The Fauci Personality Cult

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 03, 2024

 

It should be bigger news that Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted that social-distancing guidelines — mandatory in many areas of the country during the pandemic, with non-compliant schools, businesses, and even churches shuttered — “sort of just appeared.” Likewise, there should have been a backlash after Fauci confessed that the public-health establishment misled the public about the efficacy of masking, and after he decided to use arbitrary “herd immunity” thresholds as a vehicle to manipulate the public into behaving in ways he found advantageous. These bombshells washed over the country, in part, because the arbiters of national political discourse were and, in some ways, remain more invested in Fauci as a symbol of elite technocracy than in the public well-being his imperiousness was meant to serve.

 

At the pandemic’s outset, the onetime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases became in the minds of his admirers the physical manifestation of “the Science.” But there was nothing dispassionate or empirical about the hagiography to which the immunologist was treated. His face was plastered across cupcakes and novelty socks. It adorned prayer candles and duvet covers. “In Fauci we trust,” the idolatrous T-shirt slogan read. His deification was unctuous, but its unctuousness served a purpose.

 

When Fauci fell out with the Trump administration, that was taken as proof by Democrats that the NIH official was the protagonist in the improvisational drama around the pandemic. Upon his victory, President Joe Biden restored Fauci to the level of visibility he’d enjoyed early in the pandemic, but the doctor misread his mandate. His immunological expertise was no longer his primary value. Fauci became the avatar of the idea that the pandemic would have been a manageable or even avoidable event but for the stubbornness and ignorance of the Trump administration. To his eventual dismay, the doctor failed to evolve with his changing role.

 

In the spring of 2021, despite the rapidly evolving epidemiological situation, Fauci rejected the notion that public guidance should evolve too. As Politico reported at the time, Fauci’s objections reinforced “worries more widely within the administration that changing the recommendations now would be a logistical and messaging nightmare.” Fauci’s lack of faith in the public’s capacity to comprehend or comply with changing health guidelines is a grotesque rationale for preserving onerous pandemic-related restrictions on Americans’ private affairs.

 

In the fall of 2021, with 72 percent of the adult population at least partly vaccinated, Fauci continued to call for masking and social distancing in “an indoor setting” — the growing evidence that most of the country no longer hung on his advice notwithstanding. Indeed, the public’s willingness to test the limits of its social and economic liberty in the waning days of the pandemic might have been interpreted by Fauci and his ilk as a welcome vote of confidence in the success of their enterprise. Instead, the doctor seemed to regard the public’s individualistic behavior as a threat to it.

 

By December, with precious relevance rapidly slipping away, Fauci advocated putting the country on a permanent mid-pandemic footing, compelling the federal government to introduce open-ended masking mandates in places where it could claim that authority, like airplanes. “I don’t think so,” Fauci replied when asked if there would “ever” be a time when masking on aircraft was once again optional. “Even though you have a good filtration system,” he continued, “I think that masks are still a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.” Fortunately, Fauci was ignored.

 

Fauci’s mistake was to assume that the adulation he received was a function of his own merit. He leaned into the worship he received, operating perhaps under the delusion that his flatterers saw him as something more than an instrument of immediate political utility. Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to a similar misinterpretation. The RBG-style exercise trends, Hollywood biopics, children’s books, and pointed insults deemed “Ginsburns” by Saturday Night Live had nothing at all to do with her jurisprudence. Her diminished role on the Court was embellished by her fans not because her litany of dissents had any special eminence. Rather, Ginsburg served as a cultural touchstone at a time when dispirited progressives needed someone around whom to regroup.

 

At least the “notorious RBG” did not live long enough to see her hubris haunt the very people who once canonized her. Fauci is not so fortunate. Today, the doctor has seen his stature duly diminished. On Monday, the doctor was reduced to engaging in a food fight with the National Institutes of Health’s primary competitor in the American public-health space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was not his fault that the arbitrary six-foot distancing guideline he actively promoted and sought to enforce “just appeared,” he insisted.

 

Indeed, the doctor now portrays himself as a bystander to his own administration of NIAID. He knows nothing about the efforts of his senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, to evade congressional oversight by using a private email account to correspond with EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, and he never created any “backchannel” that would allow other controversial figures to avoid scrutiny in their dealings with the National Institutes of Health. The doctor’s reduced stature — from the Atlas of the pandemic to a recognized political liability among all but the most blinkered advocates for pandemic in perpetuity — could only be jarring to those who didn’t see it coming.

 

Republicans stand accused by their detractors of succumbing to a “personality cult.” This common refrain has become Trump critics’ explanation both of the former president’s political longevity and of his core supporters’ lack of receptivity to criticisms of his conduct. Well, it turns out the impulse to subordinate individual identity to a group dynamic is a human one to which Democrats are not immune. The cult that sprang up around Dr. Anthony Fauci in the darkest days of the pandemic is no less indecorous than the unearned veneration Trump receives. Nor are its destructive consequences less pronounced.

 

Democrats would be wise to recognize human frailty in themselves the next time they’re tempted to cast scorn on the GOP from great moral heights. Their motived reasoning and willful blindness perpetuated one of the most destructive policy mistakes of this young century. They have much to answer for.