“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” – 2 Timothy 1:7
Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family physician and former state senator, is repeating a line he has used for years. He says he knows how to call out people who mislead the public. He says he did that for five years. He says the cost was investigations into his medical license, attacks on his reputation, and violations of his speech. He says Fauci’s fear-driven messaging and self-interested decisions hurt ordinary people.
The quote tracks a campaign video Jensen posted this summer while seeking the Republican nomination for Minnesota state auditor. He won that primary on August 11 with about two-thirds of the vote, beating the party-endorsed candidate. A mid-August poll then put him in a 39-39 tie with Democrat Zack Filipovich heading into November.
The license fight is real and incomplete. From 2020 through early 2023 the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice opened five investigations built from 18 complaints about Jensen’s public COVID comments. Jensen and his lawyers say none of those complaints involved patient care. The board closed them without discipline. Jensen sued, arguing the probes were retaliation for political speech. A federal judge dismissed the case more than once for lack of standing. Jensen appealed to the Eighth Circuit. That appeal was still live earlier this year.
Fauci’s record is also incomplete, and the argument over it has not cooled. In July 2026 the former NIAID director appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times rather than answer questions from Chairman Rand Paul and other Republicans about origins, gain-of-function funding, school closures, masking, and distancing. Newly released diary excerpts and FOIA emails have given critics fresh material. Defenders answer that a novel virus killed on a scale no single official controlled, that Fauci served presidents of both parties, and that a Republican-led hearing aimed at perjury traps is not the same thing as a scientific review.
Both sides used fear. Officials treated dissent as a public-health threat and leaned on platforms, boards, and agencies to narrow the range of acceptable speech. Critics treated Fauci as the author of every closed school and empty church, even when governors, hospital systems, and foreign governments made the same calls. Ordinary people paid first: lost work, delayed care, children out of classrooms, and a collapse of trust that still shows up in polls and in campaigns.
Jensen is converting that history into a watchdog pitch. The auditor’s office audits local governments, not NIAID. Whether a five-year feud with a retired federal scientist is the best test of who should watch Minnesota’s books is a separate question from whether boards should investigate doctors for talking on television.