‘Bioethics Community’ Publishes Open Letter of Support for Anthony Fauci

I once respected Anthony Fauci. But, during the Covid pandemic, I believe his power and the astonishing international celebrity generated by a fawning media went to his head. Worse, his hubris brought great disrepute on public health institutions and harmed the nation and its people.

But mainstream bioethicists — mostly political progressives who deploy their supposed authority as experts to push mostly left-wing health and political causes — see Fauci as one of their own. With the doctor now in some hot legal water, and his reputation visibly tarnished by recent disclosures from his diary and text messages, prominent bioethicists have published an open letter telling us to leave Fauci alone. From the “Open Letter of Support for Anthony Fauci from the Bioethics Community,” published in Bioethics Today (emphasis within the text):

As individuals concerned with ethics in science, medicine, and public health, we wish to express our dismay at the approach taken by Senate leaders to pursue an unwarranted, ill-advised, and frankly bizarre vendetta against a scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, rather than making a sincere effort to learn from the painful experiences of the pandemic to improve national preparedness. No human is perfect, but Dr. Fauci deserves appreciation for his decades of service to American science, and he deserves respect for taking on the difficult work of advising federal policy makers during the worst plague of this century. We condemn the decision to hold him legally in contempt of Congress as the outcome of a staged public persecution, and we fear the future implications of politically and legally targeting scientists who advise the government.

Hardly a “persecution,” and Fauci’s status as a “scientist” is irrelevant.

Here’s how I see it: Fauci has much for which to answer publicly. He was preemptively pardoned in the last minutes of President Biden’s time in office. He could have refused it. He didn’t, calling into significant question the validity of his Fifth Amendment invocation, at least for actions that were taken before the date of the pardon (clouded by recently announced potential state investigations). Refusing to testify because one fears committing perjury does not justify remaining silent.

Back to the open letter:

If the Senate wished to hear from Dr. Fauci and learn how to be better prepared for the next pandemic, they could have provided him with Use Immunity, and he would not have invoked his 5^th Amendment right to decline to answer questions, even in the face of prior threats of prosecution. But they chose not to do so, showing that neither protecting the public from future pandemics nor learning were the aims of the hearing.

Some Senators instead used the hearing as a blunt warning to other physician-scientists to avoid public service or risk being ensnared in a political and legal trap like the one laid for Dr. Fauci.

Give me a break. What trap? If he had answered the questions honestly, there would have been no grounds for prosecution, at least at the federal level, thanks to the preemptory pardon. As to “use immunity,” if he was worried about state actions, he still would have invoked the Fifth.

Back to the open letter:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci was, as always, an advisor to policymakers, but he also became the public face of the federal government’s response. As such, he fought to maintain credibility for sound science and evidence-based COVID responses, sometimes eliciting the ire of those with differing views. But as he had done throughout his long career, he worked with a wide range of scientists and sought to make the best recommendations he could to policymakers under evolving, uncertain, and frightening conditions.

That is certainly the image he projected, but it was precisely the approach that Fauci did not take. Here are just a few examples:

• Fauci thwarted efforts to find the original source of the virus — specifically seeking to discredit the lab leak theory — and unethically promoted the “natural cause” answer to the question by commissioning a paper from “experts” stating that the virus leaped from an animal to humans. He then held a news conference citing the paper as proof of a natural cause without mentioning that he was both a driver for the document’s creation and a participant in its drafting, as an editor who had final approval of its contents.
• Fauci strongly pushed the six-foot social distancing policy. It later came out that there was zero evidence to support that mandate. In fact, Fauci ludicrously later testified that “it just appeared.” Fauci’s false assertion had a profound impact on countless people and on small businesses, particularly restaurants. It also kept people from visiting hospitalized patients, holding the hands of dying loved ones, and even from attending funerals. It increased social isolation, led to suicides, and made life miserable in myriad ways, large and small.
• Fauci stifled contrary opinions about the proper policies to pursue around school closures and other shutdowns. He and former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins conspired to destroy the reputations of the authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration” that criticized the government’s approach, depicting the authors as “fringe,” when all three were prominent, respected epidemiologists. One of the slandered authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — in a delicious irony — is now the head of the NIH.
• Fauci’s obeisance to popular culture became clear when the man who said we should give up handshaking forever benignly blessed — in a Vanity Fair interview (of course) — “asymptomatic strangers” hooking up using the dating app Tinder if they are “willing to take a risk.”
• Fauci undermined the normal scientific process of debate and contestation by claiming that his critics exhibited “a distinct anti-science flavor, because I represent science,” adding, “That’s dangerous. . . . 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.” Fauci’s hubristic attitude was the antithesis of how the scientific process is supposed to work and may have impeded important discussions.
• Fauci worked behind the scenes with blue-state governors and local officials to keep schools closed, causing untold harm to millions of children.
• Fauci strongly supported the imposition of vaccine mandates by localities and businesses. “I believe mandates at the local level need to be done,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd. The mandates were disastrous and helped cause the increasing vaccine skepticism we are now experiencing.
• Fauci and Collins also undermined the reputation of public-health officials by obfuscating the NIH’s funding of “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which the virus might have escaped. Indeed, Fauci denied outright having approved the funding of such experiments when questioned by Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.).

I am not one of those screaming for Fauci to be put in prison. Nor do I think he is personally responsible for millions of deaths, as some critics allege. (I have seen no evidence that the gain-of-function research Fauci funded led directly to the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus.) But Fauci’s conduct is a big reason for the public’s loss of trust in the public-health sector, and that will take a long time to repair.

Whatever Fauci’s earlier career accomplishments — and there were some — the Covid debacle will define his legacy regardless of how many open letters of support the “bioethics community” publishes. Indeed, the effort by preeminent bioethicists to salvage Fauci’s reputation tells us more about the ultimate political and ideological nature of mainstream bioethics than it does about the supposed virtues of the former über-bureaucrat whom they are defending.