J.D. Tuccille: Anthony Fauci destroyed trust in public health experts

The last few years haven’t done any favours to the status of public health experts. Ongoing revelations from Anthony Fauci’s personal notes emphasize their eroded stature. Once the face of America’s response to COVID-19, the former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been revealed by the publication of his “diary” as thin-skinned, intolerant of dissent, dishonest and obsessed with fame. To those of us who were already dismayed by authoritarian restrictions imposed by government during the pandemic, the exposed memos and emails confirm our worst suspicions about the nature of the thinking behind those policies.

For those opposed to lockdowns and convinced that Fauci played a role behind the scenes in promoting restrictions, the former public health bureaucrat offered plenty of ammunition. His notes , stored on government servers and therefore fair game for his critics to peruse, revealed him advising the then-governor of New York and mayor of New York City to order schools closed.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

“I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools,” Fauci boasted in 2020. “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC.” He said he had a similar conversation with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff. Two years later, Fauci told ABC News he “ had nothing to do ” with those lockdown decisions.

Fauci’s notes also reveal him admitting of early claims that the virus originated in a wet market that, “We know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” He also wrote that in a phone conference among knowledgeable scientists about the source of COVID-19, “about half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence.”

Despite an obvious division of opinion about the source of COVID-19, Fauci remained convinced of its natural origin and lashed out at dissenters. He raged in 2021 that, “The FBI has no idea what they’re talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak.” Fauci similarly vilified the doctors and scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration ’s call for focusing pandemic responses on the most vulnerable members of society and minimizing restrictions.