Anthony Fauci Was America's Warmup Dictator

He institutionalized the purposeful lie, suppressed critics, mastered emergency politics, even sold himself as a sex symbol. Anthony Fauci gave the next monster a playbook

Exposés in Public and Racket this week showed Anthony Fauci engaged in the bureaucratic version of witness tampering, using a dubious “Proximal Origin” paper he helped engineer to divert attention from the possibility that Covid-19, too, was a viral Frankenstein’s monster. Apart from a few conservative outlets, no one picked up the story.

Historians will scratch heads at the Fauci episode, because as troubling as his secret behavior apparently was, his worst offenses were public. While the Washington Post patted itself on the back for counting by the thousand “false statements” by Donald Trump like, “The world respects us again,” and “[Biden] was a cheerleader for NAFTA,” Tony Fauci was winning plaudit after plaudit for telling reporters to their faces that he lied to the public for its own good.

Fauci leaned into a cult-of-personality movement when Americans were exquisitely vulnerable to such manipulations. When a Covid-level disaster hits, terrified people will surrender to any hack with a poker face claiming to have answers. Fauci only just finished playing that hand more aggressively than perhaps any American public figure ever.

Donald Trump’s “I alone can fix this” campaign of 2016 was an overt paean to the strongman’s promise, but it was delivered with a heavy dose of Rocky Horror Picture Show camp, and institutional America not only didn’t buy it, it shrieked and threw a net over his presidency before it started. Doddering Robert Mueller had the savior role thrust on him, but when it came time for Adam Schiff and company to apply Caesar’s laurels in Congress, he gave a helpless look, asked, “What are these?” and that ended that.

Fauci meant it. The full weight of a global bureaucracy fell behind his edicts, and promoted him as an everything-authority with a shamelessness not seen since the Soviets published Lenin and Children. Had Fauci been younger, his term of service longer, we’d undoubtedly have been treated to Fauci Christmas specials, Cosmo features on “Anthony Fauci’s 19 Sex Secrets,” and “organic” campaigns to urge him toward higher office. Fauci made no secret of his vision of pandemic messaging as a fundamentally political project, validating ancient authoritarian ideas in which power flows from the intellectuals who devise society’s organizing myths.

Socrates described the “noble lie” as a phenomenon in which myth-making ability matters even more than political office. “How then could we devise one of those useful falsehoods we were talking about a while ago,” he said, “one… that would, in the best case, persuade even the rulers?”

This is the role Fauci tried to play during the pandemic, creating a story about a disease so devastating that not only the public, but political officeholders couldn’t be trusted to make judgments about it. Fauci was flamboyant in his embrace of the purposeful lie. Examples are almost too numerous to count, but the most infamous probably came when he adjusted estimates for herd immunity upward once he saw polls showing increased enthusiasm for his policies.

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” he said, in December of 2020. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

This was the opposite of scientific method, changing numerical estimates based on political considerations, but an adoring press still ratified narcissistic lunacies like, “I represent science” because they were incapable of examining his behavior in isolation. So long as Fauci acted stoked to wear a mask and looked like less of a threat to a cheeseburger than Trump, his Covid decrees were holy writ.

Fauci even corrupted journalism. He told industry priests like the Nieman Foundation he was concerned with delivering “correct information” to people, but his idea of “correct” was a dangerous political chimera much closer to narrative than fact.

When it suited him to exaggerate risks of the virus or inflate efficacy of vaccines, in his mind he wasn’t issuing incorrect statements, but correct behavioral judgments. He was proud of this, sitting for a shameless InStyle puff shoot on “The Good Doctor,” in which he beamed in wraparound shades at poolside while flexing about having “no regrets” about fibbing to the public. He wasn’t wrong to initially downplay mask efficacy, he told the mag, because “in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,” as “we [had] a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers.”

Fauci probably told the truth at first about the limited utility of masks, and only came up with a story later to explain away this uncharacteristic slip into candor. Still, he was explicit in telling InStyle he lied about mask effectiveness so ordinary people wouldn’t screw things up by saving their own lives before health providers. This was his definition of “correct,” a concept that would soon assume unfortunate importance in the lives of lesser-known scientists employing the old, fact-based definition.

