disclosure — as happened when Paul this week released about 1,000 pages from Fauci's personal diary dating from the pandemic era.

None of it validated Paul's accusations. And nothing at Wednesday's hearing told us anything new about COVID's origins or the course of the pandemic. That's a dangerous shame, because the GOP's obsession with falsely blaming Fauci for a tragic global natural event for purely partisan purposes will only make it harder to fight the next pandemic, which inevitably will arrive, someday.

While they're distracted with their witch hunt, important work will have to be done to stave it off. But doing it while the GOP goes off on its malevolent persecution of Fauci and other scientists will be like trying to swim upstream against a torrent of slime.

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