Singled out from the herd

And why the nature of the attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci harm us all

Dragging eighty-five year old Dr. Anthony Fauci before a hostile senate panel for the purpose of making him a scapegoat, creating humiliating video clips, pouring gasoline on the smoldering fires of division, outrage, and pain many Americans have still not processed six years after the pandemic began harms us all.

You have to ask yourself, why this?

And, why this now?

Dr. Fauci did not handle his role sharing real-time pandemic communication perfectly. I’m guessing that none of us handled our roles as parents, coworkers, friends, and Americans perfectly either. It should be noted that Fauci’s actual authority making any policy was much narrower than his public visibility suggested. He was a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, not the head of CDC, FDA, OSHA, HHS, or the White House itself. Dr. Fauci’s very early communication (passed along from official CDC consensus) downplaying the need for masks was wrong. Ironic as they scream at him for promoting masking, right? I wore one anyway from the earliest days, even when that meant hanging up the couple N95 masks I possessed each night on a clothesline to dry out for repeat use. That terrifying shortage of PPE in the early days likely influenced his communication. It was obvious to me and many others that SARS CoV-2 was easily spread by airborne transmission, and the CDC/WHO could have admitted this much earlier (though it would have raised the bar for what employers would have to do to provide real protection for their workers). Dr. Fauci had limited control over this. He winged it with his estimates of what percentage of Americans would need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. His moving target was a real time, evolving strategy during the days when 3,000 of us were dying each day. Remember that horror? I do. It turned out that the initial 95% vaccine-gained protection against infection was not durable… but thank the gods of science and luck that protections against severe disease and death were durable. The Delta variant broke through our immunity firewalls as cruelly as it broke through our public trust. Six feet of distancing and prolonged school closures were continued for too long. That’s wasn’t his call, rather it was something he influenced, and it still saved lives even as it hurt. Dr. Fauci dismissed the possibility of a laboratory origin of the virus too early, though 6 years of credible analysis and expert science still show that SARS CoV-2 almost certainly came from nature. There is genuine debate about the history of US funding of gain of function virus research and whether that might have spilled into the world. I created this deep dive with Claude in case you want a DIY forensic analysis, or we can listen to authoritative, expert, scientific consensus that converges around a natural source of this novel new virus. And framing attacks on him personally as attacks on science in general came off poorly.

To his credit Dr. Fauci continued to serve his country during the pandemic, just as he had served as a public health and research leader during multiple prior presidential administrations. Despite chaos and dysfunction and many unknowns, he was a public communicator when there were few others as ready, willing and able. He was saddled with the impossible: explaining scientific nuance, recommendation changes as they rolled in, restraining impulsive federal leadership who told us this would all be over by Spring 2020, or that we should just disastrously let it rip. His was the impossible task of clarifying scientific information when political leaders misspoke, while trying to escape the implied politics of that necessary disagreement. Dr. Fauci soon publicized and promoted measures like masking in high-risk settings, improving ventilation, testing when sick, and physical distancing while vaccines were unavailable. He coordinated government, academia, and industry long before the pandemic in ways that facilitated rapid vaccine development and testing. He strongly advocated for those vaccines once they arrived with truly warp speed. That was incredible, a modern wonder of the world. Without all the above many more people would have died, suffered in hospitals, or sustained permanent disabilities and damage from Covid infections.

Before the pandemic introduced most people outside of medicine to Anthony Fauci, he was instrumental in developing medication regimens in ‘70s and '80s that turned once-fatal vasculitic diseases (like granulomatosis with polyangiitis) into treatable diseases with high remission rates. Dr. Fauci spent nearly forty years directing NIAID, including through the HIV/AIDS crisis during which time he was protested and picketed by activists, yet listened to them, and then rebuilt the clinical trial system around their demands. Perhaps most significantly, he served as a principal architect of PEPFAR, the Bush-era global AIDS program credited with saving just 25 million lives.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina succinctly wrote about his role in the pandemic:

Fauci didn’t close your schools. That was your local politician, school board, and health official. Fauci didn’t mandate your vaccine. (In fact, he said it’s not the role of the federal government.) Your employer did. Fauci wasn’t the one who barred you from seeing your dying grandma. That was the nursing home. He wasn’t out to secretly kill us all. And he’s not responsible for alllll the other system failures either (like costs due to corporate influence) or political lightning-rod topics that divide this country, like abortion, brought up today in the hearing.

Like any public official, his decisions can and should absolutely be debated and scrutinized. Fauci had enormous power and influence. (I think he earned that over his 50-year career in infectious diseases). But accountability, in a world where there’s very little of it, still matters. People lost their lives. People lost their jobs. People’s values were tested and questioned.

He absolutely made mistakes—no question about it…

There should have been a 9/11-style commission after the pandemic calmed down. Review the whole thing from the White House to the house down the street. Subpoena power can be used justly, published findings synthesized expertly, a revised playbook devised proactively, without anyone’s personal pandemic diary being mined solely for political barbs and daggers. Instead we are given a public flogging in 2026, designed to take us back to the chaos, the fear, the anger, the pain, and the fundraising emails for the midterms and beyond.

