During his recent residency at Holy Cross, representatives from the Fenwick Review and the Spire had the opportunity to sit with Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘62 for an on-the-record conversation. We asked Dr. Fauci about the value of the humanities, the impact of COVID-19 policy on education, the role of “experts” and federalism in policy making, and his preemptive pardon from former President Biden.
Liam Murphy: A lot of students today who plan to go into medicine would find having a classics or humanities background inconceivable or unnecessary, because of academic specialization. Do you think something is lost there with that sort of disregard for a holistic, humanities education?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: I think it is… When I went to medical school (I went to Cornell Medical School in New York City), and we had a lot of kids in our class, who took pre-med courses that were purely scientific, I mean, there was nothing in the humanities about that at all. [Those students] were great. They were good guys and ladies. You know, they did well, so I don't think it's a sine qua non, that if you don't do that, you're not going to succeed. But I think for individuals depending upon, you know, your own personality, that there's a lot of value added to that, and I think for some people there would be a loss in that. I know it was extremely helpful to me to go into medicine and have a broader look at things… My interest was always curiosity about people, not formulas in physics, or in chemistry, or in biology… The person who was second or third [in my class at Cornell] was a very good friend of mine, who was here with me at the Cross, who did the same AB Classics, Greek pre-med. So out of the top four people there, two of them were from Holy Cross.
LM: On the topic of education, particularly as it concerns COVID policy: Given the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns and policies on education, such as the backward slide in literacy and mathematics skills, do you think that the extent of those measures was entirely justified? With this in mind, would you recommend the same approach if a similar pandemic were to break out in the future?
AF: Okay. I brought this up last night but I’ll repeat it for you for the record. I think anyone who is thinking fairly and not in that blame-game situation would agree universally, that it was absolutely essential to flatten the curve and, quote, “shut down.” I say “shut down,” not “lock down,” because we did not do what other countries did, where essentially, you couldn't even leave your house, you couldn't go to work. I mean, we did GPS monitoring of where people were going. We were not locked down. Schools were closed, so to do that in March, April, and May, when thousands of people per day were dying, when freezer trucks were lining up in front of hospitals because there were too many dead people, you couldn't fit in the ward. Something had to be done. So I think that's incontrovertibly correct.
What we need to reexamine as we look forward to lessons learned, is how long you kept things shut down, how long you kept the schools closed, how long you stopped work at different places. People don't remember, and there's a lot of slings and arrows thrown at me, but if you go back, and I ask people to do that and they say, “You closed the schools! And you did that!” Go back and go to YouTube and look at what I was saying in the fall of 2020, what I was saying a thousand times: “Open the schools as quickly and as safely as possible. Open the schools, close the bars…” So, when we go back, and I would hope people do that instead of pointing fingers at the teachers union, or pointing fingers at certain local people who kept schools, and factories, and other things closed, examine what the risk-benefit ratio of that is. And what people do [is] lump it all into one. They say we shouldn't have closed anything. The Great Barrington Declaration, which, conceptually and practically, everybody agrees is incorrect. There would have been thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of more deaths. So you shouldn't lump them together, like shut down and how long you shut down. You should say, we should have paused in the spring, when thousands of people were dying, but we need to examine that risk-benefit of how long you kept things shut down.
LM: What do you think about the policy making role of specialized experts, such as scientists, who are not themselves policy makers nor necessarily experts on policy making? And do you think that this role may have been inordinately expanded during COVID, since there might have been factors relevant to policy making which were not part of their areas of expertise?
AF: What a great question. I’m glad you asked that, because that is the subject of a great deal of misunderstanding. The public health officials and the scientists, myself included, we did not make policy. There was the perception that we made policy. We gave the facts and the information, if you [look at] the Trump administration and then the same thing for the Biden administration (I'm not, you know, saying one versus the other)... there was a coronavirus task force that was headed by Debbie Birx, my colleague (I was on the task force), that had on it the Surgeon General and the director of the CDC. We examined the scientific and public health data and said, “This would happen if you flatten the curve, this would happen if you wore a mask.” That was communicated to the Vice President, Pence, who communicated it to the president, who made the decision about what the policy was.
