Fauci Has Only Himself to Blame for His COVID Legacy

"We have seen complete fabrications become some people's accepted reality," Dr. Anthony Fauci laments in his new memoir "On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service."

Surely the good doctor means to speak about his ideological foes, who have long decried the heavy-handed response to COVID-19 that Dr. Fauci symbolizes.

But today, more than four years after the world first met COVID-19, it's fair to wonder whether Dr. Fauci's depiction of reality is the one that's fabricated.

Take the lockdowns imposed on much of the planet during the early months of the pandemic.

It was the assessment of the public health establishment that this mysterious virus presented such a massive threat to our lives and livelihoods that the only sensible response was to unilaterally restrict most forms of in-person human contact.

We now know that pandemic alarmists were wrong on a scale unseen in recent history.

Americans were told early on, for instance, that the lockdowns would save as many as 2 million lives throughout the United States — a figure based on early modeling from researchers at the Imperial College of London.

A recent study co-authored by Johns Hopkins University economist Steve H. Hanke estimates that, in fact, stay-at-home orders saved about 4,000 American lives.

To put that number in perspective, roughly 38,000 Americans die in a typical flu season.

The problem isn't that Dr. Fauci completely misjudged the situation.

Scientists are of course allowed to be wrong.

What's mystifying is Dr. Fauci's reluctance to admit as much — as well as his desire to silence voices that challenge his point of view.

It didn't matter that the early mortality data from China showed that children were far more likely to die in car crashes than from COVID-19.

Mass school closures weren't to be questioned.

When respected epidemiologists from institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford challenged lockdown policies in the Great Barrington Declaration — and advanced an evidence-based alternative response which prioritized the safety of older and more vulnerable --- they were deliberately censored and discredited, and with Dr. Fauci's full knowledge.

The public health establishment's vaccine roll-out displayed similar authoritarian tendencies. The very existence of a vaccine that so effectively muted the effects of the virus should have been sufficient to inspire widespread voluntary inoculation.

But that wasn't good enough for many in the public health establishment.

Instead, governments across the country enacted sweeping vaccine mandates — something it's not clear they had the authority to do.

We will one day see what kind of precedent these assertions of authority have set.

Silencing scientists, keeping children in forced isolation, shuttering huge segments of the economy, suspending people's daily lives indefinitely, insisting that we hide our faces in public even when the effectiveness of masks was at best questionable — all of these policies posed far more of a danger to the public than COVID-19 did.

Yet at every turn, Dr. Fauci ignored evidence that didn't match his priors.

The result was a polarized response to COVID-19 — and perhaps a permanent rupture in trust between the public and the public health establishment.

If Americans today are a little less willing to accept Dr. Fauci's account of "reality" because of what he counseled over the last four years, he has only himself to blame.

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and the Thomas W. Smith fellow in healthcare policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All," (Encounter Books 2020). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes. Read Sally Pipes' Reports — More Here.