In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Anthony Fauci’s diary musing about dinners with famed journalists during the COVID-19 lockdowns evokes memories of neighbors who couldn’t have guests at their child’s funeral, or attend the birth of their grandchildren, or buy seeds at a local garden center. Those narcissistic entries about his towering fame remind me of local children who were barred from attending high school with their friends, couldn’t have proper graduations, or start college on time, many of whose lives were needlessly thrown off course forever.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s document dump of the diary entries and emails of former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases accentuates what we already knew about Fauci. Though his fans portrayed him as a saintly public health official merely sharing advice and evolving science with decision-makers, Fauci was a self-serving authoritarian operator who relied on fearmongering, coaxing, and lying to manipulate the behavior of hundreds of millions of Americans. On Feb. 8, 2020, for example, Fauci acknowledged privately that after speaking with former CDC Director Tom Frieden, he believed COVID’s fatality rate was likely at 0.2-0.3% not 2%, and “acting like a bad influenza.” Less than a month later, under oath in front of a House oversight committee, Fauci warned that COVID was “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” The man who claimed to represent science itself was stoking fear to implement obedience. In a June 18, 2020, email to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, Fauci voiced frustration that viral transmission has been unaffected by lockdowns: “I have been obsessing about the increases in cases that do not seem to be related to openings or closings or massive crowds.” Fauci’s apprehension, “we may be looking for the lost keys under the light of the lamppost,” didn’t stop him from spending the next days, weeks, and months attacking any politician who proposed easing lockdowns as anti-science. Fauci privately and publicly criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for opposing mask mandates, school lockdowns, and pushing back against federal public health guidance that the head of the NIAID knew was questionable. When ABC News asked Fauci in 2022 if it was a mistake for schools to be shuttered as long as they were during the COVID pandemic, he claimed that we “should realize, and have realized,” that “there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.” In a later interview with the New York Times, he demanded, “[s]how me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did.” But in his entries, we learn that Fauci took credit for convincing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and others to shut down schools. In a March 15, 2020, entry, Fauci approvingly notes that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff Ann O’Leary told him that “based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”There was no mention of deleterious collateral consequences.Though Fauci absorbs most of the anger over COVID-era shutdowns, he’s not wrong to point out that he had no power to dictate state policy decisions. Public officials, possessing little if any knowledge of virology, are perhaps the most risk-averse people in the country. They were never going to challenge a man canonized by the media as the embodiment of science. There will never be any reckoning for them. But when dissent did pop up, Fauci was there to suppress it. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during opening statements during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Nov. 4, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
