Pleading the fifth was cowardly. It was also revelatory.
When Anthony Fauci categorically refused to answer any questions at a Senate committee hearing last week, he inadvertently showcased a throwback scene of irreconcilable pandemic partisanship. On one side were Republican ideologues boiling over with grievances familiar from 2020 and 2021. On the other side, Democrats nominally committed to the principle of defending science against partisan attacks but unsure exactly what that meant beyond lip service — or what lessons they were supposed to have learned from the Covid-19 emergency. Both sides seemed frozen in time, looking backward rather than forward. And in the middle there was a mute embodiment of the scientific establishment, refusing to engage in the partisan debate in the hope of staying above the fray. Or at least out of jail.
It’s been more than three years since Fauci retired from his position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he ran for nearly 40 years, and even longer since he was effectively canonized as a saint of American science by huge numbers of Americans hunting for leadership in a time of pandemic panic and desperation.
In a healthier country, there probably would never have been a St. Anthony. We certainly wouldn’t be burning him in effigy now, exorcising enduring resentment and delivering a forbidding message to would-be future leaders about the political pathologies that have lingered so long after the emergency itself passed that they are beginning to seem ineradicable.
The United States was not the only country to wrestle with Covid, to improvise a dramatic policy response that upended the lives of its citizens or to watch as even burdensome restrictions failed to prevent a mass mortality event, only lightening it. But for years Fauci has been bullied and harassed and intimidated and, above all, vilified and scapegoated by bad faith critics mounting contradictory attacks that allowed them to pin responsibility on one man for everything they might not have liked about the experience of living through a brutal pandemic. Yet that is exactly why Fauci should have talked last week: to answer those critics, defend his approach and those of his colleagues, and explain what lessons he’d learned and might like the rest of us to learn. Evidently, he felt too boxed in to try, even with Joe Biden’s blanket pardon in hand.
It was not a preposterous feeling. Six years ago, when Americans up to and including President Trump were first entertaining the possibility of a laboratory origin for Covid, the meaning of that hypothesis was clear: The virus wreaking havoc on all of our lives was the fault of China. But almost as soon as Trump left office in 2021, the political meaning seemed to change. Ever since, the lab leak theory has meant for many of its proponents that the disease was Fauci’s fault.
There is some logic to this: If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research around the world may have played some role in bringing it about. How much responsibility remains an open question, because the subject of pandemic origins itself remains open as well. This is another reason that Fauci should have come prepared to explain and defend himself last week, as he told me he would several years ago if presented with the chance to expound at length and with nuance about the value of this kind of research.
But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.
You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon. And you can’t really fault liberal hysteria on social media when some of the most vocal early advocates of aggressive mitigation were figures like the libertarian crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan and the reactionary neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. The National Review was slamming the case against lockdowns as “absurd”; Tucker Carlson was reportedly lobbying the president to take the virus more seriously.
Back then, support for aggressive mitigation measures was pretty close to universal: In May 2020, one survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least 80 percent of the country was on board with social distancing, stay-at-home orders and business closures. Even so, by the end of the next month, all states but one ended their stay-at-home orders. And if you think that early near-unanimity was the result of irresponsible fear-mongering, you may be surprised to learn that in 2024, when asked whether they would support any similar measures again if faced with another pandemic, Americans answered in the affirmative by a margin of 81 to 19.
These days, it’s common to hear that we should forgive early miscalculations because we knew so little about Covid in that period. In many ways, we seem more confused now than we were then. One reason mitigation measures were so popular was because, while we were living in fear, we were not living in all that much mystery.
About the virus itself, we already knew quite a lot: We knew it was extremely infectious and relatively dangerous, we knew about the dramatic age skew of mortality risk and we knew (some of us, at least) that it was transmitted not just through droplets but also through the air.
But we didn’t know everything. We didn’t know how the virus would mutate, for instance, or how long immunity would last after an infection, and we did not know how effective vaccines might be or exactly how quickly they would come.
