I Blame You: On the Political Targeting of Dr. Fauci and the Entire World’s Failure

I have always been scientifically oriented. I was the little girl who went to her encyclopedia after watching Jurassic Park and hyper focused on learning everything about DNA because dinosaurs. That same scientifically oriented mind led me to read serious scientific books as a teenager. One book made an impression unlike anything since Carl Sagan’s “A Demon Haunted World”. It scared me, but it also inadvertently readied my mind for living my worst nightmare.

Back in 2005 I read The Coming Plague by Ph.D and Pulitzer winner Laurie Garrett, a bacteriology oriented biologist turned epidemics journalist. Her book, published in 1994, warned of an inevitably upcoming pandemic with an airborne pathogen that could be potentially catastrophic. This was coming from a woman who had documented an Ebola outbreak in Zaire. I followed her on Twitter back when Twitter was Twitter, when you could follow scientists and have your timeline full of facts and useful information. I thought: if The Big One happened (which is how Laurie referred to the impending pandemic), she would be my alarm system.

And she was.

As soon as December 2019, Laurie was already reporting on an alarming respiratory virus situation in Wuhan, China. My mind immediately reached back to an afternoon at my grandmother’s table in 2003, the news on TV, the SARS emergency on every channel. I remember asking her: “Do you think that’s going to get here?” The same question played in my mind at the China news but worse: “Could this be The Big One?”

I feel the need to give my readers this personal context because having strong opinions about the pandemic and maintaining mitigation measures like masking in 2026 is met with criticism and ridicule. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have “post-pandemic stress syndrome”, “pandemic obsession”, or a “refusal to get over so-called COVID-19”. When I had to live through one of my worst nightmares in real life, I knew exactly what I was dealing with. What the entire world was going to deal with.

I followed the science closely not from influencers, but from reliable scientific sources. I read the news like someone witnessing a catastrophic accident in slow motion. But that awareness didn’t paralyze me. My scientific literacy allowed me to navigate the crisis with the best prevention tools available, even under very bad circumstances.

Remember how everyone liked to say “We’re all in this together?” (bollocks) Well, yes but the conditions were not equal. People now think of pandemic trauma as lockdown boredom and uncomfortable mask mandates. I was one of those “essential workers” who couldn’t have a single day of lockdown. Not one.

What made my situation worse was having a vulnerable, chronically ill parent at home someone I could bring death to every single day I came home from work. Imagine living those first three years (and I emphasize “first” because the virus did not vanish by government decree) with that fear. Add to that living in a country with perhaps the worst public health response in the entire world approximately 833,473 deaths (4,843 healthcare workers dead) estimated by an independent scientific commission, based on data provided by the government institutions and not counting those who died at home (the lives that didn’t count?).

When I think of pandemic trauma, I don’t think of lockdown boredom. I think of black body bags piled in cooling trailers outside hospitals. Mass burials in cardboard coffins. People dying alone. Families saying goodbye not knowing if they’d see their loved one again.

And I think of the science. The same science that guided me from the beginning and still advises me to keep masking in 2026, because the rest of the world decided the virus was no longer a threat in 2023. That vulnerable people were expendable. That the right to brunch, parties, and concerts outweighed the right of others to exist safely.

SARS-CoV-2 is not your regular respiratory virus.

Thousands of lives are still being claimed by that “just a flu” virus — a virus that may not kill you outright, but the more you catch it, the more you risk vascular damage (micro clotting), neurological damage (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, Dementia), and immune dysregulation. And the damage is cumulative. The more times you catch it, the more changes you’ll get any of these prizes.

In the U.S. 2024–2025 respiratory-virus season, the CDC estimated COVID-19 was associated with 34,000 to 53,000 deaths, compared with 10,000 to 23,000 for RSV. Influenza during a severe season sits at approximately 45,000 deaths. SARS-CoV-2 isn’t always numerically above flu every season, (not to mention covid is not really stational since it circulates all year round) but it remains in the same deadly league while also carrying distinct long-term risks that influenza does not.

The Political Theater Around Dr. Fauci

This is why I’m enraged at the political theater that has erupted since Dr. Anthony Fauci was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate. His personal diary a private document was exposed publicly, with no direct accusations beyond his criticisms of President Trump. He is being made a scapegoat. A target for the resentment of people who hated lockdowns, masks, and vaccines people who happen to make up a significant portion of Trump’s support base.

