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March 20, 2023

Three years ago tomorrow, on March 21, 2020, American Thinker published the first nationally-read critical article about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Deep State medical bureaucrat who would play a determinative role in the country’s draconian and failed response to Covid-19.  I was the author of that blog.

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At the time, the United States was in the first days of an unprecedented nationwide lockdown as a result of the pandemic. The weeks and months ahead would witness the greatest disruption of life in the U.S. since World War II – and arguably the most serious suspension of the constitutional protection of civil liberties, as well as harm to hundreds of millions of Americans’ health and personal freedom – in the history of the country.

Although Fauci, as director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had a four-decade-long history of questionable influence on the nation’s health care, the media in March 2020, both left and right, were largely swooning over him. Having reported on Dr. Fauci starting in 1985, however, I knew better.

My AT blog had the provocative – but entirely justified – title “Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s face of the coronavirus, is a Deep-State Hillary Clinton–loving stooge.” The gist of the article was substantive: Fauci, in my opinion  and  based on the record that I cited, had presided over the creation of an enormous, sclerotic medical bureaucracy in response to the first politically correct disease in history, the gay AIDS “pandemic,” in the 1980s. The AIDS-centric bureaucracy that he was largely responsible for grew to unprecedented proportions that eclipsed and crowded out research on more prevalent, but less trendy, diseases including diabetes, breast cancer, and heart disease.

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In the early 2000s, AIDS (which resulted in only 2.5% as many deaths as cancer between 1982 and 2020) was still inexplicably the dominant preoccupation of the U.S. medical establishment. In 2005, a quarter century after AIDS emerged, Fauci and his fellow bureaucrats were supporting draconian measures like mandatory testing of everyone for HIV, the virus they insisted caused AIDS, and a fruitless search costing hundreds of billions of dollars for an AIDS vaccine.

Chart from my March 21, 2020 blog on Fauci, illustrating the gross mismatch in U.S. government research dollars accorded to various diseases during Fauci’s long tenure at the helm of the NIAID. Sources: Centers for Disease Control (top); American Diabetes Association.

During the week of my March 21 AT blog, Fauci’s stellar reputation was being reported both here and internationally, including in the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald in an article titled “How Dr Anthony Fauci became America’s truth-teller.” Fauci, according to the article, “was previously a revered figure in scientific circles… but now he has become an almost omnipresent figure in American life.”

Soon after its publication, my March 21, 2020 article at AT on Fauci – because of its novelty, timing, and compelling headline – began to hit a nerve. On March 24, 2020, POLITICO was the first publication to pile on in “Anthony Fauci becomes a fringe MAGA target:”

The far-right’s most zealous Trump supporters have set their sights on Dr. Anthony Fauci….  To a vocal minority of right-wing blogs and pro-Trump pundits, Fauci is the embodiment of the establishment forces that have been arrayed against the president since he came to Washington. And those voices are getting louder amid rumblings about Fauci’s standing with Trump as the president itches to get the economy restarted in the coming weeks.

“A Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge,” read a Saturday headline on the American Thinker, a far-right website, latching on to a WikiLeaks-released email that showed Fauci praising Clinton for her Benghazi testimony as secretary of State.

Two days later, the Washington Post published the first of four critical articles that referenced – and linked to – my AT blog. Also weighing in were the New York Times (two articles including one of them on page 1A), New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, and a large number of other left of center MSM outlets. Some excerpts of their reporting follow.