Dr. Fauci and Our Pandemic of Distrust

“To challenge Dr. Fauci is, thus, to challenge a kind of revealed truth. Those who question Dr. Fauci are not merely expressing differing opinions; rather, they are apostates, ‘science deniers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ spreading dangerous ‘misinformation,’ and they are worthy of ridicule, censorship, and, of course, cancellation.”

In the beginning, I trusted Dr. Fauci. The diminutive and elderly doctor projected a sense of calm confidence in the face of the unfolding pandemic. Like tens of millions of Americans, I looked to him for clarity in a time of great confusion. It was also a time of extreme political polarization, but I expected Dr. Fauci, unlike virtually all of our public figures, to remain above the partisan fray.

The United States, like every other country in the world, has been under attack by an invisible enemy. Yet, two years into our pandemic, how to deal with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) remains highly contentious. COVID-19 attacks individuals, but it also represents an attack on the integrity of the nation as a whole. As its variants swarm throughout the country, it not only sickens and kills individuals; it disrupts all aspects of society. The nature of COVID-19 involves many variables, and approaches to dealing with the virus involve even more. What we have needed is what any country under attack needs: good intelligence and good information. We needed and still need good science.

Science and Democracy

“I represent science,” Dr. Fauci pronounced in a November, 2021 interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation. It was a statement that would produce a firestorm of criticism and no small amount of derision. But when Dr. Fauci first stepped onto the public stage in early 2020, this is precisely what I expected from him, and I believe this is what most Americans did too. I expected Dr. Fauci to be the communicator and clarifier of science, to represent all relevant science about the virus.