It is no secret that Trump’s administration is anti-science. It has been since his first term. I watched live when he addressed the nation after the first confirmed U.S. cases and said: “We have 15 confirmed cases and those cases will soon be down to zero, it’s a very good job we’re doing.” He later suggested that ingesting disinfectant might prevent infection. History has already delivered its verdict on that approach.

In my neighboring country, we had the worst government at the worst possible time. The president promoted religious imagery as pandemic protection in his daily national broadcasts. When asked why he was holding rallies during the health emergency, his public health subsecretary stated: “The president’s force is not one of contagion, but one of morals.”

These are the leaders whose decisions should be under serious public and legal scrutiny not the scientists who sounded the alarm, who followed the evidence, who tried to save lives against a tide of political interference. The evidence of their failure is not merely embarrassing. In many cases, it cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives.

Dr. Fauci is not a saint but he is certainly no villain.

When Biden won the presidency, I watched the United States with something close to envy. Their pandemic response was going to improve and it did. Biden prioritized science and followed Dr. Fauci’s guidance toward an actual public health strategy. I looked to Fauci’s public communications for information, alongside local infectious disease experts in the private sector (I had already established that my country’s public sector was not reliable). That information kept me and my parents safe even as I left for a full work shift every single day.

Dr. Fauci is not a saint. Like any scientist, he made mistakes. I was particularly hurt when, shortly after the Public Health Emergency was declared over in early 2023, he told the BBC that regarding future surges: “Even though you’ll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside they’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized and some will die it’s not going to be the tsunami of cases that we’ve seen.”

That sentence hurt deeply. It treated vulnerable deaths as an acceptable remainder in the equation. Lives like mine, like my mother’s, as expendable collateral so the majority could return to 2019 life. I hold that sentence with real grief.

But criticizing that sentence is not the same as pretending Fauci caused the catastrophe. The anti-science movement now attacking him has no moral authority. He saved lives, not only during this pandemic, but as far back as the AIDS crisis. He is far closer to a hero than a villain. And targeting him is nothing but political revenge dressed as accountability.

The real question nobody wants to answer.

Dr. Fauci’s advice and the public health protocols that followed were right and saved lives. So let me ask the question that actually matters: How many lives were lost that could have been saved because so many people refused to follow the guidance?

And how many lives continue to be lost because millions decided, by personal decree, that the virus was gone?

The pandemic was the result of a cascade of political failures. China’s delay in informing international authorities to protect their image allowed the virus to leave their borders. The WHO’s delay in implementing containment measures, and their failure to clearly communicate the aerosolized nature of the virus from the beginning, was the second fatal mistake. Then came the politicians who prioritized sovereignty over cooperation, as if a virus respected imaginary borders drawn on a map.

And then came the public. The ones who saw science as a threat. The ones who brought infection to the vulnerable, to the immunocompromised, the elderly, the chronically ill, because they decided their personal comfort outweighed other people’s survival.

What about the healthcare workers the people at the true frontlines? How many of them lost their lives caring for someone who refused to mask or isolate because they simply did not want to?

From the very beginning, authorities tried to place blame on the vulnerable themselves, tagging the people most likely to die as those with diabetes, obesity, advanced age, compromised immunity, as if their physiological difference made their death more acceptable. More inevitable. Less worth preventing.

That framing was convenient. Because if the vulnerable are to blame for their own vulnerability, then no one else has to take responsibility.

I’m Still Here. Still Masking. Still Watching.

I am not an expert. Unlike Dr. Fauci, I don’t hold a Ph.D. and decades of experience in the field of infectious diseases. But I was one of the people in the trenches. I still am. I am still forced to mask for nine continuous hours every working day because earning a living exposes me to people who, like most of the world, have decided SARS-CoV-2 is no longer their problem.

You’ve all decided to ignore the science. The papers documenting multisystemic damage. The millions of voices of Long Covid sufferers. You’ve decided to say “it’s just a flu” and move on. But reality doesn’t disappear because you stop looking at it.

So, if you want to find someone to blame for this pandemic, don’t sit comfortably and point at the authorities alone. And don’t you dare blame one of the very few sane voices who did things right.

Look in the mirror.

Because your denial is still killing people in 2026.

I blame you.

By Talia Barba (PenName Aleera Alden)

Sources:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11122535/

https://www.rthm.com/resources/blogs/anticoagulation-long-covid

Dementia

https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article/54/3/afaf046/8051277

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44400-025-00034-y

Cumulative Damage

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12242350/

Immune Dysregulation

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12126688/

Covid independent commission report

https://www.comisioncovid.mx/