Recently a patient volunteered their anger and frustration about Dr. Anthony Fauci being dragged before a senate hearing and badgered with aggressive questions. “That man is a national hero. It’s a disgrace that they are treating him like this.” What I found so striking about this comment is that it came not long after another patient told me that “Dr. Fauci should be in prison for what he did.”
While I try to stay apolitical both in my office and on this blog, it’s not possible to completely disentangle medicine from politics. Besides, what I wish in this post is not to take one side or the other, but rather to use the case of Dr. Fauci as a prism by which to look at our current political dysfunction. The fact is that, increasingly, Democrats and Republicans live in alternative epistemic universes, which helps to explain much of our national polarization. It’s not just a question of which side is right or wrong on a particular issue, but that each side is consuming media that conveys a highly curated set of facts which cater only to their own view of the world, carefully neglecting to mention those facts which bolster the other sides’ points.
Take for example this passage, which I quote from an interview with a journalist on PBS news’ website, entitled “The Campaign Against Fauci”:
I mean, one of the first things that Trump did in his second term was to strip Fauci of his federally sponsored security detail, which he had had for, gosh, almost five years at that point for very legitimate reasons. He and his family have continued to receive very serious, very detailed death threats from people who have been unhappy with him.
Trump’s officials went on to tear down a mural with Fauci’s face. They went on to fire some of his closest colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. They even ousted his wife, who was not even at the department that he ran.
I think there have just been some very targeted personal attacks, to the point where many of his colleagues and former colleagues have said it seems like essentially everything Tony Fauci touched, they have attempted to dismantle, destroy, or obliterate so that there is no legacy left.
There’s plenty in this passage that I concur with. Whatever one thinks of Dr. Fauci’s handling of COVID, the fact is that he is a retired physician who served our nation for decades. He played a critical role in the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s. There is virtually no question that many people’s lives were spared during that pandemic in part because of the actions of Dr. Fauci. He is also an 85 year old citizen, husband, and father. The specter of him being harassed, threatened, and stripped of all dignity is indeed appalling, more the type of behavior we would expect from a totalitarian government than the government of a free nation.
Moreover, these recent senate hearings were clearly for show rather than any practical purpose. An attempt to interview Dr. Fauci more cooperatively to learn from both our triumphs and failures during the pandemic would be a great service to the nation. But these hearings were obviously not made with such a goal in mind. Sadly, those who only get their information from places like Fox News are unlikely to have any of this pointed out to them.
But Dr. Fauci is no saint, and the above quoted article would not give a reader any clue that there just might be some legitimate reasons why many Americans are angry with him. So let’s take a moment to unpack those too.
Dr. Fauci almost certainly made some serious errors of judgement during the COVID pandemic – which is forgivable, but should not be beyond the pale of (respectful) discussion.
More concerningly, he engaged in activities that can only generously be described as an abuse of his power. Sadly, people who get their news from places like PBS or the New York Times rarely seem to be made aware of this fact. What did Dr. Fauci do that has so many people angry at him? All of the following, according to both the public record and his own diaries:
He solicited nominations for awards from other scientists, many of which came with substantial cash prizes, often in the tens of thousands of dollars. This isn’t just tacky behavior – in his role at the NIH, Dr. Fauci controlled where millions of dollars in research grants went. And while there is no smoking gun of a direct quid pro quo having occurred, getting to decide which scientists around the country will receive funding while asking those same scientists to nominate yourself for lucrative awards is a pretty clear conflict of interest.
He promoted “gain of function” research in which scientists actively try to make viruses and other pathogens MORE DANGEROUS in order to study their effects and how to better stop them. Both congress and the Obama administration banned such research a number of years back out of the obvious concern that – should such a pathogen escape from a lab – it could wreak havoc on the human population (ever see the film “12 Monkeys?”). Dr. Fauci’s response, instead of honoring this ban, was to award grant money to a US company that was doing gain of function research in – wait for it – Wuhan, China. (To be fair, Dr. Fauci denies that the research being carried out in the lab meets the definition for gain of function, but it’s notable that a number of experts in the field disagree with his assessment.)
In January of 2020, after meeting with various scientists who expressed concern that the new COVID-19 virus might be the result of a leak from the Wuhan lab, Dr. Fauci put out a statement belittling the idea that a lab leak was possible, and suggesting that scientists were virtually unanimous in believing the virus was of natural origin. In other words, Dr. Fauci was telling all of us that a lab leak was just a crazy conspiracy theory, even while privately admitting in his diary that it was in fact a very plausible explanation of events. To be clear, to this day we have no idea if the origin of the virus was a lab leak versus a natural event. Many scientists do in fact still think a natural event to be more likely. But Dr. Fauci clearly had an interest in steering suspicion away from a leak, since he was indirectly funding research in the very lab that was suspected of being a leak source.
He mocked and belittled various scientists – including faculty at prestigious universities like Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford – as being “fringe” for disagreeing with his stance on lockdowns and school closures. With hindsight, many of those criticisms turned out to be on target – countries that didn’t lock down or close schools in the way the US did had no higher (and in many cases lower) death rates from COVID, and suffered less of the “knock on” harms of economic disruption, mental health issues, and academic decline that the lockdowns brought to America. Fauci’s sin here was not in having the wrong judgement – it’s perfectly ok for scientists to be wrong and critically important that they be free to make mistakes. I also would grant some grace to a man who was doing what he thought best to keep the public safe. However, Dr. Fauci did not extend this same benefit of the doubt to colleagues who opposed his viewpoints, and by acting as if anybody who disagreed with his judgement was “against the science” and not to be taken seriously, he hindered important debates that could have helped us to better manage the crisis as a society.
Do I believe that Dr. Fauci intended to harm anybody? No. Should he be harassed or arrested for any of the above? Absolutely not. If being arrogant were a crime, half of the medical profession would be in prison at the moment. Nor should we fail to remember the many good things he has done for this nation during his long career. But it’s a damning indictment of our media that half the country doesn’t understand why the other half are angry at and mistrusting of him.
We need to do a thorough and fair “post-mortem” of what we did well and what we did poorly during COVID so that when another pandemic comes around, we will be better prepared for it. The way to do that would be to compare our actions to those of peer nations who had better outcomes than we did, to remember that many people (not just Tony Fauci) made important decisions during the pandemic that require analysis, and yes, to thoroughly interview Dr. Fauci, but in a forum in which he is not under threat of criminal prosecution or intimidation so that we can actually get more insight into what kinds of decisions he and others in the highest echelons of government made and why.
Unfortunately rather than pursuing the above, our politicians and media are colluding to keep the average American in the dark. As things stand, one side sees Dr. Fauci as a villain and the other as a saint. Both views are incomplete, and tell us a lot more about the person who holds the view (and where they get their information from) than about Dr. Fauci himself.
