By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 15, 2020
For his critics, Dr. Anthony Fauci cemented his status as
the Rasputin of public health with his Senate testimony Tuesday.
The National Institutes of Health official gently, but
unmistakably, struck a different tone than President Donald Trump, earning
rebukes from radio talk-show hosts and Fox News anchors, as well as fueling the
outrage of the #FireFauci claque on Twitter.
Although Fauci’s every utterance is now examined with the
same care as pronouncements of the pope, his words weren’t exactly
earth-shattering. He said that if there are careless reopenings, “we will start
to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.” Does anyone doubt that’s
a possibility?
No serious person would argue that there are no hazards
to reopening, only that some level of risk is worth taking to begin to ease the
nation’s economic calamity.
Fauci is an important voice in this debate, if only one
voice. He is neither the dastardly bureaucratic mastermind imposing his will on
the country that his detractors on the right make him out to be, or the
philosopher-king in waiting that his boosters on the left inflate him into.
He’s simply an epidemiologist, one who brings considerable expertise and
experience to the table, but at the end of the day his focus is inevitably and
rightly quite narrow.
This is why it’s a tautology for Fauci’s critics to say
that he’s focused on the disease above all else. This is like saying the
commerce secretary is too consumed with finding business opportunities for
American companies, or the head of the Joint Special Operations Command has an
unhealthy obsession with killing terrorists. What else are they supposed to do?
As a breed, epidemiologists tend to focus on the worst
case. They don’t want to be wrong and contribute to some deadly pathogen
getting loose when their entire job is to keep that from happening. So, they
are naturally cautious. This, too, is as it should be. You probably don’t want
a risk-taking epidemiologist any more than you want a highly creative,
envelope-pushing accountant.
For all these reasons, you wouldn’t choose an
epidemiologist to run your country, either. And Fauci isn’t.
Trump has remained completely undomesticated in the White
House. The idea that he has now, as some of his supporters imply, been seduced,
bullied, or otherwise manipulated by a mild-mannered, nearly 80-year-old doctor
is bonkers.
The reason Trump issued his shutdown guidance was that
the prospect of uncontrolled spread of the virus was too risky to contemplate.
Since populist critics of the shutdowns don’t want to criticize
Trump, let alone say that they think he blew one of the most consequential
decisions of his presidency, they focus their ire on the director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases instead.
In the attention-getting exchange between Rand Paul and
Anthony Fauci at the Senate hearing, both were right. Senator Paul is obviously
correct that we shouldn’t elevate one person as the authority to whom everyone
submits, and Fauci was right that he’s a scientist who doesn’t even try to give
advice on matters outside his ambit.
Part of the Right’s hostility to Fauci is an
understandable reaction to progressives putting him on a pedestal. His views
should be taken seriously, but they can’t be determinative.
The coronavirus crisis is a radically different
phenomenon from, say, the Ebola outbreak because it implicates our entire
society. What relative weight to give to the economy and public health — among
many other weighty public-policy questions — is way above Fauci’s pay grade.
This is what we elect presidents, governors, and mayors
to decide. It’s their responsibility to balance the competing considerations,
and if they are found wanting, they lose their jobs.
Anyone in this position obviously wants to hear from
experts, though. Which is why if Trump really did fire Fauci, some other
meddlesome epidemiologist would emerge soon enough. If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d
have to invent him.
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