On July 29, Anthony Fauci sat in a congressional hearing and invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the pandemic. Afterward, Tommy Tuberville — the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama — went on Newsmax and made his voters a promise.

If they elect him governor, he said, he will look for a way to haul Fauci to Alabama and try to put him in prison. In Tuberville's words, Fauci "killed millions of people."

AL.com reported the remarks. He didn't stop at millions. He said Fauci's actions caused the deaths of "20 or 30,000 people in Alabama alone," and said he hoped every one of them would sue — adding that if he couldn't put Fauci in prison, he'd like to see him in court "every day for the rest of his life."

Let's do the arithmetic he skipped

Alabama's entire COVID-19 death toll — every single person in the state who died of the disease, from the first case to the end of federal tracking — is about 21,100, according to CDC data compiled by USAFacts through May 2023.

So when Tuberville says Fauci caused "20 or 30,000" Alabama deaths, he is not making a claim about some subset of preventable deaths. He is saying one man in Washington personally caused every COVID death in Alabama — and, at the top of his range, about 9,000 more than actually occurred.

That is not a strong opinion about pandemic policy. It's a number he made up on television.

What the Republicans' own investigation found

Here's the part Tuberville left out of the interview.

In 2024, a Republican-led Senate committee published its report on the origins of COVID-19. It concluded that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for how the virus emerged.

It also found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

That's his own party's investigation, with subpoena power, going after exactly this question. And Sen. Rand Paul — who ran the July 29 hearing and has pushed the cover-up theory harder than anyone — has an "obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution," in Fauci's words from his opening statement, as reported by the Associated Press.

Tuberville isn't revealing something the investigation missed. He's promising to relitigate something the investigation already looked at and didn't find.

What he's actually running on

Strip away the COVID argument and look at what the candidate for governor is offering.

He is telling Alabama voters that if they hand him the executive power of the state, he will use it to go after a specific named private citizen. Not a policy. Not an industry. A person he has been attacking for years, who received a presidential pardon, and whose conduct his own party's Senate investigation examined without finding wrongdoing.

That's not a governing agenda. It's a promise to use the state's law enforcement machinery on a political enemy — announced on cable news, as a campaign pitch.

Governors have real power over Alabamians' lives. They shape the state budget, decide whether to expand Medicaid, appoint the people who run public health, and sign or veto bills that determine whether a rural hospital stays open. Tuberville is asking for that job and spending his airtime on a man in Washington.

Meanwhile, back in Alabama

If Tuberville is genuinely haunted by Alabamians dying of preventable illness, there's a much shorter list of things he could have done about it from the Senate seat he already holds.

He voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services — putting a man with a long record of spreading vaccine misinformation in charge of Medicaid, Medicare, and the entire federal public health apparatus.

And an estimated 53,000 Alabamians are projected to lose health coverage under Trump's budget bill — a figure that climbs to 170,000 if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits are also allowed to expire.

Fifty-three thousand Alabamians losing insurance is a real number, produced by real votes, happening right now, in the state he wants to govern. It didn't get a Newsmax segment.

The tell

The most revealing line in the whole interview is the fallback: if we can't put him in prison, let's put him in court every day for the rest of his life.

That's an admission. He isn't confident there's a case. He's saying the punishment is the process — that the point is to make a man's life a permanent legal ordeal whether or not he broke any law.

A person who says that out loud, while campaigning to run a state's justice system, is telling you exactly how he intends to use it.

Fifty-three thousand Alabamians are about to lose their health coverage. Tuberville's answer, as a candidate for governor, is a show trial in Montgomery.

Source

• Ruth Serven Smith, Tuberville wants Fauci to stand trial in Alabama, claims he 'killed millions of people', AL.com (July 2026).