RUTHFULLY YOURS

After three years as America’s Most Famous Doctor — and more than 50 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the 81-year-old Anthony Fauci has his heart set on retirement. Not now, mind you — he still has a few more CNN and MSNBC panels in him. Just last week, he was on CNN’s New Day, warning that Americans “really should, in an indoor setting, a congregant setting, be wearing masks — it’s just the appropriate thing to do to protect yourself and your family, and those around you.” But according to a Monday Politico piece, “Anthony Fauci wants to put Covid’s politicization behind him,” and the good doctor is eyeing retirement at the end of Biden’s term:

After more than five decades of federal service under seven presidents, Anthony Fauci says he’s leaving by the end of President Joe Biden’s term. In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, he spoke of his legacy, the hard truths about the country’s pandemic response and his desire to calm the politicization wracking the country. . . . With his career winding down, Fauci wants to help repair the national bonds that the pandemic shredded, and tamp down the partisan polarization that has turned him, and science itself, into a lightning rod.

What is there to say about Saint Anthony that hasn’t already been said in oozing puff pieces from star-struck journalists? How are we to express our deep and abiding gratitude better than the “Thank You Doctor Fauci — We Will Wash Our Hands” yard signs, the devotional Fauci candles, and the Fauci figurines (mask included, of course) touted by, among others, elected Democratic legislators? Skeptics will argue that the man who presented himself as the flesh-and-blood embodiment of science itself, and who regularly accused his critics of attacking The Science — “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” he told Face the Nation last November; “I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying” — is not well-positioned to “repair the national bonds that the pandemic shredded.” But we know better. In Fauci we trust.

Okay, so Fauci may have had a few slip-ups here and there. Yes, he initially argued that masks don’t “really do much to protect you” and then subsequently insisted that he had never denied the efficacy of masks but only advised against buying them, because of fears of a shortage among medical workers. Cut the man some slack — that was early on in the pandemic, and uncertainty abounded. Sure, he consciously lied about vaccines: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” he told the New York Times in December 2020. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” But that was out of a sense of paternalistic duty — it’s just that Americans weren’t ready to hear the truth. You can’t end a pandemic without telling a few fibs here and there.

It’s evident, too, that he misled Congress about the NIH’s funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan — and then, when World Health Organization investigators were denied entry to key areas in Wuhan during their attempts to uncover Covid’s origins, he chalked it up to the Chinese government being “embarrassed that the virus evolved from their country.” (“But there’s nothing wrong with that,” he added.) But then again: Who hasn’t deceived the nation’s highest legislative body at some point? We all mistakenly apologize for genocidal regimes to cover our own asses from time to time. Okay, so he has yet to apologize for or even admit his mistakes — “I haven’t been wrong, period,” he declared in 2020 — and continues to slam anyone who raises questions about them as mindless partisans or wack-job conspiracy theorists, and insists on being portrayed as the objective font of science while regularly inserting himself into partisan food fights, and runs to complain to the New York Times when he feels that politicians aren’t paying enough attention to him. But nobody’s perfect — not even Saint Anthony Fauci.

What does the future hold for America’s Doctor? If Republicans retake the House in 2022, it may include a couple of congressional investigations. But I’m sure he has nothing to worry about. “I don’t think they can say anything about the science,” he told Politico. “If that’s what you want to investigate, be my guest. My telling somebody that it’s important to follow fundamental good public health practices . . . what are you going to investigate about that?”

That’s what it was always about, for Fauci. Good public-health practices. If conservatives can’t see that — well, that’s their loss. At the end of the day, history will remember the glossy Time, People, and InStyle magazine-cover photo shoots, not the long record of brazen dishonesty. As Fauci remarked to Politico in the closing lines of the piece: “I don’t think there is anything else that I, Tony Fauci, can do except leave behind an institution where I have picked the best people in the country, if not the world, who will continue my vision.” We can only hope.