How great did Fauci have it then? When Alisyn Camerota of CNN interviewed him in April, 2020, she didn’t think of pushing back on statements already known to be questionable, like that families shouldn’t get together for Easter and instead needed to “step on the acceleratah” of lockdowns. Rather, she asked which movie star he’d prefer play him on Saturday Night Live, which was preparing to reopen its Trump-era run as blue America’s endless USO Tour. “Ben Stiller, Brad Pitt. Which one?” she gushed. “Oh, Brad Pitt, of course!” Fauci said.

American mass culture was so deranged that the real Brad Pitt answered the call, symbolically stepping aside to christen Fauci America’s real new hunk in a cold open complete with the usual tin Trump jokes, but dismounting to an Inside the Actor’s Studio-level self-serious thespian apostrophe. Pitt deliberately took off his wig and stocking-cap and, the “illusion” of America’s wise doctor-hero removed, thanked “the real Dr. Fauci, for your calm and your clarity in this unnerving time.”

In the endless daisy chain of self-congratulation that is modern American media culture this ankle-nuzzling performance of course earned an Emmy nomination, and triggered a succession of Mueller-style hagiographies promoting him as America’s political hearthrob, its real leader. “New poll reaffirms that most Americans don’t trust the President, but they do trust Dr. Fauci,” cheered CNN, whose Brian Stelter insisted Fauci — who, again, had already told the country he sometimes lied on purpose — was the cure for a country in a “truth emergency.”

He said this as real scientists like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorf began facing recrimination for saying true things. Bhattacharya’s crime was an April 2020 study showing far higher numbers of people in Santa Clara County with Covid-19 antibodies than officials believed, placing the infection fatality rate at closer to 0.2% than the terrifying 3.4% the WHO was claiming in public. Kulldorff meanwhile was pointing to the thousand-fold difference in mortality rates between age groups, showing Covid-19 to be a very dangerous disease for the elderly but hardly a threat to the young. He also retweeted information from his native Sweden showing that that country’s policy of keeping schools open had not resulted in the death of even one of 1.8 million students.

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, along with Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, would be singled out after they signed the Great Barrington Declaration opposing Fauci’s beloved lockdowns. Emails produced by Freedom of Information requests showed Francis Collins complaining to Fauci that “this proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention” before concluding, “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.” The insidious Fauci rhetorical construction that scientists like Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were pursuing a strategy of intentional Covid spread to “let it rip” because they “want them infected” was repeated in slavish fashion by a long line of supposedly independent-minded journalists and scientists, from Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! to writers* in the New York Times and Washington Post and beyond.

Critics of Fauci’s policies found themselves stripped of jobs, removed from the Internet, and isolated socially, financially, and professionally, thanks to messaging technologies that work quite well, having been developed to limit the influence of terrorists. Fauci understood the utility of emergency, used “noble lies” well enough to redefine truth and fact as relativistic political concepts, and embraced the personality cult with such gusto that pundits unironically proclaimed the Phisohex-scented skeletal octogenarian the Sexiest Man Alive.

The hostility of people like Goodman or celebrated hygienist Gene Simmons (“If you’re willing to walk among us unvaccinated, you are an enemy”) not just to scientists like Bhattacharya and Kulldorff but ordinary people who refused the shot was based entirely on myths perpetuated, purposefully, by people like Fauci. We were propagandized to reject natural immunity, ignore obvious massive age-specific risk discrepancies, and believe the health of the collective depended on mass acceptance of a vaccine that people like Fauci knew early on did not stop transmission or infection. The public was told anyway that the unvaccinated were killing grandma and predictable rage and calls for brutal counter-measures, including jail, ensued. This was true factory-produced out-group hatred of the type found in every modern authoritarian movement, and journalists blew off the obvious warning signs and even participated themselves because Tony Fauci knew how to pull an aw, shucks face in split-screen with Alisyn Camerota.

Anthony Fauci showed proof-of-concept for the whole authoritarian package. He convinced the monied classes to embrace the idea of lying to the ignorant public for its own good, green-lit powerful mechnical tools for suppressing critics, engendered fevered blame campaigns, demanded visible symbols of policy compliance, embraced open-ended states of emergency, and unlike Mueller was sentient enough to accept when beautiful people tried to apply laurel wreaths to his little pin head. Only pandemic truths that eventually became too obvious to ignore prevented this story from having a worse ending. We’d better hope the door closes before the next emergency’s Answer Man tries the same playbook.

*A previous version of this story should not have included Gerry Baker in a list of reporters who misused the term, “Let it rip.”