The words “leader” and “leadership” are defined in hundreds of ways. But by every definition among the most eminent of America’s leaders in science and medicine during the last half century has been Dr. Anthony Fauci. His list of professional achievements is as long as impressive. Suffice to say here that for most of his illustrious career Fauci has been widely regarded as a splendid and deeply dedicated public servant.
Notice I write “public servant.” Fauci did not, in other words, get his M.D. to make the fistfuls of money he would have had he gone into private practice. Rather he chose to serve in the public sector – service that included advising every president since Ronald Reagan. President George W. Bush thought so highly of Fauci that he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, specifically for his life-saving work on AIDS.
I would not claim that Dr. Fauci walked on water. In fact, in my book on what happened in the U.S. during the worst year of the Covid crisis, I took Fauci to task.* I raised the question of whether he was a Trump enabler, pointing out the good doctor chose to walk a fine line: On the one hand there were times when Fauci was “carefully critical of the president for the way he was handling the health crisis.” And on the other hand, there were times when Fauci tried to protect himself – to “escape being fired” and to avoid “the most lacerating of Trump’s tongue-lashings.” Which necessarily raised the question of whether Fauci did what he could to stave off the covid calamity. My answer finally was no. In the book I concluded that Fauci could have and should have done some things differently – though he was correct to assume that had he been more critical of Trump, Trump would have been likely immediately to dismiss him.
Still, whatever his deficits, Fauci has been a long-time public servant who has been well and widely respected for his contributions and general excellence. He deserves to be treated with respect especially by those who ostensibly are role models – including, again, ostensibly, members of the U.S. Senate. Yesterday though he was accorded neither. Yesterday Fauci was obliged to endure a Senate hearing that was in every way wretched. A fiasco. For several senators had already decided to dismember Dr. Fauci personally and professionally. They took him apart for what he did and did not do and say during the Covid crisis, and for what he did and did not do and say since then.
It was a miserable, despicable spectacle far more injurious to Fauci’s interlocutors than to him. The worst of the Senate lot did not besmirch Dr. Fauci. They besmirched themselves and the upper chamber to which, alas, they belong.
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*Barbara Kellerman, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), see especially pages 251ff.