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By Armstrong Williams [ [link removed] ]
[The below was first published by The Baltimore Sun, here [ [link removed] ]. Reprinted by permission of Armstrong Williams]
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Few public officials have become as recognizable or as polarizing as Dr. Anthony Fauci.
For decades, he served as one of the nation’s leading public health officials, advising presidents of both parties through HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and other public health crises. During the pandemic, however, he became something far different: one of the most influential unelected officials in America. His recommendations shaped school closures, business shutdowns, travel restrictions, vaccine policies and countless aspects of daily life for hundreds of millions of Americans.
Those decisions carried enormous consequences.
Families lost businesses they had spent a lifetime building. Children lost valuable classroom instruction and social development. Churches closed their doors. Weddings were postponed. Funerals were held with only a handful of mourners. Workers were forced to choose between complying with mandates or losing their livelihoods. The economic, educational and emotional costs of the pandemic response are still being measured years later.
Against that backdrop, recent congressional testimony has renewed public interest in Fauci’s role during those extraordinary years.
Fauci repeatedly invoked [ [link removed] ] his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during questioning in a Senate hearing. The Fifth Amendment is a cornerstone of the Constitution, and every American has the right to rely upon it. Exercising that right is not, by itself, evidence of guilt or innocence.
But constitutional rights do not eliminate legitimate public questions.
Many Americans have asked why a public official whose decisions affected nearly every household in the nation would decline to answer questions before Congress, particularly after receiving a presidential pardon covering specified federal conduct. Whether the pardon was necessary or not, it inevitably intensified public curiosity rather than resolving it.
Transparency matters because trust matters.
Trust is retrospective as well as prospective. People make judgments about whether an individual or institution can be trusted going forward based on whether there has been an honest account of what has been done previously. A truthful reckoning can repair lost credibility while continued evasion further erodes trust. An enormous opportunity to repair a relationship was lost yesterday. There is a cost to silence.
Another aspect of the public debate concerns Fauci’s financial success. During his government career, he became one of the highest-paid federal employees, earning a substantial government salary over many years. Since leaving public office, he has also earned significant income through speaking engagements, book contracts and other opportunities available to prominent public figures.
There is nothing inherently improper about earning money legally after public service.
The real question is different.
How should Americans evaluate a public servant whose influence over national policy was unprecedented, while millions of ordinary citizens absorbed the financial and personal costs of those policies?
That question deserves an honest discussion, not because success should be criticized, but because accountability should never depend on status.
Critics have also argued that, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, Fauci exercised an extraordinary degree of independent influence over public messaging and pandemic policy. Supporters contend he followed the science as he understood it. Critics argue that he often appeared to function as an independent policymaker rather than simply a scientific adviser.
Reasonable people continue to disagree about those judgments.
What should not be controversial is the principle that no public official elected or unelected should be beyond scrutiny.
Congress exists in part to examine the decisions of government officials. That oversight is not political revenge. It is one of the Constitution’s safeguards against excessive concentration of power.
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped American life unlike any event in generations. The decisions made during that period deserve careful examination, not to refight every debate, but to prepare for the next national emergency.
Americans deserve clear answers about how major decisions were made, what information was available at the time, where mistakes occurred and what lessons have been learned.
Accountability is not about humiliating individuals.
It is about restoring public confidence.
If mistakes were made, acknowledge them. If judgments proved incorrect, explain why. If policies produced unintended harm, say so honestly. Democracies become stronger when leaders are willing to answer difficult questions instead of allowing uncertainty to linger.
The cost of reckoning deferred is not abstract. We learned during Wednesday’s hearing that Fauci, as early as February 2020, was privately sympathetic to the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan laboratory. We learned that he knew, even then, of evidence that the DNA sequence of the virus suggested it was manufactured rather than naturally occurring. We learned that there was no scientific basis for six-foot social distancing or prolonged school closures.
By not sharing what he knew or strongly suspected in those early days, the nation lost the opportunity to course-correct. Physicians and scientists who questioned prevailing assumptions were dismissed, deplatformed, threatened and harassed for raising concerns that later proved to be legitimate subjects of debate. Fauci and his colleagues came to embody a government monopoly on truth; at one point, he even declared that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. While they knew or suspected one thing, they told the American people another.
Ordinary mistakes can arise from imperfect judgment or human weakness. Betrayal, however, corrodes the bonds of trust that hold a society together. We are left weaker and more fragile in the wake of these events, slower to trust, left to our own doubts and reflections. A nation that cannot take the scales firmly in hand and honestly examine how it performed during its last great crisis is poorly positioned to confront whatever crisis comes next.
[Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.]
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