Thank goodness. Quite a few government officials have been undone by Donald Trump’s petty, personal grievances. I think about people like Peter Strzok or Marie Yovanovich as examples. Dr Fauci is just one more example …
For over a year, Anthony Fauci has been a bogeyman for conservatives, who have questioned his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of quietly undermining then-President Donald Trump.
But those attacks took on a whole new level of vitriol this week, to the point that one social media analysis described it as highly misleading and at least one platform pulled down some posts, citing false content.
It all stemmed from a tranche of Fauci’s emails that were published as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by various news outlets. Within hours of publication, the hashtag #FauciLeaks was trending on Twitter, accusing the nation’s top infectious disease doctor of lying under oath about the origins of Covid. It became a trending topic on Facebook too, where detractors added an inaccurate and more nefarious framing that the emails were secretly “leaked” — drawing on a playbook that has worked for partisans on the right in the past, despite the fact that Fauci’s publicly disclosed emails were not state secrets.
Reddit and Facebook lit up with a fresh round of Fauci attacks, some of which called him a war criminal. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), perhaps Fauci’s most prominent bete noire on the Hill, quickly released Facebook ads demanding to “fire Fauci” and requesting a campaign donation.
And a round of conservatives, cherry-picking individual emails out of more than 3,000, argued that Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had privately supported a theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and lied about masks in an effort to amass political power. Neither was true. Fauci has said he thinks it’s more likely that the virus spread from animal to human but would not rule out a lab leak, and while he initially downplayed the need for masks, it was, he said, out of fear that medical professionals would lose access to them if the public began panic purchasing.
The veracity and velocity of the new attacks, nevertheless, underscored the growing intensity with which Fauci animates conservatives some five months after Trump has left office. And they raised difficult questions for political and medical professionals about how much they should push back on the anti-Fauci campaign and what the cost would be if it went ignored.
“Targeting Fauci erodes trust in scientific institutions and makes them seem partisan – just as universities are increasingly seen as partisan, the media, the bureaucracy,” said Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow and director of GMF Digital at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. “These strategies don’t have an easy response. You try to ignore them when they’re not that widespread and even if you eventually refute them it can seem he said-she said. The best strategy — which the White House and Fauci seem to be taking — is to push ahead with an alternate positive narrative and action — in this case around vaccinations.”
For the White House, this has created a quandary: to defend Fauci from the incoming and risk elevating it, or to ignore it and assume it only gains traction with an audience that would never trust the Biden administration anyway.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called Fauci an “undeniable asset” but said the White House would let him speak for himself. In an interview later in the day, Rob Flaherty, the White House’s digital director, would not directly comment on Fauci but said that while the White House regularly pushes back on false information it must also balance out whether its response will exacerbate false information or quash it.
Fauci declined to comment for this piece.
Career government officials don’t often become political lightning rods. But Fauci’s role, the crisis in which he has operated, and the flow of information on social media, has created the perfect conditions for just that. A mild-mannered infectious disease specialist who has earned the admiration of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, Fauci is prone to bluntness. That has served him well as someone communicating to the public about complex and high-stakes pandemics and public health issues. But, starting in the spring of 2020, it has made his life tricky.
Trump insisted that he and Fauci worked fine together. But in the early days of the pandemic, the former president rarely hid his jealousy as Fauci became something of a public deity. Often Trump would proclaim that his judgments on Covid proved more prescient over time, like an early call to shut down travel from China. But Trump also routinely flouted the public safety guidelines that Fauci touted and their divergent approaches became an emblem for the then-president’s much criticized pandemic response, writ large.
This just breaks my heart. Fauci is a scientist who was respected by everyone on both sides of aisle, even through the AIDS crisis which was viciously polarizing in its day. He’s not n oracle or a god, but he is an honest broker who shouldn’t be held responsible for Trump’s massive failures which is what this is about.
These supposedly anti-cancel culture fuckers sure do love to assassinate the characters of anyone who comes into their crosshairs. They’ve done it for decades.