Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno says Anthony Fauci's role in shutting down schools during the pandemic created a generation of hopeless young people now driving violence in American cities, a charge leveled one day after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before a Senate committee.
Moreno, a Republican, appeared on Breitbart News Daily on July 30 and laid out a causal chain that starts with pandemic-era school shutdowns and ends with the youth violence gripping cities like Cleveland. His argument is blunt: kids locked out of classrooms for two years lost more than education. They lost meals, stability, and any reason to believe the future held something for them.
The interview came the morning after Fauci sat before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and refused, again and again, to answer questions about his conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic. That stonewalling is now the backdrop against which Moreno and other Republicans are pressing a broader case: that Fauci's influence did lasting, measurable harm to American communities, and that he has never been held to account for it.
Moreno's core claim centers on a specific disruption. In Cleveland and school systems like it, he said, students left eighth grade when closures hit and did not return until tenth grade. They skipped ninth grade entirely, a year Moreno described as "the most important transitional year." He pointed to studies on ninth grade's significance, though he did not name them.
The senator described the downstream effects in stark terms:
"The problem was we had for two years, basically, in some systems like that, for example, in Cleveland, you had kids that left eighth grade were shut down and then didn't come back till 10th grade. They missed the most important transitional year, so they're just way behind. So these kids don't feel like they have a future. They were shut inside of sometimes not great family situations."
He went further, tying food insecurity and isolation directly to the violence now visible in major cities.
"A lot of these kids, this is the only meal they had was what they had at school. They felt isolation, and now you see this lashing out of youth violence. This youth violence epidemic is absolutely the result of this."
That framing puts the blame squarely on the officials who ordered and sustained the closures, and on Fauci, whom Moreno accuses of driving those decisions from Washington.
The Senate hearing that preceded Moreno's interview was, by any measure, extraordinary. Fauci appeared under subpoena before the committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul. The New York Post reported that Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 111 times, declining to answer questions about COVID origins, gain-of-function research funding, and whether federal employees were used to solicit personal prize money on his behalf.
The refusals came despite the fact that President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon before leaving office in 2025, covering potential federal offenses between 2014 and the end of his presidency. The Washington Examiner reported the total at approximately 115 invocations. Paul questioned whether the pardon undermined Fauci's legal basis for refusing to testify at all.
Paul did not let the refusals stand without consequence. He announced the committee would vote the following week on a resolution certifying Fauci in contempt of Congress.
"Because you refused to answer, citing a privilege that is unsupported because of your pardon, and after being denied to do so, this committee has scheduled a vote next week on a resolution certifying your contempt."
Paul's opening statement framed Fauci's career in the harshest terms available to a committee chairman:
"Today will be the capstone to Anthony Fauci's 40 years of abuse of power at NIH. History will judge, but the facts as we now know them paint a sordid tale of dishonesty, misjudgment and ultimately the hubris, the likes of which the world has never seen."
The hearing also produced a confrontation that went beyond words. Fox News reported that one of Fauci's attorneys, David Schertler, was physically removed from the hearing room by security after repeatedly disrupting proceedings. Paul warned him multiple times before ordering the removal, telling the chamber, "This testimony is from Anthony Fauci. This is not a game with his lawyers."
Sen. Josh Hawley raised a separate accusation during the hearing: that Fauci illegally used eight federal employees and taxpayer resources to apply for and solicit cash prizes totaling more than $1 million for his personal benefit. Florida's attorney general has since launched an investigation into Fauci following the hearing.
The senator's sharpest charge was not about research funding or personal enrichment. It was about honesty. Moreno told host Mike Slater that Fauci claimed during the hearing that he "had nothing to do with shutting down schools." Moreno called that a lie.
He pointed to Fauci's personal diary, which he said has since been released to the public. Moreno characterized the diary as containing entries in which Fauci "bragged about the fact that he convinced these morons, like for example Governor Cuomo, to shut down schools." No direct quotes from the diary appeared in the interview. But the New York Post's reporting on the hearing noted that Fauci's own diary entries, which he authenticated, showed he recommended lockdowns to New York City's mayor and the president, despite publicly denying he made such recommendations.
Fauci's diary has already produced other revelations about his behind-the-scenes political maneuvering during and after the pandemic.
Moreno did not spare his own party. He acknowledged that Ohio's Republican governor also shut down schools, saying, "I take no pleasure because he's a Republican governor, but he shut down schools too." That concession strengthens his broader argument: the closures were widespread, bipartisan in execution, and driven from the top by Fauci's influence on state leaders of both parties.
Moreno also recounted an anecdote that captured the enforcement culture surrounding pandemic restrictions. He described a mother who was tased and dragged out of a high school football game for not wearing a mask outdoors. He did not name the woman or identify the location.
The story served a broader point. While ordinary Americans faced aggressive enforcement of mask and distancing rules, Fauci himself was photographed attending a baseball game without a mask in July 2020, even as he advised the public to wear them. Breitbart published a report on the incident at the time.
That gap between the rules imposed on citizens and the behavior of the man who shaped those rules is central to the frustration Moreno channeled. Paul's subpoena compelling Fauci's testimony came only after Fauci refused to cooperate voluntarily with the committee's COVID origin probe.
Moreno summed up the state of affairs in plain language: "This got dystopian. I mean, this was so bad."
The contempt vote Paul announced has not yet occurred. Fauci's pardon from Biden remains in effect, and its interaction with Fifth Amendment protections is legally contested. The committee's investigation into COVID-era decisions, including questions about U.S.-funded research programs abroad, continues.
AP News reported that Democrats on the committee called the hearing politically motivated. But the hearing produced authenticated diary entries, accusations of federal resource misuse, and more than 100 refusals to answer questions under oath. Those are not political theater. They are the record.
Moreno's argument about school closures and youth violence is, by nature, harder to prove than a contempt charge or a misuse-of-funds allegation. Causal claims spanning years and millions of students resist neat documentation. But the senator is asking a question that millions of parents, teachers, and community leaders in cities like Cleveland have been asking since the schools reopened: Who decided to lock these kids out, and what did they think would happen?
Fauci had a chance to answer. He took the Fifth instead.