Covid killed more than 1.1 million Americans. But in the “twisted narrative” that has become Republican Party dogma, said Will Saletan in The Bulwark, “the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Anthony Fauci.” At a Senate committee hearing last month, Republicans demonized and slandered Fauci, the now-retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served the public under seven presidents back to Ronald Reagan. Several senators suggested Fauci helped China create the virus in a lab, even though studies have traced its probable origin to animals in the Wuhan wet market. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna compared Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Sen. Ron Johnson ludicrously suggested Covid vaccines were “experimental gene therapy” that killed millions of Americans. Fauci declined to answer questions on the grounds that committee chair Rand Paul had vowed to use his testimony to put him in prison. Why the witch hunt? For Trump’s GOP, “someone has to be blamed for what went wrong in the pandemic, and it can’t be the party’s god-king.”
Fauci and other health officials did make mistakes, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. The messaging on masking was muddled, and schools stayed closed longer than they had to. But public health experts “were doing the best they could in an unprecedented disaster.” What we need is “the kind of systematic, non-partisan, and nonpunitive investigation” that followed previous national crises, not a mean-spirited “blame game” that serves only to make us less prepared for the next pandemic.
The official who really “bungled” the pandemic was the man in charge—Donald J. Trump, said Molly Olmstead in Slate. But with Republicans likely to “take a beating” in November, they’re using the bogeyman Fauci as a tool to distract and energize their fractured base. As an alternative to Fauci and science, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, Trump and his populist allies are offering “witch-doctor lunatics.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied last week that Covid vaccines—which saved millions of lives—did “more good than harm” and claimed that at the height of the pandemic ICUs were “empty all over the country, including in New York.” Rather than a serious effort to explore “what went wrong with Covid,” Republicans are giving us crackpot conspiracy theories, quack miracle cures like ivermectin, and pseudo-experts “with brains worms. Literally.”