If people refuse to take precautions during the next pandemic, it will be Anthony Fauci's fault
Fauci's "noble lies" have irreparably eroded trust in public health authorities. The consequences could be catastrophic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, but there will be another pandemic — whether it’s the Bird Flu or something else, it’s just a matter of time. When that time comes, will people take appropriate precautions to protect their health?
The answer is likely no — and it’s the fault of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, who served as one of the lead members of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force during COVID, became the face of the federal government’s response to the pandemic. He was the voice calling for “15 days to slow the spread” (which turned into multiple years of restrictions on people’s freedom). He became perhaps the biggest proponent of COVID-19 vaccination, including using coercive means to force the vaccine upon people. And he was also a vocal critic of the theory that COVID-19 may have originated from a Chinese lab.
As the pandemic raged on, it became apparent that Fauci’s approach to public health was a condescendingly paternalistic one. Fauci admitted to telling multiple lies throughout the course of the pandemic, lies that he considered necessary to nudge the public to behave in ways necessary to protect public health.
The first lie came early in the pandemic response, when Fauci implored people not to buy facemasks because they were ineffective: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he said. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Later, Fauci changed his tune. It wasn’t that masks were “not providing … perfect protection.” No, the real reason was to prevent a shortage to make sure healthcare workers had access to masks: “[W]e … were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” he said of his earlier comments against masks.
Why not just tell people that? Why make up a story about how masks are ineffective to manipulate public behavior? How can you not see how that would blow up in your face when it came time to ask people to take other precautions in the fight against the pandemic?
The next big lie was about the level of vaccination required to achieve herd immunity. He told the New York Times: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... 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. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Again, it’s incredibly paternalistic of Fauci to purposely withhold the truth because he thinks the public can’t handle it. Have a little faith in the people you’re supposed to be serving!
The third, and perhaps most insidious, lie that Fauci told was when he claimed that the National Institutes of Health (which overseas the NIAID) “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
It turned out that was a lie, probably to cover up his involvement with the funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan. As Reason recently wrote, “A treasure trove of documents uncovered by congressional investigators and dogged investigative journalists has established that the NIAID was funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Lab via a grant to the scandal-plagued nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (which the Biden administration just debarred from receiving federal funding).”
While Fauci may have believed these lies were necessary to protect the public’s trust in public health institutions, his dishonesty has had the exact opposite effect: Trust in public health authorities has reached record lows, and a public beleaguered by years of onerous pandemic restrictions — many of which we now know were not necessary and which have had disastrous effects on crime, the economy, and public education — is less likely than ever to follow public health guidance during the next pandemic. That could yield catastrophic consequences if the next pandemic proves deadlier to a wider segment of the population than COVID, whose deaths were largely concentrated among the elderly.
The next pandemic could come in the form of the Bird Flu. It’s possible the Bird Flu might never reach pandemic status, but it’s entirely possible that it will — and it could prove far deadlier than COVID-19 if past flu pandemics are anything to go by. COVID didn’t affect everyone equally. Older people were the most vulnerable, as were people with comorbidities such as obesity; children were largely spared from the virus’s worst effects. Although some relatively young and healthy people lost their lives to COVID, for the most part, such deaths were rare.
Historically, the flu has been different. It has tended to be less discerning in who it inflicts with severe disease, and those susceptible to death at the hands of the disease have included not just the elderly, but children as well. It’s not a stretch to think that if we start to see human-to-human transmission of the Bird Flu, we could see far higher fatality rates than we saw with COVID-19. Technologies developed during the COVID pandemic, such as “plug-and-play” MRNA vaccines, could blunt the impact of a Bird Flu pandemic and save countless lives — but only if people take advantage of them. In a post-COVID world where trust in public health has been squandered by the lies of scheming public health officials, including Fauci, that’s far from a given.
I am not a vaccine skeptic. Although the COVID-19 vaccines came with certain risks, side effects were relatively rare and the risks of contracting the virus were generally far greater than any risks posed by the vaccines — at least for most demographics. Still, that’s a risk calculus that should be done by individuals, not the government. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental right our government should never violate through force or coercion.
That means we need to persuade people to get vaccinated for pandemic diseases with facts and reason, not force. That job gets much more difficult when the public’s hackles are raised after being repeatedly subjected to lies by the very officials they’ve entrusted to protect public health.
Fauci’s paternalism has sown a level of distrust against vaccines and other public health measures that will leave many people resisting at any cost when the next pandemic rolls around. Many will pay with their lives, and the death toll could be in the tens of millions.
Much of the blood will belong on Anthony Fauci’s hands.