It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.
Still, in December, when Elon Musk joked on Twitter that his "pronouns" were "Prosecute/Fauci," it felt like the cresting of a turning tide against the man who had played essentially that role for the first three years of the pandemic. At least 30 state legislatures have passed laws limiting public-health powers in pandemics. This January, the month after Anthony Fauci retired as the four-decade head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, barely half of Americans said they trusted the country's public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic. The Wall Street Journal named that as his legacy — sowing distrust about public health and vaccines. Earlier in the pandemic, the leftist magazine The Drift mocked Fauci as "Doctor Do-Little," and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, proposed that Fauci had "blood on his hands." Upon the announcement of Fauci's retirement, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also a Republican, celebrated: "Grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac."
Of course, there were mistakes and missteps, including some by Fauci: describing the threat to the country as "minuscule" in February 2020, for instance; or first advising against wearing masks, and moving slowly on aerosol spread; or playing down the risk of what were first called "breakthrough infections" in the summer of 2021. And the broader public-health establishment that Fauci came to embody made other mistakes, too, even if it wasn't always easy to know at the time or identify later who exactly was responsible. Almost certainly, schools stayed closed longer than they needed to. Very conspicuously, American vaccination rates never approached the levels of peer nations — and the problem wasn't just the anti-vaccine right. Quarantine guidance was abruptly shortened in the midst of the Omicron variant, when thresholds of community-spread levels were suddenly redefined as well. There was no effective paid sick leave instituted, and the official end of the pandemic emergency on May 11 imperils the Medicaid coverage of 15 million Americans. But three years on, whether you are focused on Covid's direct carnage or on its collateral damage, it seems irrational to pin the brutality of America's pandemic on policy failures, however much Americans want to put the blame somewhere. Or on someone…
