Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday and refused to answer. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee's chairman, had subpoenaed him. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times during the hearing.
Two days earlier, Paul had released a 1,141-page tranche of Fauci's private diary, spanning late 2019 to his retirement in December 2022. C-SPAN has the hearing.
Six years of American argument have run through this man. He closed the schools, or he didn't. He shut the businesses, or the governors did. Utahn wanted to know what the Utah version of that fight looks like on paper, so we dove into the records.
The orders
Every restriction Utah imposed rested on state law. Gov. Gary Herbert declared a state of emergency on March 6, 2020, pursuant to Utah Code Section 53-2a-206, part of the Disaster Response and Recovery Act. Federal guidance carried no legal force here at any point. The order mentions the CDC three times and names one federal official, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
State Public Health Order 2020-13 set the color-coded restriction levels in September 2020 on the authority of the World Health Organization's pandemic designation, Trump's national emergency proclamation, and Utah Code sections 26-1-30 and 26-6-3.
State Public Health Order 2020-25 carried Utah's statewide mask requirement, which Herbert had imposed on November 9 after resisting one for months, and it reaches for outside scientific authority more than any other document the state produced. It quotes the CDC director calling cloth face coverings "one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus." That was Robert Redfield, in a CDC press release issued four months earlier. The order then cites Brigham Young University researchers who reviewed more than 115 studies on masking.
Fauci's name appears in none of the above. His influence on the entities the state cited is another matter, but his name appeared in no other Utah executive order or public health order that Utahn could find.
The one time
There is a single instance of a Utah official invoking him by name to defend a decision.
On April 8, 2020, Herbert and Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox got Fauci on the phone. Herbert posted afterward that he had "finished a productive visit with Dr. Anthony Fauci about the actions and results from Utah's Stay Safe Stay Home directive," and that Fauci "expressed how favorably impressed he was with Utah's comprehensive response."
For context, at that time, Utah was one of nine states without a statewide stay-at-home order, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams had gone on Meet the Press that Sunday asking the holdouts to move. Mayors and county leaders were pressing him too. Stay Safe, Stay Home was a directive rather than an enforceable order, asking Utahns to leave home infrequently and capping gatherings at 20. Cox called it "a much more surgical approach" than the sledgehammer of a blanket shutdown.
Two days early
Herbert announced a soft closure of Utah's K-12 schools on March 13, 2020, saying the decision came from "input from scientists" and that acting early beat acting late. He had consulted superintendents and state and county health officials. State Board of Education officials pointed out that they lacked authority to mandate closures in the first place. Districts and local health departments held that power.
The diary entry Paul released this week, the one in which Fauci writes that he convinced New York's mayor to close the city's schools and had a similar call about California, is dated March 15. Utah's schools had been closed for two days.
6 feet or 10 feet?
The clearest case of federal guidance moving Utah policy.
Utah's operational playbook was the Phased Guidelines for the General Public and Businesses, written by the Governor's Office of Management and Budget and the Utah Department of Health with help from Leavitt Partners, the consultancy founded by Mike Leavitt, the three-term Utah governor who later ran Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.
Across its 24 pages, the CDC appears only as a reference, in a recurring instruction to follow standards promulgated by the CDC, the Utah Department of Health, and local health departments, and in four footnotes linking to CDC web pages.
The numbers in it are Utah's own. Group limits of 10, 20, and 50. Venue caps of 6,000 outdoors and 3,000 indoors. One person per 100 square feet in retail. A symptom threshold of 100.4 degrees. Hotel rooms left vacant 48 hours after checkout.
Utah also wrote a distancing rule stricter than the federal one. The April 22, 2020 version required 10 feet between household groups at events and in gyms, and the footnote explains why. Distance was "increased to 10 feet in this category due to movement, cheering, exertion, and prolonged exposure."
Then the state loosened it. The Public Health and Economic Emergency Commission met on April 20 and 21, 2020, under Utah Code 53-2c-202. Its co-chairs were Sen. Daniel Hemmert and Maj. Gen. Jefferson Burton. Its members included Senate President Stuart Adams, Rep. Mike Schultz, University of Utah Health CEO Dr. Michael Good, and five business and civic leaders. By unanimous vote, the commission recommended Herbert "revise spacing guidelines to be consistent with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation of six feet between individuals rather than 10 feet."