Now, since I was a communicator, that goes back 38 years to HIV, I was a trusted communicator in public health. I did it with HIV, I did it with Ebola, I did it with anthrax, I did it with Zika. So I would get up in front of the television and say, here are the kinds of things you should do, you should wear a mask, you should do this. People misinterpreted that I made the policy, and they would ask the same question, Liam, that you're asking: “Should a scientist and a public health person make the policy?” No. The scientific person, the public health person, gathers the data, presents it to the policy maker, and the policy maker makes the policy. It is a major misunderstanding that you have a couple of docs and public health people in a room, deciding, “Okay, we're gonna close your factory.” There isn't a factory in the United States that I closed. There isn't a school in the United States that I closed, and yet there's this prevalent perception that the public health people closed the schools, closed the factories, ruined the economy. That decision was made at a much higher level.
Juan Cortes: Do you believe that federalism, which allows for differences in policy between the states, aided or inhibited the response to the COVID-19 pandemic? For example, states such as New York were more shut down, while Florida was more open. As the pandemic continued, it gave us an observation of how policy variations influence outcome.
AF: Yeah, a very sad observation. Federalism, which, as you know, dates back to the birth of our country, reflects the diversity throughout, regionally, culturally, ethnically. We have an enormous country that you're all aware of. You know, there are a lot of differences depending upon where you live, what the resources are in a particular region of the country. New York City versus Mississippi and San Francisco versus Florida. So federalism or the “states’ rights,” as it were, has an important contribution to being sensitive to diversity. However, when you're dealing with a pandemic that equally kills somebody in Maine as it does in Texas, then, unfortunately, the idea of individual decisions about how you're gonna do things as opposed to taking something that would [be standard, like:] people should get vaccinated. We know vaccinations have saved (this isn't me making it up), clearly saved three to five million people in the United States and 15 to 20 million people worldwide. That's not TikTok. That's not social media. That's a fact, okay? Yet, because of the differences… between a red state and a blue state, it is tragic that… the political association is that if you are Republican, it's much less likely you will wear a mask or get vaccinated than if you are a Democrat. That's not conjecture, that's a fact. Another fact is that if you live in a red state versus a blue state, you will have a greater chance of getting hospitalized or dying from COVID. So here's where you have a situation where what should be a sensitivity to diversity leads to people dying. So when people die because of that difference, then you've got a question that maybe this is a point where the strict adherence to, “Okay, if you're in Wyoming and you don't want to wear a mask, but you're in New York City and you want to wear a mask” [is worse than] saying, “We're going through a pandemic together as a nation, let's do the most scientifically correct and scientifically sound thing.” That did not happen. And that, I think, is one of the contributions to what I mentioned last night, that it is tragic and astounding that the richest country in the world had 1.2 million deaths, and on a per capita basis, we were one of the worst two or three countries in the world in deaths. What is wrong with that picture, you know? But it is the truth.
JC: What precedent do you think your preemptive pardon from President Biden sets? Do you think measures like this are necessary to protect experts from political backlash?
AF: The pardon is a very sensitive issue… Preemptive pardons, there's a potential negative aspect to that. President Biden did a preemptive pardon because there was something that was happening that was unprecedented. And what was unprecedented was a presidential candidate who said publicly, “I am your vengeance, I am your retribution. I am going to punish people who disagreed with me.” He didn't hint that, he said it. So that triggered the idea of a preemptive pardon.
However, there is an issue, that that could backfire, because then… in subsequent situations people might assume that I can do anything I want in a public position, as long as somebody's gonna preemptively pardon me. So, on the one hand, it's a positive thing because it protects people from unjust attacks on them when they clearly have done nothing wrong. On the other hand, it has the potential to shield people who intend to do things wrong. So it's a double-edged sword. I'm not at all one-hundred-percent comfortable with the idea of pardon. I mean, I didn't ask for a pardon. That's very clear because I said, that could hint to some people that I did something wrong. But the attorneys in the White House said, “In the weight of all things balancing, do it,” and they were very, very adamant about that. It wasn't like two guys said “yes,” and one lady said “no,” it was one-hundred-percent, “do it.” But I didn't ask for it.
Cover image by Christopher Michel, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Fauci_in_2023_02_(cropped).jpg.
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