Public Distrust of Health Officials Is Anthony Fauci’s Legacy

He presented his judgment as beyond reproach, while consistently flip-flopping and silencing dissent.

By Allysia Finley of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Start with his dissembling on masks. When the virus began to spread in the U.S., he advised that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” He later reversed himself and acknowledged his earlier guidance was based on worries that there wouldn’t be enough masks for healthcare workers. In other words, he told an expedient lie.

Weeks later he endorsed universal masking even though studies showed cloth masks don’t protect against other respiratory viruses and there was little evidence they would do so against Covid. Over time it became clear that Covid was spreading through aerosols, tiny particles that cloth and surgical masks do a poor job of filtering out. 

So Dr. Fauci recommended double masking, for which there was scant evidence. “If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on—it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective,” he told NBC News’s TODAY.

Yet common sense also suggested lockdowns wouldn’t work. When China locked down its Wuhan region in January 2020, Dr. Fauci expressed doubts in an interview with CNN: “Historically, when you shut things down, it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Here, too, Dr. Fauci swiftly reversed his position. The initial call by Trump public-health officials for “15 days to slow the spread” in March 2020 stretched into two years as Dr. Fauci invoked one virus flare-up after another to argue for keeping public restrictions.

Some scientists in fall 2020 offered an alternative strategy of “focused protection” for the elderly and high-risk patients in a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. “Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19,” it read. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Dr. Fauci worked with then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins to “take down” the declaration. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci in an email. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” he continued. The two subsequently did multiple media interviews denouncing the strategy in an effort to chill debate. “It’s nonsense,” Dr. Fauci told ABC."