The Left Has No Use for Anthony Fauci Anymore

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

It’s been a long fall for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Four years ago, he was hailed as real-life Atlas — the avatar for an army of selfless physicians and medical professionals and proof that bureaucracy and competence were not incompatible concepts. Today, Fauci is invoking his right against self-incrimination in what may be a fruitless effort to avoid accountability for what Republicans allege was a pattern of misconduct. And for all his troubles, Fauci’s performance before a congressional committee on Wednesday may yet result in a criminal referral. After all, what else would you call that spectacle but “contempt?”

 

A few dead-enders still enamored with the fictionalized account of Dr. Fauci that ensorcelled so many liberals in the depths of the pandemic mounted a half-hearted attempt to defend his honor. But they seemed more outraged by the GOP’s behavior than aggrieved on Fauci’s behalf.

 

The left’s indifference is understandable. Why bother? As an instrument of political utility, Fauci is a spent force.

 

There’s a reason why, more than any other public health official under Trump at the outset of the pandemic, Fauci so quickly became a dashboard saint to the American left. No other figure in public life had the demonstrable power to convince the public to subordinate their financial self-interest to the state, severing the bonds of community and family that mediate the personal and the political.

 

Even as public officials with more propriety assured Americans throughout the Covid years that a return to “normalcy” was the goal — “or as normalized as you can be, post-Covid,” in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s formulation — a segment of the American left convinced itself that returning to normal would be worse than the perpetuation of the pandemic.

 

Vox’s Sigal Samuel called it the kind of anxiety that “might be worth cultivating.” Theirs was a fear of returning to a world in which mental health was incompatible with “the rigidity of the modern workday,” a world of wealth disparities and racial inequity, a world defined by “harmful systems” and no collective will to alter them. “We shouldn’t go back to ‘normal,’” he admitted. “Normal wasn’t good enough.” That outlook was hardly exclusive to the far-left fringe. “There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” CNN’s headline read. “The sooner we accept that, the better.”

 

This outlook was overrepresented in the Biden administration. His White House fast lost sight of its initial modest objective — putting “the nation back on a path to get closer to normal.” By the fall of 2021, Fauci told reporters in the first weeks of Biden’s presidency, he hoped only that America would “start approaching some degree of normality.” After all, “our lives are not going to be the same,” Barack Obama’s CDC director, Thomas Frieden, contended. If these were only prudent expressions of uncertainty, they wouldn’t have erred only in one direction — and there would not have been consequences for administration figures who diverged from that depressing pattern. And as 2021 drew to a close, Fauci abandoned normalcy as a goal in favor of advocating the pandemic’s anti-social practices indefinitely.

 

Fauci was never an honest broker. When it came to the “herd immunity” threshold, the doctor “acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” in an interview with the New York Times. He convinced Biden not to relax the federal government’s recommended vaccination schedule because that would be “a logistical and messaging nightmare” — as if pandemic-era guidelines were ever static, and best practices should be subordinate to the ease with which they’re communicated. Fauci has defensively insisted that he never insisted on the closure of schools, in accordance with the demands of core Democratic constituencies like the teachers’ unions, although his diary tells a different tale. But we don’t need the diary to indict Fauci’s mendacity. As he boasted to reporters in October 2020, “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” Quote, unquote.

 

None of this diminished his standing in progressive eyes. Rather, it seemed to intensify the affection for him. Whether he was a man of the left himself was immaterial. He was a man of the state.

 

At the height of his power, Fauci had his hands in nearly every aspect of American statecraft — from its foreign policy to the preservation of Americans’ constitutional rights — and he would often contradict Democrats who displayed any sensitivity to the public’s demand for normalcy, the president included. It was power he managed to amass, in some reasonably significant measure, due to the cultural phenomenon around him. In his private musings, Fauci indulged his own celebrity. He never seemed to recognize it for the contrivance that it was.

 

Fauci was the perfect technocrat; impassive, disdainful of public opinion, and single-minded in his assumption and application of state power. That’s what they loved about him. But just as Andrew Cuomo discovered that the cult around him — what with the prayer candles, ornamental “love gov” socks, and celebrities confessing their “Cuomosexual” tendencies — wasn’t sincere, Fauci has learned the hard way that he was only ever useful. Now, he’s not.

 

It was the doctor’s own hubris that brought him low, but, of the many miscalculations he made, believing himself to be anything other than a tool in his political allies’ hands was his gravest.