Anthony Fauci and Covid-19
Yesterday was Tony Fauci’s day in the bullseye in Congressional hearing about dealing with Covid-19, 6 years ago.
This morning, Jeff passed along Paul Krugman’s take on this and other similar issues, and it is worth your time to read. I’m a subscriber to Krugman. Here is his column: “Reality is a Communist plot”.
Anthony Fauci, who I really didn’t know much about before Covid-19, was the person needed for the time of crisis. His demeanor, credentials as a scientist and all gave hope. Sure, there were occasional wrong calls, but as anyone who’s ever dealt with a crisis knows, you do your best
We all lived through The horrid time of Covid-19 and know our personal stories. At the end of the pandemic, February, 2022, I was hospitalized for surgery for Colon cancer, and my roommate was a young man struck down with long Covid, not contagious but not recovered. He was not happy. Probably in his 30’s, he had been an AAU calibre basketball player, but when we were roomies, he could barely walk, and was becoming morbidly obese.
We conversed. I often think about him, but I can’t stay in contact. I knew only his first name.
I responded to Jeff’s forward, today, with my own brief comment:
Communicable disease have always been a problem. They’re inevitable in our world today, and we can’t avoid them our their possibility. Dr. Fauci was there when the chips were down.
POSTNOTE:
I’ve mentioned before the several on-line columns I subscribe to – well-informed opinion writers. Paul Krugman is one of them; Heather Cox Richardson@, Joyce Vance, Tim Snyder (with his ten part free series on Hitler and Stalin now in segment three), Robert Reich, Garrison Keillor and, most recent, Heather Delaney Reese (with her own excellent commentary on the Fauci issue, today). These, along with the Minnesota Star Tribune, are my own windows on the world, so to speak, along with occasional others. Each of these, and others, deserve paid subscriptions. Nothing worthwhile is ever “free”.
@ – I have found especially interesting Richardsons daily History Minutes, never more than a minute, about various History events and people, narrated by a diversity of individuals. One of today’s is here. Check it out.
Dick, I’m feeling the need to weigh in on Anthony Fauci, with less glowing “takes” than yours, on his performance during Covid. I will start by mentioning that his work during the darkest times of early AIDS/HIV thoroughly qualified him to become “The Covid Guy”. Absolutely. A truly laudable pre-Covid career.
But… However… As a retired R&D scientist, who did both academic “pure research” at Berkeley and “applied R&D” at 3M, I feel qualified to state that most scientists in bureaucratic institutions (academic, governmental, and corporate) know that the best scientists most often do NOT become “leaders”, AND the leaders are frequently NOT exceptionally good scientists. This may seem like two ways of saying the same thing, but they are not. Go back and read again. These are related, but different, phenomena.
When one knows enough far-above-average scientists, one inevitably is glad that they do NOT often become “executives”, managers or even R&D “group leaders”. The necessary skill sets are very different. When companies, for instance, fail to understand this, they imperil their own thriving and even their existence.
To me, Fauci, from a position not just of “management” but of governmental power, committed the most mortal of scientific sins during Covid. He made statements that were wholly based on factors other than science, claimed they WERE based on “The Science” (a phrase that was not commonly used before he and others started using it during Covid), and used his access to the levers of power, both formal and informal, both to force compliance, and to vilify those who disagreed with him. Love him or hate him, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the current head of the NIH, was far more true to what it means to be a “scientist” during Covid than was Fauci, and, for several years, Bhattacharya paid for it dearly.
The most simple and straightforward example was “masking” (not vaccines! not school closures! not “social distancing”! not lockdowns!) Only “masking mandates” exemplify the federal government insisting on something that was palpably, scientifically *wrong*. Anyone who has ever worked in an environment where there are dangerous airborne things larger than an individual molecule knows that one is not allowed to work in such an environment unless one is professionally *fitted* with a top-of-the-line mask such as an N95. Neither cloth masks, surgical masks, nor bought-off-the-shelf N95s even come close to sufficing. If the air contains something you *need* to be protected from… You. Are. Gonna. Die. Fauci’s championing – eventually, after several flip-flops – of *requiring* “masks” (writ broadly) was nothing short of scandalous to real scientists who had worked in hazardous environments, because we all knew it was utter bullshit, and knew, with his background, that he knew this too.
That is not the only thing about which he grotesquely misled the American people – it is just the easiest slam-dunk for me to type out on a Monday evening.
The result of Fauci’s multiple instances of perfidity is that “science” (again, writ broadly) is immensely less trusted today by enormous numbers of people than it was previously. And that is a great loss to us all. His actions as an “executive” or “manger” of a science-based enterprise are unforgivable. It is impossible for a scientist even to imagine that he did not “know better” AT THE TIME than to say and do many of the things he said and did.
I regret that President Biden “blanket-pardoned” him, understand why ol’ Joe felt it was necessary to protect him from the rightful consequences of his actions, and even though Sen. Rand Paul so often falls into being a parody of himself, I applaud his efforts, post-pardon, to find *some* way to create a verdict for history’s sake against Fauci. Anyone who truly wants social and governmental decision making to “follow The Science” – or at least to avoid *contradicting* The Science – should be supportive of this effort, regardless of how “theatrical” it has been or becomes.