Fauci’s Pandemic of Half-Truths
For two long pandemic years, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s grey hair and fatherly tone either soothed or assaulted the nation’s senses, depending on what Americans wanted from their government.
Late last month, Fauci faced the cameras once again, this time under subpoena, before a Senate committee chaired by Kentucky’s Rand Paul and including Ohio’s Bernie Moreno. Republican Senators wanted to probe inconsistencies between Fauci’s public statements during the pandemic and what he likely thought would be private musings in a diary he maintained on a government computer. Democratic Senators sought only to defend and protect him.
He refused to answer, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The committee’s Republican majority has since voted to refer him to the Justice Department for criminal contempt.
His diary spoke loudly enough.
It revealed a man enraptured by his growing celebrity and the accolades showered on him by stars of movies and music. Worse yet, his journaling revealed a person entrusted with giving the public honest, unvarnished, evidence-based scientific advice, who repeatedly chose instead to lie.
A lie isn’t merely being wrong about an assessment in a complex and rapidly evolving crisis. We all make mistakes. Do it enough and you’re simply the wrong person for the job. But knowing one thing and choosing to say or do something materially different, including the omission of uncertainty, is a fact-dodging lie.
Most of Fauci’s falsehoods were in that category. They were half-truths. But his diary illuminated a possible motivation for his duplicitousness.
Though he’s a generation older than me, we were both around during the TV portrayals of physicians like “Marcus Welby, MD.” The show was infused with a deep sense of “Father knows best” paternalism that was common in culture and medicine at the time. Fauci’s pandemic persona was a modern-day echo of that ethos.
Those of us who reject such patronizing authoritarianism found it maddening that many other public health officials would don their white coats for the cameras, pronounce their diagnosis, and assure us that all would be well as long as we did what we were told.
Dr. Amy Acton, now campaigning to be our next governor, routinely donned the costume for Ohioans even as she spouted nonsense suggesting that viruses multiply on surfaces.
These images were a made-for-TV example of an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy. That’s when viewers are encouraged to rely only on the speaker’s credentials rather than the truth of what’s being spoken.
When lives, liberty, and livelihoods are on the line, it’s utterly contemptuous of the people’s right to self-determination for government authorities to pronounce recommendations that affect hundreds of millions of people and cost trillions of dollars of borrowed money on a foundation of falsehoods.
Early in the pandemic, Fauci claimed the COVID fatality rate was as much as 3% when his private communication suggested it was likely ten times lower. It was always ten times lower. He made pronouncements of certainty regarding COVID risks to children as well as the effectiveness of masks, six foot social distancing, and the origins of the virus when he knew the evidence didn’t support such absolutes.
His push for universal vaccination, regardless of individual risk or protection from prior infection was particularly galling because it wasn’t based on evidence of universal benefit. Instead, he simply didn’t believe Americans should be trusted to make the judgments for themselves.
Fauci privately acknowledged the possibility the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China (a lab his agency helped fund). He subsequently referred to such assertions as “conspiracy theories” and proceeded to conspire with Francis Collins, then chair of the NIH, to conduct a “quick and devastating takedown” of those who disagreed.
Though still uncertain, a lab leak remains a legitimate possibility. Fauci’s crushing the conversation and failing to use his massive influence to task the government behind an investigation early in the pandemic might have allowed sufficient time for those responsible to bury the evidence forever.
Government deception doesn’t defeat skepticism; it feeds it. Too many in both political camps embrace nonsense, then shop for “experts” who validate it. Prior to the government’s COVID response, the willfully ignorant and conspiracy-minded could hold their local meetings in a diner booth. No more.
The revelations from Fauci’s diary also help to explain the partisan hero worship of him and Acton from our progressive friends and the far less flattering characterizations of them from conservatives.
Fauci’s pedestal positioning fits perfectly with progressivism’s preference for a technocratic, government-centered communitarianism reliant on experts who guide and protect us. His infamy likewise lines up with a conservatism that tends toward individual liberty and decision-making and the consequences that follow.
Thomas Sowell’s A Vision of the Anointed offers a scathing critique of the failures of such expert-centric — rather than evidence-driven — social policy. The determination of progressives to defend rather than accept the evidence of Fauci’s pandemic policy failures follows the same pattern.
Our inability to confront the objective, evidence-based truth of those failures doesn’t bode well for our ability to manage the next crisis any better.
There will be a next crisis. There will be other experts with an authoritarian’s fondness for fame who promise salvation for those who follow them. But we don’t need a savior with the right initials after their name. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, including any uncertainties.
And leave the white coat at home. We can handle the truth without the patronizing regalia.