The last "trusted doctor"

In no way is Fauci to blame for these violent threats, or for the overall heat of a far-right that probably would’ve been hostile to public health officials no matter how they handled the pandemic. Lower down the thermostat, though, it’s easy to see why Fauci, who became the face of the government’s pandemic response, was a lightning rod for more reasonable frustrations over COVID. Like most people in power during a fast-moving pandemic, Fauci has been wrong. Most infamously, he was wrong about masks and asymptomatic transmission early in the pandemic. He was also wrong about vaccines stopping transmission. He was dismissive about the possibility of the lab origins of the virus—which, though increasingly unlikely, could not at the time be completely ruled out—which later raised eyebrows and fed into conspiracy theories because the NIH had provided grant money that indirectly funded virus research in Wuhan. The stress of managing a pandemic in a withering political environment even caused the preternaturally composed Fauci to occasionally give in to the heat of the moment. (“If anybody is lying here, senator, it’s you,” he snapped at Sen. Rand Paul in a testy exchange last summer.) Some of Fauci’s apparent flip-flopping was legitimately due to evolving evidence, but some of them were overconfident predictions. It would be fair to call some of them missteps—but not Nazi-level war crimes. To conflate the two, as figures on the right have done quite casually, is unhinged.

But a deeper issue, I think, is that the archetype of the “trusted doctor” just did not survive the pandemic. It might be easy to chalk this loss up to a hyperpolarized country that can’t agree about anything. Or to blame decades-long efforts to generally destabilize scientific expertise. These are both factors. But the loss of the trusted doctor is also about a nation confronting a truth easier to ignore before the pandemic: Public health is unavoidably political. Fauci’s strength as a communicator relied on projecting an air of neutral scientific authority, but in reality, that was always a bit of legerdemain—for him, or any scientist. So many of the controversies of this pandemic aren’t about facts, but values. That the mRNA vaccines save lives is an empirical fact. Whether we should mandate them is a political choice. When Fauci advocates for vaccine mandates—even if it’s consistent with the principles of public health—he’s taking a position that elevates collective benefit over individual choice. I happen to share those values, but a large swath of America doesn’t.