If you thought there had to be some reasonable explanations for why his diary assessments were so different from his public statements, he’s not giving them to you.
As laid out on today’s forthcoming Three Martini Lunch podcast, it’s understandable that critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci are frustrated by his performance before the Senate today, repeating “under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment” like a malfunctioning Westworld robot. (Note that former president Joe Biden’s pardon of Fauci covers January 1, 2014, to January 19, 2025. It would not cover perjury, contempt of Congress, or any other crime committed after January 19, 2025.)
But I think today’s performance is strengthening the anti-Fauci argument and weakening the pro-Fauci argument; you find fewer Fauci superfans in the circles of Democratic elites today than you did in 2021, and no one is quite as eager to run to the ramparts to defend Fauci’s reputation as they were a few years ago.
Exhibit A would be this morning’s article in The Atlantic, “The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci,” by Katherine Wu. It is, by and large, still a sympathetic portrait, emphasizing the terrible toll that criticism from Republicans and the Trump administration had on him, along with the death threats against him and his family from unhinged maniacs.
But here and there, the Wu profile concedes that Fauci was not quite the saint that the mainstream media coverage made him out to be:
Certainly, Fauci made mistakes. Early on, for instance, he advised against the widespread use of masks amid a shortage of them and then reversed that position. “I don’t think the communication around that was particularly good,” Emily Erbelding, a former director of NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases who was ousted from her role last year, told me. “It was just No masks, and then all of a sudden Everybody’s wearing masks, and you must wear a mask.” But Fauci was also asked to weigh in on seemingly every pandemic policy, including many far outside his purview, and he was doing so as everyone’s understanding of the virus was evolving rapidly and in real time.
Oh, Fauci was weighing in on policies outside his purview, was he? Funny, I don’t remember that being mentioned much at the time.
The profile more or less includes a guilty plea on the notion of Fauci being an egomaniac who was obsessed with press coverage of himself.
I spoke with 15 of Fauci’s friends and former colleagues, and they described him as someone who adored the attention that came with being a go-to health expert for journalists and presidents alike. “He certainly embraced that role—sometimes, I thought, a little too much,” Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci’s former deputy director at NIAID who retired in 2024, told me. The pandemic diary entries fit that assessment: The phrase prolonged standing ovation appears seven times throughout; his admirers are repeatedly described as being brought to tears by his presence. “As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies,” he wrote in May of 2021. “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”
We’re told Fauci was a demanding boss and had a bad temper at times. Again, Wu largely attempts to defend Fauci against the accusations that the U.S. government knowingly funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China, or that he was the architect of the lockdowns:
When Fauci said that sending kids back to school without a vaccine could be risky, and that opening schools in areas experiencing intense viral transmission would not be prudent, many people took that to mean Fauci said to keep all kids home, indefinitely. (School closures were ultimately up to individual states and districts, and decisions about them were complicated by demands from teachers’ unions.)
Eh, in his personal writings, Fauci mentions talking with then–New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Ann O’Leary, the chief of staff for California Governor Gavin Newsom, about closing schools, right before they announced decisions to close the schools. No, Fauci didn’t give the order to close the schools, he just advised a bunch of the people who gave the order to close the schools. And if Fauci had any misgivings about keeping schools closed for a year (much longer in some communities), he kept them to himself.
Overall, the profile signals to the rest of the D.C. chattering class that the image of Fauci as our perfect, trusted, wise leader during the pandemic was, at best, a generous exaggeration. It’s a crack in the foundation of the metaphorical giant heroic statue of Fauci built during the pandemic.
If you’re a Fauci fan, you probably figured there had to be some reasonable explanations as to why his assessments written in his diary seemed so different from his statements to the public during the pandemic. Today, Fauci didn’t give them to you.