I don’t know how many of you remember the resignation of NY Times reporter Donald MacNeil during the height of the COVID pandemic and if you don’t, the details are all right here. Without taking a position on the merits of the pressure he was under, I do think it was unfortunate that he had to leave at the time he did because he was a great science reporter in the middle of a once in a century pandemic. We lost something valuable.
His newsletter today shows just what we lost. He takes on the NY Times’ truly shitty treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci at the hands of Benjamim Wallace-Wells the other day. This is just the opening. I urge you to read the whole thing:
I love science-fiction series like “The Man in the High Castle” because they force us to question our ingrained assumption that history was always ordained to turn out as it did. It was set in 1950’s America after the Allies lost World War II. Germany had beaten us to The Bomb, vaporized Washington and stormed ashore at Virginia Beach. Berlin and Tokyo had divided the U.S. between them. Most Americans were cowed but prospering under the new regime. The few resisters were holed up in the Rockies fighting a losing guerilla war.
I kept thinking of that series as I read David Wallace-Wells’ interview with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, which is destined for this Sunday’s New York Times magazine. It is amazing how the certainty with which we look back on even recent history so quickly erases our memories of how much confusion and fear reigned at the time. Of course the Normandy Invasion would succeed. Of course the bomb dropped on Hiroshima would not be a dud. Of course we won, and Eisenhower, architect of Normandy, would go on to be President — instead of being hanged at the Nazis’ equivalent of Nuremberg.
My father was at Normandy and I read history. In 1944, those outcomes were not so clear.
What Mr. Wallace-Wells did was adopt the sneaky suspicion of the MAGA crowd that the scientific elite (liberals, they assumed) somehow knew or should have known how things would turn out: whether masks would work, whether lockdowns or school closures made sense, whether vaccines would pan out, how much herd immunity would develop, whether there would be breakthrough infections, how the virus would mutate, even how many Americans would die.
The truth is that many of the early guesses made by science proved wrong. When the data changed, good scientists changed their advice. But, like the MAGAmites, Mr. Wallace-Wells makes Dr. Fauci personify all science and treats him as if he knew the truth but concealed it for political ends. “I’m not trying to prosecute you” he says soothingly, but it’s just a less foamy-mouthed version of Rand Paul or Jim Jordan asking: “Some people say you lied, Dr. Fauci. Your response?”
That’s unfair. This time it was me that was there, not my dad. That’s not how it happened.
The whole interview showed Fauci on the defensive, trying to correct Mr. Wallace-Wells’ rewriting of history. To me, his most telling answer was: “David, we’re playing a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking here. This is some really serious Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
For perspective: On May 24, 2020, The New York Times movingly devoted its whole front page to the names of 100,000 dead. Can you imagine we would have done that if we’d known that we were less than 10 percent of the way to the top of a mountain of 1.1 million dead? 100,000 seemed horrific; in retrospect, it was just the first inning. Should we have known?
The pandemic was a whorling protoplasmic cyclone that lasted years longer than expected. Its outcome was unknowable from the start. Our response was mostly not science-based, but an ugly national bar fight. Now the ghouls are wandering the field, shooting and stripping the wounded.
I presume that Mr. Wallace-Wells is not a MAGAmite. But in his intro, even before his questions begin, he rewrites history from that perspective: Fauci dismissed the threat as “minuscule.” Fauci opposed masks. Fauci played down aerosol spread. Even the opening line is unfair: “It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic….”
Fauci was never the lone face. Hundreds of experts, in and out of government, were interviewed. I interviewed dozens of them myself. Some were on TV often: Scott Gottlieb, Peter Hotez, Leana Wen, Paul Offit and Bill Schaffner instantly come to mind. There was no shortage of expert opinion, and they did not always agree. And the side with the alternative facts had its own experts, who also got airtime: Dr. Scott Atlas with his bizarre theories of T-cell immunity from benign coronaviruses (900,000 deaths occurred after his assurances that the epidemic was fading away), the Great Barrington bunch, Dr. Didier Raoult and the defenders of chloroquine and ivermectin, Dr. Demon Sperm and the other Frontline Doctors, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the rest of the Disinformation Dozen. They too were interviewed and lionized.
Nor was Fauci “made” the face of public health. He became it by default because studies are boring and it’s more fun to personalize it, to pit St. Anthony against Fire Fauci, the way you’d pick Team Jen or Team Angelina, whether what’s at stake is a million lives or a few years with Brad Pitt. Also, our other public health generals were cowering in silence. (More on that below.)