Senator Moreno:

Is this a cynical harvest of a collective trauma, cooked up for dinner table conversation? We all lost something during those first years of the pandemic. Maybe it was a parent, a business, a 4th grade year at school, a marriage, a social network, a set of lungs or a beating heart. I saw all of that and more. Like many pandemic deaths, our collective grief never got a memorial. No Irish wake. No reckoning, and not even a permission to mourn, really. If I were president I would be building a big, beautiful, reverential monument to the lives lost and the sacrifices made by all of us. It would be on the scale of a White House ballroom or arch. But instead our grief and deferred dream of societal healing still curdle at times into rage, a poisoned stew stirred as if by recipe. Rage is a savory ingredient. The proceedings against Dr. Anthony Fauci offer senators the chance to point their wands at a country full of unprocessed loss, and to conjure a single scrappy Brooklynite face to blame.

Really?

Reagan

Bush

Clinton

Bush

Obama

Trump

Biden

Though presently singled out from the herd, in some ways Dr. Fauci is not unique. Health leaders in other countries have also been made into fall guys by similar forces. In Germany, virologist Dr. Christian Drosten was attacked in full page tabloids while receiving death threats and accusations that he was destroying the economy. In Canada, Conservative leadership candidate Derek Sloan built a fundraising drive around firing Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam. She was born in Hong Kong, so Sloan cynically asked in a video, does she work for Canada or for China? and then refused to apologize when his own party demanded it. In the UK, Chief Medical Adviser Chris Whitty and scientists like Sir Jeremy Farrar faced similar hostility and threats from a public frustrated with pandemic restrictions. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro was the primary antagonist against his own medical community, undermining his own public health officials, firing dissenting health ministers, and promoting pandemic denialism. BTW, in late 2021 a congressional panel accused Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity, citing his deliberate actions to spread the virus and undermine public health measures. Brazil had one of the highest Covid death tolls in the world, besides the USA.

Does an attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci hurt all of us? Senator Randal Paul described his hearing last week as “the capstone to Fauci’s four decades of abuse of power at NIH.” Really? Under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations? Not just a few questionable or indeed bad pandemic moves along with many good ones? What changed? Could such statements be a way of establishing that federally funded science is corrupt from the top down? Why? Could it be another way to justify the massive research budget cuts that have gutted our country’s leadership in science, the ideology-driven vaccine policy rewrites and cancellations, the historic purges of career scientists and institutional knowledge underway at HHS? Our federal support of research helped bring us The Human Genome Project, the internet, modern vaccines and cancer treatments, the Global Positioning System, and the Apollo and Artemis missions to name just a few.

Anti-democratic leaders like to discredit/destroy the people, positions, and institutions that establish facts independently. Without inconvenient and decentralized checks on power, truth becomes what power makes it.

Humiliation is a powerful tool. More than 1,000 pages of Dr. Fauci’s private diary were pulled off government servers at the direction of Secretary Kennedy after an eight-month search and published in full. Dr. Fauci was not notified in advance. The words in the journal were mined for embarrassing moments. Instead of constructive analysis we got senators then pouncing on Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniac” and “an infamous villain” and dropping gratuitous, performative F-bombs. We know where this leads. In 2022 a Maryland man was sentenced to three years for emailing threats to kill Fauci and his family. And yet, just weeks later, the governor of Florida told a cheering crowd that “someone should grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.” Last year our president revoked Dr. Fauci’s security detail.

Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey pointed to the obvious:

A chilling effect for the next generation of people who might consider stepping up to serve our nation, to be the next generation of researchers who now are wondering whether or not this is the right thing for them to do at a time when they see some of their colleagues, or those that they looked up to, being attacked.

As Dr. Fauci pointed out in his statement before the Senate, some of this is simply personal. Senator Paul has pursued Fauci for six years. He’s made criminal referrals that even the Justice Department declined to act on.

Most importantly, for all Americans, let’s consider what was not on the agenda of the Senate that day last week as spittle flew from enraged lips, and this week as senators try to hold him in contempt. We are still mired in a strait in the Middle East, a war of choice, incredibly expensive to run, choking the world economy, making stuff more expensive at home, costing military lives and security. New tariffs consumers must pay. Millions are losing health coverage, millions more are seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket. Fellow Americans are going hungry without basic food assistance. We will see more and more people without homes on the streets of our cities. The planet is visibly burning, with thick plumes of smoke choking the very atmosphere. And it’s flooding. They are taking away the relevance of our vote, and maybe our actual vote. Our vote, people! Sordid Epstein files have been heavily redacted and hide the abuses of power and women and children in plain sight. Measles is at a 35-year high… while the Senate puts one man on the gallows.

I agree with many others who point out that this will cost future lives, future doctors, future scientists, future public servants (who serve all of us, red white and blue), future trust, future healing, future reconciliation, and present energy. We only have so much to go around.

As a physician I stand with Dr. Anthony Fauci and all the other imperfect doctors, nurses, public health workers, medical assistants, trash collectors, grocery store workers, meat packers, Asian Americans, bus drivers and other folks at times singled out from the herd because they were essential, or potentially blamable, or both. I stand up not because Fauci was right about everything. He wasn’t, and reasonable people can disagree.

How will history view the scapegoating of Dr.Anthony Fauci these six years on, in another twenty, in another hundred?

How will we come back together as Americans before the next pandemic divides and conquers us more than any army ever could?

Reasonable people can agree, this is not the way.