Unherd
Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer, novelist, and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast.
December 3, 2021
For nearly two years now, Anthony Fauci has been an object of fascination, adoration, even worship in an America both frightened and polarised by the coronavirus. From the beginning, the Left identified him as the public health expert to trust: the one member of Donald Trump’s Covid response team who was willing to contradict him in public, our own personal mole in the White House, a voice for science and sanity in the face of the president’s bluster and incompetence.
He was the one who undermined Trump’s “just the flu” narrative; he was the one who told us that the virus wasn’t going to disappear in the spring. When Trump was touting the unproven benefits of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, Fauci stepped in with a reality check — and yet always, somehow, stayed just enough in the President’s good graces to keep his job.
And so, after last year’s election, we greeted Fauci as a hero who’d emerged safely, against all odds, from behind enemy lines. Journalists sat with him for breathless interviews, asking how he “survived” his time as Trump’s advisor. Time magazine wrote, jubilantly: “Anthony Fauci Is Finally Getting to Do His Job”. The New Yorker declared him “America’s Doctor”.
The fact that he was still standing, preaching the gospel of science while Donald Trump slunk away with his tail between his legs, took on its own significance. Fauci was more than the sum of his parts; he was a figurehead. And while he did decry the tragic and unnecessary politicisation of the Covid pandemic from his new perch as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor, it was a winking sort of neutrality: when the man wishes out loud that “we had a country where people realized the importance of a communal effort,” it’s not like we don’t know which people he’s talking about.
Given that half the nation wants to canonise him as the Patron Saint of Public Health, it was probably inevitable that Fauci would be ultimately unable to resist buying into his own hype — but it was still remarkable to witness. In a recent interview with Face the Nation, Fauci explained why the criticism he’s weathered from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, who accused him of lying under oath about what kind of viral research the NIH was funding, is not just distasteful but dangerous.
“They’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” he said. “That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever.”
For some, this statement was nothing more or less than a terrifying profession of absolute power: La science, c’est moi. But let’s be charitable and imagine that what Fauci was trying to say — inelegantly — is not that he believes himself to be synonymous with science, but that other people treat him as such, attacking him as a proxy for the ideas they find offensive.
The thing is, that’s not really any better. These comments reveal a monumental hubris no matter how you slice it, a conviction that no criticism — whether…
