It's time to leave the man alone.
One day in 2020, I went to a coffee shop. I was so sick of working 100-hour weeks from home with a newborn that I loaded up the stroller, grabbed my laptop bag (the one with the big World Health Organization logo on it), and headed out. When I got there, I started typing a YLE post, totally absorbed in the words, when a man walked up to my table outside. I thought he was curious about where the restroom was or something, but then he started screaming. At me, at the top of his lungs. Because of the logo on my bag. Then he grabbed croissants and threw them at me. My daughter started crying. And everyone just… watched.
That was just one of the incidents. Packages arrived at my work. Emails landed in my inbox threatening to kill my husband. Someone showed up at my house. My social media got hacked. I was doxxed. The list goes on. I wasn’t the only one who went through this; ask anyone in public health, and you'll hear horror stories. Thankfully, it subsided over time.
Friends, family, colleagues, and reporters have all asked me what I think of Fauci. I have a wide range of mixed thoughts and emotions, ones that sometimes put me at odds with my own public health tribe. But even after everything I’ve lived through, there was one emotion that hit me hardest watching him on the stand today: survivor’s guilt.
Watching a man who is typically so talkative plead the Fifth, I realized that some of the hate aimed at me had subsided, in part, because one person had continued to absorb the heat, fire, vitriol, and anger over all of our mistakes. Not just his.
Fauci didn’t close your schools. That was your local politician, school board, and health official. Fauci didn’t mandate your vaccine. (In fact, he said it’s not the role of the federal government.) Your employer did. Fauci wasn’t the one who barred you from seeing your dying grandma. That was the nursing home. He wasn’t out to secretly kill us all. And he’s not responsible for alllll the other system failures either (like costs due to corporate influence) or political lightning-rod topics that divide this country, like abortion, brought up today in the hearing.
Like any public official, his decisions can and should absolutely be debated and scrutinized. Fauci had enormous power and influence. (I think he earned that over his 50-year career in infectious diseases). But accountability, in a world where there’s very little of it, still matters. People lost their lives. People lost their jobs. People’s values were tested and questioned.
He absolutely made mistakes—no question about it. And I get angry about it, too, because at times I feel like he led me astray. He could have, and should have, done better at communicating uncertainty, being transparent, not brushing off people’s fears, frustrations, and misunderstandings, and integrating the whole person into policy instead of just the science. I’m also mad that he didn’t admit to his mistakes. (There’s been such a bad-faith effort that now I don’t think he can engage honestly, even if he wanted to.)
The point is, we all made mistakes. And we deserve to know why and what steps are needed to ensure this doesn’t happen again. However, resorting to unhinged attacks and disingenuous waves of pandemic revisionism will only hurt us in the end. We need a 9/11-style Commission because pandemics suck, laced with impossible tradeoffs, and we’ve avoided a reckoning about how scared we were and how much we lost. Scientists did their darnedest within the systems they were handed and the polarized landscape we find ourselves in. But most importantly, we did not flee.
I think about that day at the coffee shop a lot. A man screamed at a woman with a newborn over a logo on a bag because he needed somewhere to put his fear and anger. Fauci has been that outlet for the entire country for six years running. That anger is real, and sometimes earned, but at some point, the croissants need to stop, and we need to start turning anger into something that actually fixes what’s broken.
It’s time to leave the man alone.
Love, YLE
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Perhaps I didn't pay close attention but in Dr Fauci during the turmoil I saw a calm experienced man doing a job that no one would have wanted. I never felt he was 'pulling a fast one' on us. I trusted him. I'm a health care professional and I stayed well informed at the time. It confuses me that people feel such animus toward him. He had to function under Trump...a lying liar...and walk a tightrope of uncertainty. I say leave the poor man alone and find someone else to torture in the press.
I’m a Fauci fan. His entire career of public service and the multiple pandemics before this one that people seem to have forgotten. Do you know how we could get in touch with him to show support? I was in the NIAID program as a medical student, but switched to IHS midway through USUHS. We met when I was in his program.