Most criticism of Fauci that I see comes from right wingers who think that he is injecting microchips into their body. What is the left take on him?
Fauci is a libertarian nutjob who botched three pandemics. He was the original anti-masker, which liberals and conservatives have both memory-holed. There was never any scientific reason to doubt the efficacy of masks, and the reason for that deliberate lie was thinking that they could reduce the demand for masks in hopes of preventing shortages at hospitals. Obviously, once the CDC stopped lying to people, people were able to not only make their own masks at home, but also make masks to donate to hospitals. I know people who were mocked by their liberal colleagues for wearing a mask early in the pandemic because the CDC was saying they don't work, and now we have this unironically 1984 shit where no one acknowledges that that ever happened. A lot of the reason that the anti-mask movement happened was a reaction against liberals following the CDC blindly and snidely dismissing anyone who disagreed with whatever they were saying at the moment, even when it contradicted what they had said previously. Of course, he dismissed the idea of lockdowns out of hand because of his libertarian ideology, regardless of how well they were working, and other, less invasive approaches like contact tracing were never even part of the discussion. In the early days of the pandemic, countries that implemented such methods, like Vietnam, were praised and held up by the media as success stories, but once it became clear that China was going to do lockdowns and the US wasn't, suddenly opposing lockdowns was your patriotic duty, regardless of what the science said. Edit: Bloomberg: Lockdown’s Success in China Offers Hope for World’s Virus Fight, March 24, 2020 (paywalled); CNBC: Vietnam took drastic early action to fight the coronavirus — and has reported zero deaths, July 23, 2020
The other two pandemics that he botched were Aids and Ebola. During Ebola, doctors were returning home to the US after working abroad with infected patients, and there were no quarantine procedures in place. A few governors implemented such procedures as best they could on a local level, and then finally Dr. Fauci took action - not to put quarantine procedures in place, mind you, but to criticize these governors for taking any action at all. Quarantining medical workers was "unfair" because they had risked their lives doing the right thing, and should be rewarded for it, not punished. And if millions of people die from disease, that's a lesser evil compared to a handful of people being inconvenienced by the government - because that's how libertarians like him think.
And then there's Aids. There's audio of Reagan and his buddies giggling at the question of whether they were going to take action on Aids, and asking the reporter concerned about it if he's gay, and so forth. That's who gave him his job. Long before Covid-19, Aids activists were saying he's a murderer who deserves to be put before a firing squad.
Fuck Fauci. He should've gotten the wall over Aids and he should get the wall over Covid. He's a deeply evil person, for basically the exact opposite reasons that anyone on the right hates him.
Reading posts like this makes me feel sane. There's a lot of nonsense on the left, but it's the only place you find lucid takes.
These days, the only way to find accurate information about the early months of the pandemic is by knowing exactly what you're looking for and then finding a fact checking website explaining how the thing "needs context." A part of me wants to try to put together an actual history effortpost of it, but dwelling on it doesn't exactly sound like a fun time. But I don't think there's any source written in 2022 that acknowledges what happened with masks, other than chud conspiracy shit maybe.
Here's a transcript of an interview
LaPook, March 8: There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?
Fauci: The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else… Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.
Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
LaPook: And can you get some schmutz, sort of staying inside there?
Fauci: Of course, of course. But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks — that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine.
LaPook: But it can lead to a shortage of masks?
Fauci: Exactly, that’s the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.
What really gets me on this is that if he'd just clearly and unequivocally stated that he was wrong, nothing much would have changed and he would have seemed much more credible. The "no need to mask" recommendation was pretty early in the pandemic, and there was a lot of conflicting information about how COVID spread, whether asymptomatic spread was common, and so on. If he'd said "we made a recommendation based on early data, and it turned out to be disastrously wrong," I'd be a lot more sympathetic, and so would many other people, I think. The world is messy and science is hard, and COVID was a very rapidly evolving situation. There's a fair argument to be made that he should have known better given SARS and whatnot, but owning the bad call openly would have still made a difference to his credibility.