In that same vote, on gyms, the commission went the other way and replaced a density rule with a 10-foot requirement.
Fauci later told Congress he had nothing to do with the 6 feet rule. In a closed-door interview released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, he said the threshold "sort of just appeared" and that he was not aware of studies supporting it. At his public hearing in June 2024, he said the guidance came from the CDC and that "it had little to do with me since I didn't make the recommendation." A state commission adopted it anyway, over the stricter draft the health department had produced.
The state's other borrowings look the same. In December 2020 Utah cut quarantine from 14 days to 7-10 to match the CDC.
Utah's version
Utah did have someone standing where Fauci stood. Dr. Angela Dunn, the state epidemiologist, ran the daily briefings, and in April 2020 the Salt Lake Tribune wrote that "Dunn has become Utah's version of Anthony Fauci."
She got his critics along with his job. Anti-mask protesters gathered outside her Salt Lake City home in October 2020. Telling the Tribune in 2021 why she left for the Salt Lake County Health Department, she said she had become "this poster child for, you know, [Dr. Anthony] Fauci, or the liberal left or whatever." In the same interview, she described the job she was leaving. As state epidemiologist, she said, she was purely in an advisory role.
The reopening plan bore that out. When Herbert unveiled it in April 2020, Dunn said she had not been involved in setting the statistical conditions for it.
Where the virus came from
Utahn found no evidence that any Utah state official ever took a public position on the origins of COVID-19. Not Herbert, not Cox, not Dunn, not the health department. The orders are silent, and the briefings were silent. It was not their jurisdiction, and it does not appear that it had any bearing on a single decision they had to make.
That fight belonged to the state's congressional delegation. Rep. Chris Stewart introduced the FAUCI Act in November 2021, a companion to Sen. Joni Ernst's Senate bill. The acronym stands for Fairness and Accountability in Underwriting Chinese Institutions. It would have barred federal money for gain-of-function research at laboratories in China, and made ineligible for federal funding or employment any NIH official, employee, or grantee whom the Health and Human Services inspector general found had intentionally misled Congress about federal money for such research abroad.
Both bills were referred to committee and died there with the 117th Congress. The statute itself never mentions Fauci. His name lives only in the title, and Stewart's announcement said the effort was not about assigning blame.
He was blunter in interviews. Stewart told the Deseret News in March 2023 that U.S. intelligence agencies had been "afraid of confronting China." Asked whether Fauci should be held responsible if he were proven to have purposely misled Americans, Stewart said yes, there was no question about it.
The origins bill Utah actually helped pass drew no partisan line at all. Sen. Mike Lee co-sponsored the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, requiring the director of national intelligence to declassify information on potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the pandemic. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent and the House 419-0. Biden signed it on March 20, 2023, as Public Law 118-2, saying he shared the goal of releasing as much information as possible.
The question is still open. The CIA concluded in January 2025 that a lab origin was more likely, at low confidence, joining the FBI and the Department of Energy. Other agencies still favor natural transmission. Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee concluded in a March 2023 memo that Fauci prompted the drafting of the scientific paper he later cited from the White House podium to rule out a lab leak.
Fauci denies steering it.
The role Utah's legacy media played
The Deseret News editorial board wrote about origins once, on March 1, 2023, after the Department of Energy shifted its assessment. The editorial declined to pick a theory. It walked through the confidence levels agency by agency, described the politicization on both sides, and defended the act of changing your mind. "Politicians, and particularly political zealots, don't like the kind of uncertainty science often provides," the board wrote. "They don't like how conclusions change as facts emerge."
The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board wrote about the pandemic constantly and, so far as Utahn can find, never once about Wuhan. Its subject was Utah's own leadership. In September 2020 it wrote that "Utah's leaders have perhaps done the worst job of any state of managing the COVID-19 pandemic." In October it demanded a deeper audit of TestUtah and the state contact tracing app, neither of which, it said, seemed to have been worth the money.
Then came January 15, 2022, in the middle of the Omicron surge. The board published "Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic," under the subhead "Cowardice and misinformation at all levels have left each one of us to fight this battle alone." It contained this now-infamous sentence:
"Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor's next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere."
