Sen. Rand Paul is a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist, but he has an unhealthy obsession with Dr. Anthony Fauci and now has rigged a ridiculous contempt of Congress charge against Fauci, who was the ubiquitous, calming voice of reason during the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many in the MAGA base came to resent, even hate Fauci for this, disregarding his advice often at their own mortal peril. Yet he carried on, determined to see the nation through, the consummate scientist who tried to keep the nation abreast of how to navigate the deadly crisis.

Last week Fauci was rewarded with an attempt at prosecution, with the Paul-chaired Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs having voted along party lines to refer Fauci to the Justice Department for contempt — preempting a full Senate vote, which is dubiously legal in itself — after the doctor invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions during a July 29 hearing.

During the session, which was a kangaroo court, Paul made it very clear that this was not just an effort to gather more information, as helpfully summarized by his public desire to see Fauci “behind bars.” The hearing was a transparent attempt to gotcha Fauci into admitting that he hid information about the origins of the COVID virus, something that is not true and which Fauci has testified about repeatedly about already.

Even with a full pardon from President Joe Biden, Paul, in collusion with Trump attack dog and now-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche will look for a crime by Fauci in using his Fifth Amendment rights. So it should have come as no surprise that, given the explicit objective of this sham hearing, Fauci did not see much reason to cooperate.

Stepping back a little further, let’s think about what message this all sends: if you’re a dedicated public servant who devotes a lifetime to government work, culminating in a careful effort to help the nation navigate a once-in-a-generation emergency, what awaits you in exchange is persecution and vilification for the rest of your life.

Were there missteps that Fauci might have made, moments where he could have acted faster or made different decisions? Sure, such is the nature of being a high public official during a basically unprecedented emergency, and it’s fair and proper to examine these decisions with the benefit of hindsight to figure out lessons for the next emergency.

What is not proper is to take one public official, who by all accounts acted well as professionally as he could have with the information he had available, anoint as the avatar of all the grievances that a political movement has — ranging from arguably reasonable to out-and-out conspiracy — and hound him.

Let’s be clear about something: while the endeavor to conclusively ascertain the origin of COVID is important, neither Paul nor anyone else has found any conclusive evidence for their preferred lab-leak theory, certainly not to the level of not only establishing that this was its genesis but that Fauci and other officials worked to cover that up. The World Health Organization has determined that a natural cause is likeliest based on the evidence thus far, though it remains inconclusive.

That’s a far cry from the assertion that the health authorities, under Fauci’s direction, basically funded the engineering of the virus and then negligently allowed it to get loose and wreak global havoc, a smear with no basis in the evidence. If Blanche’s DOJ tries to move forward with this sham, a judge should quash it.

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