The Q&A itself expands on the “blame Fauci for everything” theme. Fauci didn’t intuit that there was asymptomatic spread even though China and the WHO initially said there wasn’t. It’s Fauci’s fault that Zoom-schooled students lost years of math proficiency. Fauci didn’t tell seniors often enough that they were in danger. Fauci set us up for high death rates in red states. Fauci infected black Americans with vaccine hesitancy. Fauci failed to force Congress to pass paid sick leave. Fauci neglected to face down the NYPD and cancel the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and shut down New York in February because…oh, yeah — Fauci wasn’t the mayor and he’s in Bethesda. Fauci funded lethal research in China that caused the lab leak that may or may not have happened.
This idea that we should have know what was unknowable and that the fact that we didn’t indicts all the scientists who were working on the problem is driving me mad. Yes, there were many things that should have gone better and if we’d had decent political leadership at the time, it probably would have. But blaming Fauci and the other scientists for what so many now insist were unnecessary lock downs or this widely held belief that if he hadn’t gone to virtual school children’s learning would have not been interrupted is infuriating. There were so many corpses they had to bring in refrigerator trucks to hold them! Kids’ learning would have been disrupted no matter what — everyone was terrified and thousands were dying! The idea that we could have had anything resembling “normal” during that first year is absurd. Nobody knew what that virus was going to do, they were all learning on the fly.
The US did terribly during the pandemic compared to other countries not because we went too far but because we didn’t go far enough:
There is no question that we, as a nation, did terribly against Covid-19. Even though we are the world’s richest country, invented both of the best vaccines and had first dibs on them, we did worse than any of our wealthy peers — much worse than we should have. It’s in the data.
As Mr. Wallace-Wells shows in his footnotes, the easiest thumbnail measure of that is Covid deaths per million population.* Peru, Bulgaria and Hungary did the worst, with 6,500 to 5,000 per million, respectively. (Peru had many problems, but its worst was that it ran out of oxygen. Most eastern European countries did poorly because of corruption, broken health systems and distrust of government. They live now in the world we’d live in if “Man in the High Castle” were set in 2028 and President for Life Trump was beginning his fourth term.)
The U.S. is 15th worst on the list, with almost 3,500 dead per million. (Roughly tied with Slovenia, Mrs. Trump’s homeland.) Britain is 21st, with 3,240. Germany is 56th, with 2,058. Canada is 83rd, with 1,360, roughly tied with Israel at 1,338.
In my opinion, if we’d had better leadership, we would have fallen somewhere between Germany and Canada. Germany got hit hard earlier than we did, Canada later. They’re both roughly our peers in per capita wealth and expertise, both are democratic, both have their own MAGA-style movements. (Someone was shot dead over a mask in Germany and Canada had a major trucker strike over vaccines.)
Sweden, which many scientists favored by the right initially suggested we should imitate, did much worse than all its Nordic peers.
The countries that did really well, by contrast, with less than 800 dead per million, are mostly in Asia, even though they were hit first by travelers from Wuhan: Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam. What advantages did they have? Harsh initial lockdowns with no home quarantine. Tight borders with visitors held in hotels for two weeks. Universal masking. Plenty of tests from the git-go. Rigid contact-tracing. Unlike us, they went through SARS two decades ago and they knew the threat was real. Then, later, they had widespread acceptance of vaccines. (Non-Asian Australia and New Zealand also did well with similar tactics.) I’m ignoring India, Indonesia and most of Africa because their data are shaky. China didn’t even pretend to issue honest data when it ended its Zero Covid policy in December, but even if it had 1.6 million dead in January (the highest estimate, and I doubt they reached it) it still did far better than we did because they have triple our population.
Meanwhile, the American “lockdowns” that provoked such anger here were a joke, a garden party. Not just by China’s standards — even by Italy’s. The virus was inside the walls by January 15. We travelled freely around cities and between states. We overcautiously closed beaches but we also held country-wide motorcycle rallies. We had almost no tests until mid-March and no easy-test regimen (walk-in clinics, sidewalk tents) until 2021. Quarantine was done at home on the “Scout’s-honor-wink-wink” system. Our level of vaccine acceptance is still appallingly low.
The incessant whining about how horrible even those lame mitigation efforts were is indicative of how shallow so much of our culture has become.
There’s a lot more at the link. MacNeil’s perspective is a necessary counter to the rapidly gelling conventional wisdom that Fauci and others must be held accountable for “forcing” us to endure lock downs and mask mandates when it wasn’t necessary. The million dead are now forgotten. It’s a shame that this piece isn’t on the front page of the NY Times.