The board was not calling for forced vaccination. It was calling for a mandate, and for soldiers to keep the unvaccinated out of public life.
Paul Huntsman chaired that editorial board. He bought the Tribune in 2016, served as its publisher, and stayed on as chairman of the paper's board of directors after it converted to a nonprofit, holding both chairmanships at once.
While the editorial board had six members, critics went straight at Huntsman. Sen. Mike McKell of Spanish Fork, and Cox's brother-in-law, wrote, "Remember that time Paul Huntsman and the Salt Lake Tribune called on the National Guard to remove all unvaccinated from society? Wow, that was bat shit crazy."
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson called the editorial "the sort of nonsense that makes editorial boards irrelevant." The Salt Lake County Republican chair demanded an apology. Newsweek and the national press had it inside 48 hours.
The leaders Huntsman's editorial board accused of surrender had spent the previous autumn fighting mandates from the other direction. Cox promised to veto any bill barring private businesses from requiring vaccination. In October 2021, he and six other statewide Republicans joined a lawsuit against the federal contractor vaccine requirement.
Huntsman vs. Cox
Something else was happening at the Tribune while it covered the pandemic.
Paul Huntsman's brother was running for governor. Jon Huntsman Jr., twice elected to the office and later ambassador to China and Russia, entered the 2020 Republican primary against Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, the man managing the state's pandemic response.
Jon Huntsman went into quarantine on June 6 after campaign staff tested positive, tested positive himself on June 10 after first being told he was negative, and participated remotely in the final primary debate. KUTV, which hosted it, noted that "precautionary measures taken include isolating Huntsman."
He lost narrowly. The Associated Press called the race for Cox on July 6, after days of counting, with the two men separated by about 9,100 votes. The general election was a foregone conclusion.
Four weeks after the race was called, the Tribune's editor quit. Jennifer Napier-Pearce, who had run the newsroom through its Pulitzer and its nonprofit conversion, wrote to the board that "the board chair and I have differences of opinion about newsroom coverage, management and policies." She added that those differences "have sharpened over the past six months." She told staff she could no longer effectively lead and was "in the way of progress." She said she had not been asked to resign.
Six months back from August 2020 lands in February, at the start of both the pandemic and the primary. Poynter's Rick Edmonds connected it publicly at the time, reporting that "word on the street, and a Twitter thread by columnist Robert Gehrke, concluded that those differences came to a head this spring in how the Tribune covered the Utah governor campaign of Jon Huntsman Jr., Paul Huntsman's brother."
Neither Napier-Pearce nor Huntsman explained the dispute at the time. Edmonds's own guess was that Huntsman wanted more aggressive coverage of the failures of Utah's COVID-19 response, which Cox directed. An editor at the Deseret News, speaking anonymously, told him Napier-Pearce "ended up running a lot of interference for her staff."
Edmonds noted that former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet had recused himself from 2020 race coverage when his brother ran for president. He also noted a structural limit on the conflict. Nonprofit newsrooms give up the ability to endorse candidates, so the Tribune could not have endorsed Jon Huntsman even had its chairman wished it.
Paul Huntsman had never kept his distance from the newsroom. He told the New York Times in 2019 that he passed notes and suggestions to reporters directly. "I did hint to our newsroom to follow the money and you'll find the story, which they did," he said. He said he once called editorial cartoonist Pat Bagley to ask why he never made fun of Democrats.
Napier-Pearce did not elaborate on why she left, but told Poynter she was not bitter. "I'm proud of the excellent journalism Tribune reporters and editors produced during my tenure," she said. "I hope they'll continue to be Utah's independent voice. The community needs The Tribune."
Two days after the November general election, Cox named Napier-Pearce his senior adviser and communications director. She held the job for most of his first term. In 2022, the governor's office gave her its Award for Excellence for outstanding public service, describing her as "Senior Advisor and Director of Communications" and crediting her with having "reimagined the communications strategy" of the office.
In March 2021, Huntsman formed an LLC called Jittai and, with a Los Angeles business partner, spent at least $1 million investigating Nomi Health, the Utah company running TestUtah. He says he filed more than 400 public records requests across several states, and Jittai sued for records in Utah, Nebraska, and Iowa.
