RACHAEL BEDARD2026年7月31日 Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSenate hearings are always theatrical. Even still, Wednesday morning’s Senate committee hearing to interrogate Dr. Anthony Fauci on, among other things, the origins of Covid-19 was a shocking performance: Dr. Fauci barely spoke, while everyone else spent some three hours projecting their emotions onto him.参议院的听证会总是充满戏剧性。尽管如此，周三上午参议院委员会就新冠病毒起源等问题质询安东尼·福奇博士的那场听证会仍是一场令人震惊的表演：福奇几乎一言不发，其他人在约三个小时里却不断将自己的情绪投射到他身上。Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthy intent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country. The Covid lockdown “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime,” he said to Dr. Fauci during his opening statement. And “you have for years avoided responsibility.”委员会主席、肯塔基州参议员兰德·保罗将自己塑造成当代的乔·麦卡锡，一心要查明某人所谓危害国家罪行的真相。在开场白中，他对福奇说，新冠封锁“如果没有你协助和教唆犯罪，绝对不可能实施”。他还说，“多年来你一直在逃避责任。”Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon covering all of his activities from 2014 to early 2025. This pardon would not protect against new accusations of perjury if Dr. Fauci were found to have lied during sworn testimony after Mr. Biden left office in 2025. On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth Amendment. As Republican senators peppered him with often hostile questions, he repeated over and over again that he respectfully declined to answer.在离任之前，拜登总统采取了一项非同寻常的举措，对福奇从2014年到2025年初的所有活动给予了全面赦免。但如果福奇博士在拜登2025年离任后被发现曾在宣誓作证时撒谎，这项赦免将无法保护他免受新的伪证罪指控。在律师的建议下，85岁的福奇在周三的听证会上做出了援引美国宪法第五修正案这一不同寻常的选择。当共和党参议员向他抛出一连串往往充满敌意的问题时，他一遍又一遍地重复表示礼貌地拒绝回答。By doing so, Dr. Fauci became the speechless cipher to whom committee Republicans and Democrats argued their irreconcilable stories — about the pandemic, but also more broadly about science and public health in America. The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.通过这样做，福奇博士成了一个无言的符号，委员会中的共和党人和民主党人对着他陈述着彼此无法调和的说法——不仅是关于大流行的叙事，还包括更广泛的关于美国科学和公共卫生的叙事。其结果是一场毫无用处的闹剧，未能向迫切需要深刻见解的公众提供任何启示。Mr. Paul personally and directly accuses Dr. Fauci of: funding dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, that may have resulted in a lab leak, releasing SARS-CoV-2 into the world (which Dr. Fauci denies); promoting mitigation policies that infringed on civil liberties; profiting off his pandemic-era fame; and hiding the truth about what he knew about the virus’s origins and when.保罗亲自且直接地指控福奇：资助中国武汉危险的功能增益研究，这可能导致了实验室泄漏，从而将SARS-CoV-2病毒释放到全世界（福奇对此予以否认）；推行侵犯公民自由的防疫政策；利用其在大流行期间的名声牟利；以及隐瞒了他对病毒起源及其知情时间的真相。Dr. Fauci has faced congressional grilling numerous times, before both the House and the Senate. In the days before this event, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s diary entries. (Dr. Fauci apparently wrote them on computers associated with his government account; they were retrieved by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his staff, who provided them to Senator Paul.)无论是在众议院还是参议院，福奇都曾多次面临国会的严厉盘问。在这次听证会的前几天，保罗公布了福奇1100多页的日记内容。（显然，福奇是在与其政府账户相关联的电脑上写下这些日记的；卫生部长小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪及其工作人员找回了这些日记，并将其提供给了保罗。） Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesExcerpts from Dr. Fauci’s private writings, including his reflections on his conversations with celebrities and his growing award collection, seem to affirm the right’s portrayal of him as a self-regarding operator who was flattered rather than humbled by the attention he received during a national crisis.福奇博士私人笔记的节选——包括他对与名人交流的感想，以及他不断增加的奖项收藏——似乎证实了右翼对他的刻画：一个自我中心的操弄者，在国家危机期间受到的关注让他沾沾自喜，而不是保持谦逊。But many of the entries being cited as evidence that Dr. Fauci lied to the public or deliberately withheld information are really reminders of how uncertain the context was for pandemic decision-making. Some of the entries, in fact, give a useful glimpse into how decisions were hashed out among experts with different perspectives and concerns, with Dr. Fauci often playing the role of convener or informal chair. On Jan. 26, 2020, he wrote that the virus may have originated in animals and jumped to humans; later, he dutifully noted conversations he was having with other scientists who were discussing alternative possibilities.