I’m sure it is unpleasant to have your private diary made public, which is why I don’t keep one. Anthony S. Fauci was not so circumspect, and worse still, he kept his personal notes on a government computer. Their release last week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), ahead of scheduled Senate testimony, has embarrassed Fauci and revived old resentments. Many entries seem almost purposely crafted to inflame every lingering conservative grievance over the pandemic.
Fauci, who helped lead the U.S. response to covid-19, records many laudatory interactions with famous and influential liberals. He details behind-the-scenes maneuvering over restrictive covid policies. Oh, and he describes meetings where eminent experts deemed a lab-leak origin for covid possible.
When called in front of the Senate to address all this, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment. The best explanation for this is that he feared a perjury trap. That said, law professor Michael Dorf argues persuasively that Fauci was not entitled to do so, because of the sweeping pardon he was given by President Joe Biden. Some of it paints a picture that bears a striking resemblance to the conservative image of the liberal establishment: a cozy and insular elite that manufactures consensus behind closed doors, ignores or conceals inconvenient facts, and haughtily dispenses the party line as a scientific fact, rather than a contestable opinion.
One might protest that this image is a caricature, and, well, yes. Fauci does not really come across as the cartoon villain some conservatives imagine. But then caricatures are usually exaggerations of reality, not pure imagination. Washington insiders are a cozy little community. (They almost have to be, because the city’s not that big.) They can get a little intoxicated with proximity to power and influence. And many of the powerful and influential really did become dogmatic on all things pandemic, from the origins of the virus to the merits of public gatherings to the benefits of mandatory vaccination. When challenged, instead of debating their beliefs, many denounced their challengers as bigots and fools.
This would be bad in any case, but it is particularly enraging because the experts made so many mistakes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention screwed up testing, allowing the virus to spread undetected. Experts told us masks didn’t work right up to the point where they told us masks were mandatory. Schools stayed closed even though they’d been opened successfully in Europe.
There has never been an adequate reckoning with those mistakes, and I can’t blame conservatives for wanting one, even if I think that releasing a man’s personal notes goes too far.
What is gained by embarrassing Fauci over his starstruck diary entries? Sure, conservatives get to feel vindicated, and Paul gets fodder for his next campaign. But while it’s of genuine importance to know how Fauci was thinking about lab leaks versus natural origin, releasing entries in which he muses on his celebrity contacts adds nothing to the history of the pandemic and makes it easier for Fauci’s supporters to dismiss this as a partisan witch hunt.
This dynamic is why, six years after the pandemic began, the nation still hasn’t had the kind of systematic, nonpartisan and nonpunitive investigation it needs. Nor has it embarked on reforms that might keep institutional failures from happening again. Instead, one side seems to hope the public can just forget it happened, while the other mostly seems interested in venting its spleen.
What the country needs is a less confrontational approach that is not about assigning blame but about figuring out what went wrong.
That won’t sit right with many conservatives, who argue that what went wrong was bad people doing a bad job. The problem is, those folks believed — and still believe — that they were doing the best thing for the country. Sure, they might admit they garbled some details early on. Yes, maybe the scientists were a little too eager to assert that their beloved labs couldn’t possibly be the outbreak’s source. Maybe the experts should have been clearer about the uncertainties, on that and many other issues. But they were doing the best they could in an unprecedented disaster.
You can protest that this is self-serving, and of course it is. But then, when are humans not self-serving, prone to confirmation bias and groupthink, or dazzled by the lure of insider status? Focusing on the individuals sets us up to make the same mistakes, because their successors will also be prone to those common failings. Rather, we need systems that are robust enough to function with the flawed human material available — that is, unless you happen to have a reserve stash of angels ready to take on the job.
Fixing the system starts with determining exactly what went wrong, and your best source of information is, obviously, the decision-makers who may have made terrible decisions under pressure. If you are bent on punishing them, those people will, like Fauci, quite rationally clam up.
I can’t blame him for refusing to risk a perjury charge, any more than I can blame conservatives for still being mad. That’s the problem with the blame game: There’s more than enough to go around … and around … and around. We keep traveling in circles. Nothing changes, and nobody wins.
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