The Fauci Effect

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, August 26, 2022

 

You might have noticed that Dr. Anthony Fauci is doing a mini media tour this week to celebrate his forthcoming retirement as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He’s commemorating the big moments in his life, the big calls he made during the pandemic, and telling the haters they’ve got him all wrong.

 

In a recent interview, he talked up “the Fauci effect.” It’s the increase of applicants to medical schools. Fauci explained: “People go to medical school now, people are interested in science — not because of me, because most people don’t know me, who I am. . . . It’s what I symbolize.” And what is that? Fauci explained: “And what I symbolize in an era of the normalization of untruths and lies, and all the things you’re seeing going on in society, from January 6th to everything else that goes on — people are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth, and for people caring about people.”

 

Consistency? I’m not sure.

 

“I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci recently told Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Hill’s daily web series, Rising.

 

But when lockdowns were more popular, and Trump’s reticence to impose them more often pilloried by liberals, Dr. Fauci had said, “When it became clear that we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread — this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area — I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.”

 

Fauci famously flip-flopped on masks. Citing the best studies available, in a private email he urged against using them. Later he would say they worked, though he let the cat out of the bag by calling them a “symbol” of the sort of thing one should do. He would explain that he had originally urged against them to save them for first responders — another lie. But perhaps not an unexpected one.

 

And Fauci told us himself during the pandemic that he uses deception and misdirection deliberately as tools of public-health communication. “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci said to the New York Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

 

It also turns out that Dr. Fauci was indeed misleading his audience when he rebutted Senator Rand Paul’s assertion that the National Institutes of Health and the NIAID were funding controversial gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Fauci took these as personal attacks and returned in kind, saying that Rand Paul didn’t know what he was talking about and that he resented Paul’s allegedly false assertions, which he said led to threats and nonsense. Fauci accused Paul of lying. A letter released by NIH this week confirms that in fact the NIH did, through a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in China. The next obvious question is on your mind — did the U.S. fund the creation of the virus that escaped the lab? — but people are still too afraid to ask it directly.

 

The Fauci effect, if it exists, turns out to be one of corrosion of trust in our institutions. It is the faith, shared by millions of Americans, that whatever the appointed experts are denouncing as a conspiracy theory is likely to be the conventional wisdom in six months or a year. Hardly any parents are vaccinating their children against Covid, despite recommendations from the FDA and some local mandates. Vax skepticism is up more generally after millions of people took a vaccine, or lost a job for not taking one — on the premise that taking the vaccine would significantly reduce spread.

 

Dr. Fauci misunderstood his role in a self-governing republic. His role was not to lead the national pandemic response, but to advise a self-governing people. Instead, thinking they were too stupid to lead themselves, he sought to manipulate them into the right behavior. He thereby brought expertise itself into disrepute. The Fauci effect was to destroy public health for a generation.