“I represent science” was the arrogant response of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, after senators had the temerity to do their oversight jobs and question his decision to spend tax dollars on gain of function research at the same Wuhan lab where COVID-19 likely originated.
Believing himself to be the living embodiment of science, Fauci has claimed ultimate authority to set policy, apparently for as long as anyone anywhere has a single case of COVID-19. “This is a public health matter, not a judicial matter,” Fauci whined when a federal judge overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s travel mask mandate this spring.
TWITTER DROPS COVID-19 MISINFORMATION POLICY
Never mind that Democrats in Congress had voted to end their COVID-19 emergency declaration a month earlier so they could attend President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union speech unmasked. Fauci never criticized that blatantly political decision. It was always abundantly clear that politics, not science, lay behind his pronouncements.
It wasn’t science that led Fauci to downplay the efficacy of masks when the virus began to spread, saying, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” only to reverse himself weeks later and eventually call for double-masking.
It wasn’t science that led Fauci to move the goal posts on herd immunity from a 60% to an 80% vaccination rate.
Nor was it science that led Fauci to pooh-pooh suggestions that a lab in Wuhan, China, the region where COVID-19 first broke out and where researchers were studying COVID strains, might have been responsible for allowing the virus to leak and escape into the rest of the world.
Yet Fauci wasn’t the only public official to sacrifice credibility at the altar of politics. There were more than 1,000 doctors who signed an open letter claiming that it was a health risk for parishioners to pray and worship in a parking lot, but thousands of people clogging the streets for Black Lives Matter protests was safe.
Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bureaucracy conspired with the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s largest teachers union, to keep schools closed even when there was no scientific justification for doing so.
Then there was the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which tried and failed to implement a national employer vaccine mandate.
Science is not Fauci. Indeed, it’s fair to say Fauci is more of a career bureaucrat than a scientist.
Nor is any person representative of science. Science is a process. It is about questioning established wisdom to understand the world better.
In this sense, Fauci has been the embodiment of anti-science, shooting down questions and discouraging intellectual curiosity about COVID-19. When a group of scientists and economists produced a thoughtful document questioning his shutdown policies, for example, Fauci moved to crush debate. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Fauci emailed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins at the time.
Fortunately, federal courts and opposition politicians pushed back on Fauci’s power grab. It took longer than it should have, but mask mandates were abandoned, vaccine mandates were enjoined, and schools reopened.
Fauci’s legacy is bad enough. It would have been a lot worse if he and his allies had been given all the power they sought.
