Dear doctor, how perfectly composed you look, lounging poolside for your In Style cover shoot. Cool, if not in the same league as my friend Will, bundled up in July 1989 and shivering hard. You’re still as an ice floe in your voguish photo, your animation suspended, though Will’s has ended for all time. Like you, he sat in the sun and didn’t speak, but he’d lost his voice to esophageal ulcers, spores of raw silence. And some blame you. How on earth can you be held accountable.
NOTE: The “Will” of today’s poem is a pseudonym. “Will” is something of a composite, a general representation of several dear friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. But I can’t look at that 2020 photo of Dr. Anthony Fauci without being taken all the way back to a summer afternoon almost twenty-five years ago, and to the specific suffering of one friend in particular.
Maybe that’s not entirely fair.
Anyway, I want to recommend an article by Sam Adler-Bell (link below), who has written for the New York Times, New York magazine, the New Republic, Dissent, and The Intercept. He is the co-host, with Matthew Sitman, of Know Your Enemy, billed as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement, one podcast at a time.”
The article, from January 2021, is evenhanded and generally sympathetic to Fauci. But it doesn’t shrink from assessing Fauci’s shortcomings and mistakes during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. It also argues that some of those failings persisted into the COVID-19 pandemic, influencing its course and outcomes.
Adler-Bell’s article naturally reflects the author’s biases, but it stands in clear contrast to attacks on Fauci coming from the far right. At the same time, it’s a necessary corrective to the uncritical profiles and fawning interviews that have formed the template for mainstream liberal reporting on “America’s doctor” since 2020.
Softball, quasi-hagiographic coverage of Fauci continues to be the rule at publicly subsidized media outlets (NPR, PBS), networks heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC), and major newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others) that have failed to report on regulatory capture, corruption, information laundering, censorship, and incompetence at the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, and Fauci’s own NIAID.
And you don’t have to be an unhinged right-winger to say so, or to suggest that “the good doctor,” though he eventually corrected his earlier missteps, may still have some splainin’ to do.
Fauci has always been very good at bureaucratic knife-fighting. He crushes his enemies, climbs org charts, and generously feathers many nests. As a medical scientist, he's an appalling, fatuously stubborn mediocrity. His quest to revolutionise vaccines is an horrifying failure.
People at a distance have never been real to him. They only become real when they can further his career.