但是，许多被援引为福奇向公众撒谎或故意隐瞒信息证据的日记实际上是在提醒人们，当时的大流行决策背景充满了不确定性。事实上，其中一些记录生动地展现了持不同观点和关切的专家们如何商讨决策，而福奇经常在其中扮演召集人或非正式主席的角色。在2020年1月26日，他写道，病毒可能起源于动物并传染给人类；后来，他又如实记录了自己与其他科学家讨论其他可能性时的对话内容。In an interview with The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells in 2023, Mr. Wallace-Wells pushed Dr. Fauci on the lab leak hypothesis and his role in funding research in Wuhan. When Mr. Wallace-Wells suggested more thorough responses that Dr. Fauci could’ve offered when questioned on the subject, he became irritated. “David, have you ever testified before a congressional committee?” he snapped.在2023年接受《纽约时报》戴维·华莱士-韦尔斯采访时，华莱士-韦尔斯就实验室泄漏假说以及他在资助武汉研究中的作用向福奇施压。华莱士-韦尔斯建议福奇，在被问及该话题时本可提供更详尽的回答，福奇变得恼火起来。“戴维，你曾在国会委员会面前作过证吗？”他厉声说道。Dr. Fauci seems to have concluded years ago that the more he says, the more his character and actions become subject to debate. And so, on Wednesday, he took abuse — and some praise — and stayed silent. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, in a particularly aggressive performance, accused him of wanting “to be the sun god of science.” Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, demanded to know, using an expletive, who Dr. Fauci thought he was for doing what he did.福奇似乎几年前就得出了结论：他说得越多，他的品格和行为就越会成为争论的焦点。因此，在周三，他承受着辱骂——也有一些赞扬——并保持了沉默。另一位共和党参议员、来自密苏里州的乔希·霍利尤为咄咄逼人，指责福奇想要“成为科学界的太阳神”。俄亥俄州共和党参议员伯尼·莫雷诺则用脏话质问福奇到底以为自己是谁，竟敢做那样的事。Democratic senators, including Gary Peters from Michigan and Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, commiserated with Dr. Fauci over his ordeal, and used much of their time to argue that the committee ought to be discussing all of the ways President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have ruined public health.密歇根州的加里·彼得斯和康涅狄格州的理查德·布卢门撒尔等民主党参议员对福奇遭受的磨难表示同情，并利用了他们的大部分发言时间主张，该委员会本应该讨论特朗普总统和肯尼迪部长是如何从各个方面破坏公共卫生的。Only Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, said anything insightful — and that was about what the hearing represented about the state of politics in America, and the implications for trust and a functioning democracy. “Right now, I feel the hyper-partisanship growing in this country in dangerous ways,” Mr. Kim said. “People calling our public servants criminals,” he lamented, is “undermining the very nature of the work of governance.”只有新泽西州民主党参议员安迪·金发表了有见地的言论——他谈到了此次听证会所反映的美国政治现状，以及这对公众信任和民主正常运转的启示。“现在，我感觉到这个国家的极端党争正在以危险的方式加剧，”金说。他感叹道，“人们把我们的公职人员称为罪犯，这正在破坏治理工作的本质。”He’s right, of course; show trials are bad for democracy and do nothing to get us closer to either truth or consensus. Hanging over every conversation about what happened during the pandemic of the recent past is anxiety about what might happen should we face a pandemic in the near future. In projecting all of a difficult era’s conflicts onto Dr. Fauci, Republicans evade the harder work of figuring out what we actually should learn from his, and our, mistakes.当然，他是对的。作秀式的审判对民主是有害的，且无助于让我们更接近真相或达成共识。在每一场关于过去那场大流行期间发生了什么的对话中都笼罩着一种焦虑：如果我们在不久的将来再次面临疫情，会发生什么。共和党人将那个艰难时期的所有冲突都投射到福奇身上，从而逃避了一项更艰巨的工作——弄清楚我们到底应该从他以及我们自己的错误中吸取什么教训。Dr. Fauci is a complicated man who has been both elevated and reduced to a symbol. His legacy after a decades-long career at the intersection of science and politics is now defined by incompatible, contested accounts of his pandemic-era impact. There is little hope of resolving that contest any time soon.福奇博士是一个复杂的人，他既被抬高也被贬为一个符号。经历了数十年处于科学与政治交汇处的职业生涯后，他留下的历史遗产如今正被关于他在疫情时期影响力的评价所定义，它们相互矛盾且存在争议，而且在短期内，这样的矛盾恐怕难以化解。Theater, at its most powerful, refracts truth through fiction so its force can be viscerally felt. This hearing was a performance that only entrenched the mistrust that increasingly defines Americans’ relationship to their institutions. Dr. Fauci, the ultimate institutionalist, has become that mistrust’s enduring target.最有力量的戏剧通过虚构来折射真相，让人们能切身感受到它的力量。而这次听证会不过是一场作秀，只会进一步加深那种日益定义美国人与制度之间关系的猜疑。作为最典型的建制派，福奇已成为这种猜疑的长期靶子。Rachael Bedard是观点文章作者，也是一名老年病学家和姑息治疗医生。翻译：晋其角点击查看本文英文版。