Huntsman explained himself in two signed Tribune op-eds, writing that he had "created a specialized group independent of The Tribune to make public records inquiries in multiple states." He told USA TODAY he used Jittai documents to write Tribune editorials critical of Nomi. According to the Washington Post, the paper did not disclose Jittai's involvement to the public.
Once the Washington Post story was published, the paper retroactively added a note that "Documents from Jittai, an LLC formed by Tribune board chair Paul Huntsman, were used in this reporting."
The arrangement unsettled the newsroom. In that same Washington Post article, reported in April 2022, Tribune journalists, speaking anonymously, worried that their chairman's pursuit of the man who beat his brother threatened the paper's independence. Huntsman denied to the Post that he was using either Jittai or the Tribune on his brother's behalf, saying the company existed to expose mismanagement in the public health system. He also noted that he formed Jittai several months after his brother conceded.
"My own newsroom ran and cried to WaPost when I did their homework for them," Huntsman wrote on X four years later.
"I think he has a lot of money, and he doesn't have any particular obligation to spend it on the newsroom. But it seems to me there are questions to be raised on whether this fits a pattern of supporting his brother's previous campaign for governor. At a minimum, he seems to be fired up by this set of issues. - Rick Edmonds, Poynter Institute"
The scrutiny produced results, though the Tribune newsroom (aided by Jittai) drove much of it. Reporters documented low positivity rates at TestUtah sites and the federal violations found at the hospital lab processing its tests. State officials asked Nomi to abandon both that test and lab when they updated contracts in August 2020.
The 2021 Legislature passed HB43, sponsored by Rep. Candice Pierucci, capping most no-bid emergency contracts at 30 days and requiring the state to post each emergency contract online within 14 days. The Tribune revealed in June 2021, through a records request, that the SEC was investigating Co-Diagnostics, the Salt Lake City company that supplied the original test. The SEC fined Co-Diagnostics in 2023 over how it promoted those tests to investors. Huntsman's Nebraska litigation surfaced documents showing that a test billed as Utah-made involved a consortium led by Chinese firms.
"We were compromised"
Then Huntsman turned on his own newsroom. He told USA TODAY he created Jittai because he did not trust Tribune reporters to "step up," and that the paper had gone soft under Napier-Pearce. "I went back and read all the stories from our political team and TestUtah and Cox, and we were compromised," he said. "That's not everyone else's opinion, and it will sound like political sour grapes."
According to the article, he told USA TODAY, "he believed The Tribune was not aggressively covering alleged cronyism, pay-to-play, abuse of power, conflicts of interest and no-bid contracts being awarded to friends of Republican politicians."
One of the reporters who wrote that USA TODAY article, Craig Harris, went to work for Paul Huntsman 6 months later.
Napier-Pearce called it a "ludicrous assertion that I suppressed investigative reporting in order to get a state job," and said she had consistently encouraged rigorous reporting on the 2020 campaigns. Gustus told USA TODAY the newsroom independently verified every Jittai document it used.
Matt Canham, a former Tribune editor, said publicly that "to have the board chairman question the commitment, talent and ethics of Tribune reporters and editors crosses the line."
Josh Walker, co-founder of Nomi Health, told USA Today, "We have refuted every single one of his points. … It's just baseless. There are people who didn't get health care services because of his articles."
Huntsman stepped down from the Tribune board in February 2024.
Huntsman says he is finishing a documentary about Utah's response to the pandemic. "You guys have no idea how bad this was," he posted on X in May. "Barely scratching the surface. I've got the receipts, and finishing a documentary."
What is left
Utah's loudest demand for force during the pandemic came from a newspaper, not from Washington. Its editorial board was chaired by the brother of the man who lost the 2020 primary to the official running the pandemic response. Its editor resigned four weeks after that race was called, over what she called differences with him about coverage, and the governor-elect hired her in November.
Six years later, Paul Huntsman is still saying the paper failed to vet the winner.
Next comes the documentary.
Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.
Clint Betts served on The Salt Lake Tribune's inaugural nonprofit board of directors, with a term ending June 30, 2021. He was also CEO of Silicon Slopes during this time.
