Anthony Fauci: I Am the Science

A few people show up in Botswana with a new variant of COVID, and Dr. Anthony Fauci was scrambled from NIAID to appear on the Sunday shows, where he had no useful information at all to share on this development of the virus. But he did manage to criticize President Trump, aggrandize himself as a martyr, say that Florida “does not want to get vaccinated” (it’s in the top 20 most vaccinated US states), and attempt to revive the wet-market theory of COVID’s origin.

And then he turned around and accused everyone else of politicizing the pandemic and public health:

I am somebody who only cares about science and health, and it is — you’re right, it’s painful and disturbing to see when you’re trying to focus all of your attention on doing what you can do the way we did to create the vaccines, to develop the drugs, to save millions of lives. And then you have this completely outlandish politicization of it. Politicization of everything. Politicization of the public health, politicization of the origins, politicization of all of it is really — I think when we look back at this, we’re going to see what were we thinking, what was going on back then?

This is a bad joke. Public health was already deeply politicized. Public-health bodies kowtowed to China early in the pandemic and dragged their feet on declaring a public-health emergency because they wished to spare from embarrassment the oversensitive Communists who run China. Public-health officials were against border controls early on, not because the science backed up their view, but because their politics required it. Fauci amplified Peter Daszak’s campaign to label the lab-leak theory a “conspiracy theory” because of politics; they thought that it would hinder funding of research they believed in.

While it is absolutely true that some Republican senators calling for the legal prosecution of Fauci are cynical showmen, Fauci is responding in kind. “I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, Senator,” he said, referring to Senator Ted Cruz.

But all this was prelude to the truly grand peroration. Saith Fauci:

So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that’s what I worry about.

Reading it on the page, one is reminded of an overwrought crime drama where the most crooked and vindictive policeman is left at the end of the line, exposed for what he is, impotently shouting, “I am the law” before his satisfying comeuppance.

But it’s actually easier to understand than that. “I represent science” is roughly Fauci’s job, if you think of “science” as a special-interest lobby, rather than as an iterative process for investigating truths about nature. He is, along with the director of the NIH, effectively the head of an enormous industry that relies almost exclusively on federal funding.

The question is whether the Biden administration can stand to have Fauci much longer. Fauci has gone on television to preemptively cancel Christmas, only to reel it back the next day. He went on the talk shows this weekend to say nothing useful about the new variant of the disease, but to lecture the world to prepare for the imposition of the same policies that failed to contain the previous, less infective variants.

Hours after Fauci’s remarks on Sunday, the head of the South African Medical Association pronounced, “The new Omicron variant of the Coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent symptoms.”

Somehow, I don’t think Fauci will be touting this news, or the arrival of endemic COVID, and the onset of his irrelevance to the Sunday talk shows.