Most of all, we didn’t know how Americans would respond, especially over the long haul. We did not yet know much about how the country’s risk tolerance might evolve over many months or years of ongoing exposure, illness and death. We didn’t know how many Americans would come to blame their pandemic anxiety on public health officials, resentful that they were ever made to feel so much fear. And even so, six years on, we seem to overestimate that backlash and that resentment. Over the course of the pandemic, trust in scientists fell by about 10 points; over the course of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reign at the Department of Health and Human Services, trust in the C.D.C. has fallen by more than 25 points.
This is not to say that Fauci made no mistakes, or that there were no problems with the public health response more broadly. I collected plenty of objections, registering many along the way in print.
In retrospect, it is especially striking that Fauci initially downplayed the risk of the virus, suggesting that it was sufficiently low-risk that Americans need not worry about it in February 2020, and implying that they should worry more about the seasonal flu. When Fauci did come out as a relative alarmist the following month, offering what were seen at the time as worst-case scenarios, he predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths — about one-tenth as many as the country eventually endured.
Like many other people, I found myself frustrated by the reversal of guidance on masking. I thought more emphasis should have been placed on the spectacular age gradient in mortality risk. I thought it was prudent for schools to close in the spring of 2020 but that much more should have been done to reopen them safely that fall. I thought Fauci and others downplayed the risks of breakthrough infection and death even after vaccination, perhaps to promote uptake. I thought the impulse to even try to impose vaccine mandates was problematic when it was clear that the person getting the shot was the main beneficiary. All along, I thought many scientists were too dismissive about the question of pandemic origins. In fact, I commissioned and edited the first major national magazine story that took the question seriously; when I interviewed Fauci years later, I asked him how, exactly, given the open possibility that the pandemic emerged from the kind of laboratory research he’d played a role in promoting and funding, he was able to sleep at night.
This all sounds like the résumé of a Covid contrarian, a lockdown skeptic and a Fauci hater. But I emerged from the pandemic emergency with almost the opposite set of convictions: that the American Covid response, while far from perfect, was also far from catastrophic; that those who raised the alarm relatively early, like Fauci, were much more correct than those who downplayed the threat; that those still outraged about the length and severity of lockdowns are mostly misremembering guidance, which was largely self-policed and lasted only for a few months; and above all that the collective hardship of our experience was primarily a matter of Covid itself.
After six years, I had hoped that hardship was far enough behind us that we might wrestle with some less partisan questions in a somewhat less heated environment. Why did we have such a hard time approving and mass-producing rapid tests early on, and why did we get so locked in on things like plexiglass aerosol dividers long after we knew they weren’t very helpful? Why were parents so scared about schools reopening, and what might have been done to reassure them and make classes safer? Was it possible to persuade the vaccine hesitant without overhyping the efficacy of the shots in blocking transmission? How should we think about the country’s tolerance for pandemic risks, given that a vocal minority of people believe their rights were violated by requirements to wear masks and plenty of others think the country’s leadership failed to do enough to stop the spread of the disease?
This is what it would mean to actually learn from the experience, rather than treating the pandemic as a simplistic blame game. Instead, we got Senator Bernie Moreno asking Fauci who he thought he was, punctuating the rhetorical question with an expletive and a burn-book-style digest of the contents of Fauci’s just-released diary.
The diary did reveal an unseemly preoccupation with fame. But it runs more than 1,000 pages and is full of many dense paragraphs recounting conversations and debates with other scientists and public officials, trying to hash out matters of epidemiological dispute and fashion public health guidance.
Some of these conversations are of enduring public interest — about early estimates of the fatality rate, for instance, and school closures. But in almost every case the discussions are less scandalous and more nuanced than Fauci’s critics have alleged. The critics said the diary showed Fauci dismissing a natural origin of the disease when in fact it shows that he believed the disease had jumped from animals to humans before arriving at the wet market in Wuhan, China. They said it showed him entertaining the lab leak hypothesis while ruling it out in public, when in fact he was typically careful to acknowledge the chance of a lab leak even while downplaying it.
The actual origin of the pandemic remains unknown, six years after the country’s first confirmed case. Perhaps it always will be, maddeningly enough, which may be one reason it’s so difficult to make any collective and honest accounting of it. So much seems to hang on the question of ultimate responsibility. But maybe if we can stop trying to blame someone for Covid, we can actually learn something from it.