Dr. Fauci Had Plenty of Help

Anthony Fauci is in the prosecutorial crosshairs, and deservedly so. Much of what was imposed on the American public under his leadership ultimately looked a lot more like harassment than sound scientific judgment.

• Mask mandates were imposed on everyone from toddlers to senior citizens, even as the effectiveness of ordinary cloth and surgical masks, particularly compared with high-quality N95 respirators, was far less certain than public officials suggested. And that doesn’t even address the absurd rituals of taking masks on and off in restaurants or wearing them outdoors.
• The six-foot distancing rule turned out to have little scientific basis. Fauci himself later acknowledged that the specific distance was not grounded in the kind of supporting data the public had been led to assume existed.
• Mass testing and contact tracing consumed enormous resources and billions of dollars, with questionable impact on transmission once the virus was spreading widely through communities.
• Business shutdowns, school closures and shelter-in-place orders imposed enormous economic, educational and social costs, while arguably offering minimal benefit.
• Vaccine mandates were often applied indiscriminately, with insufficient regard for age, individual risk or immunity acquired through previous infection.
• Perhaps most troubling, scientists, physicians and ordinary citizens who questioned Covid edicts or proposed alternative approaches were frequently censored, marginalized or vilified as people who “didn’t believe in science” or were even “killing people.”

So yes, there is good reason to review what happened and hold those in leadership and other influential positions accountable. But while Fauci may have been the face of the Covid response, it is a mistake for investigative bodies to train all their fire on him.

Let’s not forget the institutions and individuals that were not merely complicit but, in many cases, had greater power to implement these policies or to change course when the evidence changed. I’m talking about political leaders, establishment experts, the legacy media and celebrities who used their platforms to enforce the prevailing orthodoxy.

Many of them are now ignoring what happened, distancing themselves from it or explaining their behavior as an understandable response to the uncertainty of the moment.

At the Senate hearing convened by Rand Paul, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Democratic senators forcefully defended him, portraying him as a public-health hero and characterizing Republican attacks as baseless. Their message was essentially that the country should look forward, not backward, while much of the blame was redirected toward their familiar target: Donald Trump.

Dr. Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the legacy media’s most prominent vaccine commentators, offered a more sophisticated version of the same defense. In a CNN interview, he explained: “[W]hat Dr. Fauci was doing at the time, as we were all doing, was trying to understand in real time what was going on, because you learn as you go. [W]e could have done better and communicated better, but, again, it’s always easy in retrospect.”

That would be a reasonable defense if the problem had simply been that officials made mistakes while confronting a new virus. Of course they did. The problem is that many scientists, physicians and members of the public who questioned those policies in real time were dismissed, censored or professionally marginalized. Officials now asking for the benefit of hindsight were often unwilling to extend the benefit of uncertainty to their critics at the time.

The legacy media, such as the New York Times, CNN and others, have largely treated revelations about Covid-era policy failures as secondary stories. When public anger over school closures, mandates and other policies has surfaced, coverage has frequently framed it as a partisan reckoning rather than a legitimate examination of how public health institutions performed. Too often, the press served not as a skeptical check on government authority but as an amplifier of it.

Then there were the celebrities. Some of the loudest voices during the pandemic are conspicuously quiet today. Jennifer Aniston, for example, publicly acknowledged cutting people out of her regular routine because they refused to get vaccinated or disclose their vaccination status. She was hardly alone. Celebrities with no particular expertise in epidemiology or public health nevertheless became enthusiastic enforcers of the prevailing consensus, using their cultural influence to stigmatize those who resisted it.

Fauci, for all his flaws, could never have wielded the influence he did by himself. He was enabled by political leaders who too often confused scientific advice with scientific certainty; by public-health experts who treated legitimate disagreement as misinformation; by a fawning media that too rarely challenged the official narrative; and by influential celebrities eager to demonstrate their virtue by enforcing it.

The lesson of Covid should not be that Anthony Fauci was uniquely responsible for everything that went wrong. That is too easy.

The more important question is how so many institutions that were supposed to provide independent judgment — government, medicine, academia, journalism and even popular culture — came to reinforce one another, suppress skepticism and turn provisional public-health judgments into unquestionable doctrine.

Fauci should have to answer for his role in that system. But so should the people and institutions that made the system possible.