I am thinking of sending Anthony Fauci a copy of Herodotus’ Histories. After his humiliating performance before the Senate last week, Dr. Fauci might find the story of Solon’s visit to the Lydian king Croesus instructive. Croesus displays his great wealth to the Athenian lawgiver and asks, “Who is the happiest man you have ever seen?” Croesus expects Solon to name him. Instead, Solon says that no one can be judged truly happy while still living because fate can reverse one’s fortune in an instant.
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It was not so long ago that Anthony Fauci was adulated worldwide as a wise and caring paragon, a Hippocrates for our age. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years (1984–2022), Fauci was the highest-paid government employee, earning more than the president. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2019–2020, Fauci was the veritable face of science. He told us so himself. He appeared countless times on the podium next to President Trump as the hysteria over the disease mounted. No matter that his advice was contradictory, he somehow emerged as the consoling incarnation of paternalistic nannydom, the perfect foil for the deployment of coercive state power. Remember the nauseating signs proclaiming “In this house we follow the science,” etc., etc.? The “science” in question was defined and transmitted by the Wizard of Oz, Anthony Fauci.
The actress Julia Roberts swooned and tittered over “maybe the coolest man on the planet” as if she were a schoolgirl encountering her first heartthrob. He presided over a conference on COVID at the Vatican in 2021. Perhaps the best summary of Fauci’s celebrity is contained in the second humiliation he experienced last week, and by Sen. Rand Paul. There are essentially two themes to those documents. One is a breathless, not to say narcissistic, account of how popular he is. The other is a darker chronicle of his leaning on colleagues to nominate him for cash prizes (one for $900,000) and various accolades, as well as his furtive efforts to manipulate the story of COVID’s origins and lethality. It is both cringeworthy and infuriating.
This summary is correct:
- Social distancing was a hoax
- Masks were a joke
- Lockdowns were worthless
- mRNA jabs were dangerous
- Case fatality rate was low
- Ivermectin worked
- Hydroxychloroquine also worked
- Remdesivir was a killer
- COVID came from the Wuhan lab
- Fauci funded it
Yes, but the American people fell for it. Perhaps the best slogan for what happened to America (and the rest of the world) during COVID was articulated in the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds(1841). The world went insane over COVID. Anthony Fauci was the principal ringmaster of the asylum.
At the time, I wrote dozens of skeptical columns about COVID and Fauci. (Here are links to a few I wrote for American Greatness over the years: “COVID-19, the Elephant, and the House Cat,” “Herd Immunity vs. Herd Mentality,” “It’s Not a Choice Between Lives or the Economy,” “This is an Emergency!,” “A Deadly if Dutiful Deference,” “The Coronavirus in Retrospect,” “When Will the COVID Revolt Come?,” “Oh, Oh, Omicron,” and “The Issue is Never the Issue: Senate Hearing Turns into a Proxy War.” And there are lots more where those came from, e.g., this little piece on ivermectin: “Who’s Afraid of Ivermectin?”)
The saga of Anthony Fauci—what might be called “The Rise and Fall of Anthony Fauci”—is inextricably linked to someone even more famous than he, Donald Trump. Fauci would recommend hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment. Then Donald Trump would recommend it. Then Fauci would withdraw his recommendation. Even now, the NeverTrump fraternity is rallying round their fallen soldier, Anthony Fauci, in order to land a few impotent blows against the man they love to hate, Donald Trump.
It is pathetic, yes, but as the case of Fauci himself reminds us, being pathetic is no protection against being malevolent. Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing last week and took the Fifth Amendment 111 times. “What color is your tie?” “On the advice of counsel,” etc., etc. Sen. Josh Hawley eviscerated Fauci. So did many others. I am not sure it will matter. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Fauci will be held in contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to jail for that. But they are Trump supporters. What happened to Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general and self-described “wingman,” when he was held in contempt of Congress? Nothing.
Joe Biden (or his autopen) granted Fauci a blanket pardon just before leaving office in early 2025. Why then did Fauci repeatedly plead the Fifth last week? He had been preemptively pardoned for everything he might have done during the COVID tyranny. Apparently his lawyers were worried that he might perjure himself or otherwise expose himself to fresh liability. So they decided it was better for him to shred his credibility for a few hours on national television rather than tell the truth.
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Remember what cruelty he helped to precipitate. You could not visit your dying relative in the hospital. Your children’s schools were closed. So was your workplace. So was your church. You put off that cancer screening your doctor ordered. Wearing useless masks became a sign of virtue. Even toddlers were required to wear them. You were prevented from taking therapies like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but required to take largely untested novel mRNA vaccines. Fauci himself developed a blood clot after taking the vaccine, but he concealed that. Your COVID vaccination card was your required passport to—well, everything outside your home. (I still have mine.) Social distancing—what ought to have been called “anti-social distancing”—was the universal rule. You can still see tattered stickers and signs reminding you to keep at least 6 feet between yourself and others, just as you can still descry here and there the remnants of masks scattered like cigarette butts or used condoms among the pedestrian detritus of life.
Will Fauci face any consequences for his arrogant, “I-Am-Science” megalomania—other, I mean, than the utter destruction of his reputation? Probably not. The state of Florida is launching an investigation into Fauci’s actions. Biden’s federal pardon does not exempt Fauci from state liability. Maybe something will come of that. But I would not hold my breath.
A friend sent me this passage from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. As the invocation of “quack-conjurers” suggests, it is relevant to the story of Anthony Fauci:
One mischief always introduces another. These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things, which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked to encourage them to: and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune, . . .
With what blind, absurd, and ridiculous stuff these oracles of the devil pleased and satisfied the people I really know not, but certain it is that innumerable attendants crowded about their doors every day. And if but a grave fellow in a velvet jacket, a band, and a black coat, which was the habit those quack-conjurers generally went in, was but seen in the streets the people would follow them in crowds, and ask them questions as they went along.
I need not mention what a horrid delusion this was, or what it tended to; but there was no remedy for it till the plague itself put an end to it all—and, I suppose, cleared the town of most of those calculators themselves. One mischief was, that if the poor people asked these mock astrologers whether there would be a plague or no, they all agreed in general to answer ‘Yes’, for that kept up their trade. And had the people not been kept in a fright about that, the wizards would presently have been rendered useless, and their craft had been at an end. But they always talked to them of such-and-such influences of the stars, of the conjunctions of such-and-such planets, which must necessarily bring sickness and distempers, and consequently the plague. And some had the assurance to tell them the plague was begun already, which was too true, though they that said so knew nothing of the matter.
Anthony Fauci would have been right at home among those charlatans, mountebanks, corrupt pseudo-sages, and insatiable grifters. It is some modest consolation to reflect that Solon was right in what he told Croesus about happiness and the fickleness of fortune.
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