Vendetta against Fauci is a disgrace

Dr. Anthony Fauci is hardly above criticism. But the appearance by the former chief medical adviser to the president of the United States turned into bizarre theater before a Senate panel last week.

Fauci refused to answer questions, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, while Senate Republicans castigated his alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Fauci’s detractors, mostly on the right, this was a belated attempt to hold an arrogant bureaucrat accountable for negligence and deception; for his defenders, it was a combination of GOP grandstanding, vendetta and a pernicious attempt to discredit pandemic-era public health measures.

While Fauci worship in some liberal circles during the pandemic could certainly be obnoxious, such critiques fall away in the face of the Republican push to demonize the 85-year-old scientist.

The question of Fauci’s alleged wrongdoing often rests on interpretation. Was he being deliberately deceptive when, by his own admission, he initially discouraged mask use by the general public because he worried about a mask shortage for healthcare personnel — only to flip-flop on the issue later? Or did the shifting advice partly reflect, as Fauci himself has said, an evolving understanding of the virus’s spread?

Anti-Fauci obsessive Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has latched onto a January 2020 entry in Fauci’s leaked personal diary saying that he no longer believed the virus came from the outdoor meat market in Wuhan, China. This, says Paul, shows Fauci knew the virus originated from a “lab leak” yet publicly disputed that theory. But, as FactCheck.org points out, Fauci stressed in the diary entry that he still thought the virus came from natural animal-to-human transmission — just in a different location.

Paul and other Republicans want to scapegoat Fauci for pandemic policies that were likely misguided, such as school closures which lasted too long. In fact, Fauci said in the fall of 2020 that children should generally return to school — but localities experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks should consider restrictions. Should he have pushed harder for reopenings, often opposed by teachers’ unions? Maybe. That still doesn’t make him the villain.

Others excoriate Fauci for failing to criticize massive crowds at racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 while supporting bans on gatherings at funerals and religious services. (In reality, he clearly said at the time that all large gatherings, especially without masks, should be regarded as dangerous.) Still others claim, without evidence, that he tried to destroy the careers of scientific dissenters.

The truth is that many of those trying to villainize Fauci are also pushing far-right myths about COVID-19. Among those myths: that a supposed overreaction to the disease did more harm than the disease itself; that cheap drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (which proved completely ineffective against COVID-19) were maliciously withheld; that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful; that the coronavirus did not merely originate from a lab but was engineered with U.S. funding promoted by Fauci himself. These hyperbolic claims often contradict each other: We’ve heard assertions that Fauci murdered people by supposedly helping create the virus, but also that it was no more dangerous than a common flu.

Whatever mistakes Fauci may have made while trying to deal with a new disease in a crisis situation, the vendetta — which may go as far as state prosecutions, despite President Joe Biden’s federal pardon — is a disgrace. That it’s happening while the federal public health system is led by junk science promoter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes it even more repugnant and dangerous.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.