Instead, he and the CDC have tried to rewrite history by screeching that he was "taken out of context" and never really said that, which is clearly false. People--even qualified professionals--make mistakes, but running the "don't trust your own eyes" disinformation campaign is just a bizarre way to deal with that, and makes people think that there's something nefarious going on beyond just mere incompetence.
He absolutely should have known better. He legitimized all sorts of completely made up claims about the reasons masks don't work, none of which had any sort of evidence backing them up, and all of them were immediately discarded when he changed course. What evidence ever existed that would make one think that say, wearing a mask would increase risk by making people touch their face more? Where is the study? Where is the study that disproved that study? None of that BS was ever based on anything, there was never any doubt that masks work. The idea that he changed his position because of new evidence is total bull.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that it's nonsense. But even from just a PR perspective, the way they handled it is bizarre. They would have been more successful if they'd just said "sorry, we made a mistake" than "no, what you remember wasn't actually what happened."
weak and inconsistent messaging on COVID, botched the response to the AIDS health crisis in the eighties. he's not the antichrist or anything but he sucks and seems to care more about his own image than results
Fauci is chief apologist for the absolutely fucked American response to COVID. He also spread anti-mask disinformation at the beginning of the pandemic. The left take is also a reaction to libs embracing this douche like he's some kind of hero, whereas he's basically a symbol of everything wrong with American public health.
Fall guy for the military taking this shit over to China during 2019 war games after all the mysteries with regard to vaping related pneumonia
Careerist asshole. Flim-flammed on masks and vaccines for a year and stopped talking about it cause the insurance companies said so
I'd say that Fauci is the OG technocrat.
Fauci strategically manipulated his message, downplaying or upplaying the truth so that it could be received constructively by the masses. This is extremely the word "politics". And yet liberals managed to conceive of this whole episode as standing with science or not.
That's how it goes invariably with technocracy. This looks a LOT like politics. No bro, it's science.
Fauci is the high priest who comes down from the mountain to share the message and if you question his word you’re a heretic against Science.
He was in charge of public health messaging, and in order to protect capital, his messaging obscured the need for an immediate lockdown in order to contain covid.
Edit: I'm understating who this guy is. He actively advocated against lockdowns.
A servant of capital that fucked up any proper pandemic response for fear of hurting the "economy" and thereby allowing at minimum the death of a million or more Americans, as well as the disabling of likely another million or so from long covid. He is a patsy to the oligarchy and flip flopped between revolting against trumps response (which was shit) while praising Biden's response (which is also still shit) and has now tried to insinuate that the pandemic is over and that anymore deaths due to covid were "always going to happen". He deserves the fuckin' wall.
Regulatory capture. Caved to pressure when big biz profits started to dip.
Nothing nefarious.
As late as April 2020 he was telling people there was no need to mask or change their behaviors because Covid didn't seem to be a big issue in the US. He's on video saying this, if you can still find it (probably only available from right wing sources by now). When confronted about this, it never happened or it was taken out of context or he was right then but the science changed and now he knows better.
The problem with that argument is that science did know about how Covid spreads. Because we had years of data on SARS. Covid is SARS-2. But that would have involved working with other countries to share that science. The US hegemony can't let other countries tell it how to respond or what to think about the virus. Especially one of the largest countries impacted by it, China. The science didn't change, he just denied the science out of political expedience.
After that he should have stepped down because he's old anyways. But he's a careerist and narcissist. Obviously he's not the only qualified person to do the job, but he felt he was. The Democrats encouraged that idea.
The ad-hoc justification for denying the science became that he knew we had a PPE shortage and didn't want to make it worse. We had a shortage because Trump's son-in-law raided the program and sold all the inventory. Someone who wasn't even an elected official. Instead of saying that and being honest about it, he lied. Again, because he's a liberal and he had a duty to the office to not upset the administration. Yeah, Trump could have fired him but who cares. Then go on the lib media, which would have hailed him a martyr, and light his ass up. Pretty easy media strategy there.
Imagine denying science, throwing away public trust over Trump.
Also he was bad on the AIDS crisis as well. He was a proponent of the idea that constant close contact with people infected with HIV would spread it. That alienated a lot of victims from their friends and families and spread the panic.
