Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For

D uring the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a cliché for historians, pundits, commentators, and every jackanapes with an ability to broadcast his thoughts to tell us that the survivors of the influenza pandemic of 1918 barely ever talked about it afterward, even if they were voluble public figures who experienced the tragedy personally. At the time I thought this was all quite strange.

Now it makes perfect sense to me. As the news poured in about China closing its most productive industrial centers, and Lombardy, Italy, experiencing a medical enormity where hospitals were genuinely overwhelmed, I joined early in the folly calling for school closures. I thought it would be a two- or three-week thing while the U.S. closed its borders to China and Italy. Within a few months I was asking for relief from the strictures imposed on us. The one redeeming thing I can say for myself about this time is that in that first month, even though it literally cost me friendships and the respect of some of my peers, I defended skeptics such as First Things editor Rusty Reno and British commentator Peter Hitchens who questioned our stampede into madness. I thought they were wrong, but I hated the way they were savaged and that normally intelligent people were trying to morally forbid debate. Maybe the other thing is that I was very early to reject the wet-market thesis and showed Jim Geraghty a convincing video arguing for the lab leak, which he ran with and turned into one of the most important beats of the pandemic.

The fact is, our country by and large reacted as if the Constitution had been suspended. Nobody was allowed to be a normal human being anymore. The idea of socially distanced funerals with people crying into medically useless surgical masks appalls me. Even more, I’m angry that many doctors who advised this would later encourage mass anti-racist protests, which quickly and (in retrospect) unsurprisingly turned into riots. In general, I feel like one of those people who emerges from a totalitarian regime. Every day after the collapse of that tyranny, I wish I had resisted it more, but no gesture or action of resistance that occurs to me would have been effective or even understood at the time.

And so part of me dreads that Dr. Anthony Fauci will be back, where he loves to be, under bright lights and on television cameras, for a Senate hearing today. Dr. Francis Collins has admitted to certain “myopia,” and that’s the extent of his public penance. But Fauci has defended himself victoriously. As our editorial points out, Fauci is given to saying things like, “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did.” It’s true in the most technical sense. School districts could refer to county health department guidelines, and counties referred to the state, and the state referred to the CDC, and then the CDC would say it had no legal authority and only guidelines and pointed you back down the chain to state health departments, and so on. What really governed the country, until red states like Georgia and Florida paved a way out of the emergency, was Conventional Liberal Opinion. And Fauci took great pride in shaping it while privately advising elected officials all over the country to join in the lockdown jamboree.

Fauci literally told the press he lies to manipulate public opinion, and the same press still hailed him as a bold truth teller. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. 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.”

I’m glad his self-admiring diaries are going to be read into the public record. I’m glad his unseemly obsession with profiles about him will be, too. I’m glad that for a little over an hour, he will be subject to Rand Paul, another doctor. I’m glad that he will be exposed on his real views of masks, the wet-market thesis, and everything else he lied about. Many of us had to live under these lies for years — marred funerals, missed holidays, kids wearing ineffective masks in speech therapy — all while he gloried in his rising status.