Celebrity scientists are an interesting breed in the pop culture marketplace. People like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson have popularized big concepts to broad audiences that, sometimes, probably don’t fully comprehend what is being said, and in even headier territory, Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, both of whom had far more serious academic credentials, still managed to attain celebrity status. Then there is Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci.
Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until 2022, and also as Chief Medical Adviser to the President from 2021 to 2022 doesn’t have the jet-setting, best-selling author vibe of a Hawking or Sagan, but he was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientific minds across all scientific journals for a period of nearly 20 years, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
Fauci is also Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of many, having been in the position he was in during the COVID pandemic, which ultimately killed more than 1.2 million Americans.
Fauci walked into a Senate hearing last Wednesday and invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than a hundred times in one of the more bizarre spectacles under then guise of oversight in recent memory.
The ensuing outrage, mostly seen on social media, was all-too-predictable, but the obsession with Fauci is less of an effort to solve problems that were exposed by the once-in-a-millennium pandemic, but more of a convenient scapegoating move.
Fauci became that guy, the symbol onto whom enormous amounts of anger concerning lockdowns, mandates, vaccines, school closures and government distrust can be projected, but turning him into the central villain of the entire pandemic doesn’t answer bigger questions that Americans, today, face.
When you step away from the political theatre of last Wednesday’s hearing and all the hurly-burly around Fauci for a minute and reduce it all down to the simplest of terms: Fauci was not operating as some rogue official within the first administration of Donald Trump. He was, after all, the appointed, long-serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Of course, given the gravity of the situation we were faced with as a nation, Fauci became one of the most prominent government officials during that time, and he appeared alongside Trump at White House briefings, helping give some public guidance during the most consequential public health crisis in generations.
By no means is Fauci above or beyond criticism. Most reasonable people can debate whether or not particular policies were justified, or whether officials effectively communicated the uncertainty of the times to the public. Personally, I believe the federal government’s response to the pandemic is beyond mere “bungling,” but that’s a conversation for another day. There is, however, a huge and significant difference between legitimate governmental accountability and political scapegoating. If the goal from Wednesday’s oversight hearing is to actually learn from COVID, then America should be examining the entire governmental response from top to bottom, and these decisions were initially made during 2020, which was the last full year of Trump’s first term.
Why wasn’t the country better prepared? Why did the federal and state governments sometimes seem to contradict in their messaging? And why did public health communication devolve into a partisan battlefield of nonsense? Also: what can be done differently during the next pandemic? Because you know there will be another, be it five years from now or 500.
To me, those sorts of nagging questions seem far more consequential than endlessly placing blame on Fauci for everything that went wrong.
It might be an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth for many folks, but Fauci’s role cannot be separated from the administration in which he served, and in the height of the pandemic, he served under Donald J. Trump, and then under Joe Biden, prior to stepping down. So, if the argument is that he wielded enormous influence over the country’s COVID policies, then questions should be raised about the president who was receiving his advice and overseeing the federal government.
Blaming a scientist is politically convenient because it simplifies a complicated disaster into some sort of morality play, where Fauci is cast as the villain and everyone else is able to abscond responsibility.
Pandemics do not work that way, though, and COVID was an enormous and unprecedented crisis that involved scientists, doctors, government officials, various bureaucrats, presidents, Congress, businesses and We the People. There were mistakes aplenty, debates that resembled drunk family members at Thanksgiving and decisions that deserve scrutiny across the political spectrum.
Personally, I look back at that time in our history as a dark mark. Every single American knows someone who either suffered greatly due to the virus or lost their life, and most of us did what we could to prevent the spread. I lost a good friend to it here in Tyler County that summer, and right around the time when things started getting really crazy, nationally, one of my heroes, the great John Prine, died due to complications.
America in 2026, six years removed from the pandemic’s height, has far bigger problems than keeping Dr. Anthony Fauci cast in a starring role as the villain in some political revenge story. If the country really wants accountability, it should pursue facts instead of scapegoats, and the entire COVID response of the administrations of Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden.
