Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, people have been told to trust the experts. But what happens when those experts knowingly lie to the public?
This is the situation in which Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leading experts on the White House coronavirus task force, currently finds himself. Having admitted that he subtly shifted the goal posts on coronavirus guidance, Fauci owes the public an apology.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is one of the only political leaders willing to demand he do so. He has come under a good deal of criticism over the past week for calling out Fauci’s deception, but he makes a good point: Many of our elites, Fauci included, feel comfortable misleading or sharing only part of the truth with people because they think of themselves as the only ones capable of understanding our present crisis.
Fauci admitted as much in a recent interview with the New York Times. He confessed that he knowingly downplayed the percentage of people who would need to be vaccinated in order for the United States to reach herd immunity, and then he raised that number only because of a “gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks,” the New York Times reported.
This is not the first time Fauci has been caught in his own web. He was one of the most prominent health experts to discourage people from wearing face coverings toward the beginning of the outbreak, even though the available data confirmed masks would help prevent COVID-19 carriers from spreading the virus. A few months later, after many states began mandating masks in public, Fauci acknowledged that he knowingly misled the public because the experts “were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
The same goes for Fauci’s many predictions about when normal life might return. Back in the spring, he was hopeful that some semblance of normalcy would return in the fall. In July, he predicted that everyday life would not be able to pick back up for “a year or so.” And now, he’s estimating that people will still be wearing masks and social distancing well into 2021. It seems that with every passing month, Fauci pushes the goal posts back just a bit further.
This approach might work well in the medical world — after all, it’s better for a doctor to overestimate risk and be proven wrong than to say things will be all right when they are not — but it does not make for good policy. We are now nearly nine months into 15-days-to-stop-the-spread, and the public is tired of being asked to make it over just one more hill. Compliance is waning, pandemic fatigue is spreading, and trust in what the experts have to say is at an all-time low.
What the country needs right now is honesty — not a pat on the back or a vague “we’ll get there when we get there.” People deserve to know just how long this shutdown could last, whether the coronavirus restrictions they’re being asked to obey actually combat the spread of the virus, and how much more they’ll be asked to give up before this thing is over. And if Fauci cannot give them the answers, he should reconsider his role and its purpose.
