The Fauci witch-hunt

There are many appalling spectacles in Washington these days but, for sheer grotesquerie, it is hard to beat yesterday’s Senate hearings in which one Republican senator after another competed to see who could make the most far-fetched and offensive allegations against Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He is a true American hero who has been on the frontlines combatting every major epidemic since AIDS. Presidents of both parties once lined up to praise him. Yet Republicans want to make him out to be a criminal as part of their effort to scapegoat him for all the problems associated with Covid-19, a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Of course he didn’t get everything right; nobody would, in dealing with an unknown and deadly disease. But it is risible to see Republicans blaming for all the inconveniences we all endured in coping with this pandemic, as if he were the dictator of America.

In fact, guess who was president when Covid-19 broke out? Yup: Donald J. Trump. Fauci was only an adviser who had no power to order anything. He did his best to share scientific advice with Trump and the governors, but Trump and many of the governors (Republicans in particular) weren’t listening. Did lockdowns go too far? Was some of the initial advice wrong? No doubt, but that’s second-guessing with the benefit of hindsight. Again, Dr. Fauci did not order the lockdowns; he couldn’t have even if he wanted to. All he could offer was his best advice.

I would certainly take his advice over that of the crackpot White House trade adviser Peter Navarro who, with no medical credentials at all, was eager to send out hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, to treat Covid-19, even though it had not been approved for that purpose by the FDA.

To repeat, Dr. Fauci did not always get it right, but he got an awful lot right. No less than Trump himself awarded Fauci, among other administration officials, a presidential commendation for his work on Operation Warp Speed, the administration initiative to develop Covid vaccines in record time. That was the best thing that Trump ever did, but now he has disowned his own achievement because vaccines have become so unpopular with his base.

And sure, as revealed by the malicious release of Fauci’s diaries, he has an ego and enjoys publicity; who doesn’t? Certainly the Republican senators castigating him would kill to have the kind of adulation that Fauci enjoyed before the MAGA wing of the party turned on him.

Fauci is 85 years old. He should enjoy his retirement and look back with satisfaction on a lifetime of public service. He should not need to hire bodyguards to protect himself against death threats, and he should not be forced to plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid falling into some perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans who have made no secret of their desire to put him in prison. He should not be subjected to all the abuse he receives.

The MAGA attempt to demonize Fauci is, unfortunately, part of a larger MAGA attack on science and expertise. How else to explain how a kooky anti-vaxxer like RFK Jr., with no medical credentials at all, could wind up running HHS? Just a couple of days ago, at the White House, RFK was claiming, without an iota of evidence, that “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism.” Apparently Republicans are fine with that kind of quackery, but they want to throw in jail a distinguished physician and medical researcher who has spent decades battling to protect American health.