September 1, 2022 – Dr. Anthony Fauci recently announced his retirement from various roles in public health, including Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. In an op-ed piece from The New York Times, Ari Schulman writes that the inconsistencies in Dr. Fauci’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic caused Americans to mistrust his insights on pandemic protocol.
While some might argue that right-wing politicization and an overall fear of science led to the widespread mistrust of Dr. Fauci, Schulman writes that ”Dr. Fauci became the face of American public health’s incoherent response to the pandemic. He urged the country to shut down weeks after dismissing early Covid worries as a baseless fear of “going to a Chinese restaurant”; he encouraged masking weeks after counseling against it; he aggressively cast the lab leak theory as fringe (though possible) despite many scientists wanting more to be done on lab safety.”
That there was often a confusing and incoherent approach to the early days of the pandemic is inarguable, which might have led to some of the disruptions and challenges in the supply chain and the overall response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Schulman writes, “There was nothing stopping Dr. Fauci in those chaotic early weeks from saying ‘Masks might help, but doctors and nurses need them more now,’ or even just ‘We’re not sure yet.’ This would have been far closer to accurately representing scientific understanding and would have done wonders in case the answer later changed, as many elements of guidance were bound to. “
Whether Fauci is a villain or a hero of the nation’s response to the pandemic, it’s important to look at those early days and evaluate how we can better respond in any potential future pandemics.
“If in the next pandemic we want something else from our public health leaders — to save lives and not tear the country apart in the process — we must learn to see science as a vehicle, not a dodge, for human agency: something we are right to make demands of, right at times to get angry at, whose terrible failures it must own along with its triumphs,” Schulman wrote.