New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor.
For two long pandemic years, Dr. Anthony Fauci’swhite coat and fatherly tone either soothed or assaulted the nation’s senses, depending on what Americans wanted from their government.
Late last month, Fauci faced the cameras once again, this time under subpoena, before a Senate committee chaired by Kentucky’s Rand Paul and including Ohio’s Bernie Moreno. Republican Senators wanted to probe inconsistencies between Fauci’s public statements during the pandemic and what he likely thought would be private musings in a diary he maintained on a government computer. Democratic senators sought to protect him.
He refused to answer, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The committee’s Republican majority has since voted to refer him to the Justice Department for criminal contempt.
His diary spoke loudly enough.
It revealed a man enraptured by his growing celebrity and the accolades showered on him by stars of movies and music. Worse yet, his journaling revealed a person entrusted with giving the public honest, unvarnished, evidence-based scientific advice, who repeatedly chose instead to lie.
A lie isn’t merely being wrong about an assessment in a complex and rapidly evolving crisis. We all make mistakes. Do it enough and you’re simply the wrong person for the job. But knowing one thing and choosing to say or do something materially different, including the omission of uncertainty, is a fact-dodging lie.
Most of Fauci’s falsehoods were in that category. They were half-truths. But his diary illuminated a possible motivation for his duplicitousness.
Though he’s a generation older than me, we were both around during the TV portrayals of physicians like “Marcus Welby, MD.” The show was infused with a deep sense of “Father knows best” paternalism that was common in culture and medicine at the time. Fauci’s pandemic persona was a modern-day echo of that ethos.
Those of us who reject such patronizing authoritarianism found it maddening that many other public health officials would don their white coats for the cameras, pronounce their diagnosis, and assure us that all would be well as long as we did what we were told.
Dr. Amy Acton, now campaigning to be our next governor, routinely donned the costume for Ohioans even as she spouted nonsense suggesting that viruses multiply on surfaces.
These images were all a made-for-TV example of an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy. That’s when viewers are encouraged to rely only on the speaker’s credentials rather than the truth of what’s being spoken.
When lives, liberty, and livelihoods are on the line, it’s utterly contemptuous of the people’s right to self-determination for government authorities to pronounce recommendations that affect hundreds of millions of people and cost trillions of dollars of borrowed money on a foundation of falsehoods.
Early in the pandemic, Fauci claimed the COVID-19 fatality rate was as much as 3% when his private communication suggested it was likely ten times lower. It was always ten times lower. He made pronouncements of certainty regarding COVID-19 risks to children as well as the effectiveness of masks, six foot social distancing, and the origins of the virus when he knew the evidence didn’t support such absolutes.
His push for universal vaccination, regardless of individual risk or protection from prior infection was particularly paternalistic since he simply didn’t believe Americans could handle the nuance necessary to make the judgments for themselves.
Government deception doesn’t defeat skepticism; it feeds it. Too many in both political camps embrace nonsense, then shop for “experts” who validate it. Prior to the government’s COVID response, the willfully ignorant and conspiracy-minded could hold their local meetings in a diner booth. No more.
The revelations from Fauci’s diary also help to explain the partisan hero worship of him and Acton from our progressive friends and the far less flattering characterizations of them from conservatives.
Progressivism is rooted in a technocratic, government-centered communitarianism reliant on experts who guide and protect us while conservatism tends toward individual liberty and decision-making and the consequences that follow.
There will be other crises and other experts with an authoritarian’s fondness for fame. We must demand the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, including any uncertainties. And leave the coat at home. We can handle the truth without the patronizing regalia.
New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a retired business owner. He was a two-term member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. He is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor. Reach him at philderrowdispatch@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: COVID truth Fauci wouldn’t say in public is in his diary | Opinion
