Rich Lowry Slaps Down Conservative Caricatures of Fauci as ‘Dastardly Bureaucratic Mastermind’
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Conservative columnist Rich Lowry fired back at the growing right-wing chorus attacking the Trump administration’s infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, calling out their wild caricatures of the public health official as a “dastardly bureaucratic mastermind imposing his will on the country.”
In his latest Politico column, “Fauci Is Not the Villian,” Lowry, who is also editor of the conservative magazine National Review, pointed out the absurd attempts to portray Fauci as intent on hamstringing the economy. The anti-Fauci movement has been bubbling online for weeks, and Trump himself retweeted a post with the #FireFauci hashtag a month ago. But Lowry noted that the outrage seemed to take a great leap forward after the doctor’s Senate testimony on Tuesday, where Fauci again seemed to contradict Trump by warning that a rapid reopening of the economy could trigger “suffering and death.”
“The director of the National Institutes for Health gently, but unmistakably, struck a different tone than President Donald Trump, earning rebukes from talk show hosts and Fox News anchors, as well as fueling the outrage of the #FireFauci claque on Twitter,” Lowry said, throwing sharp elbows across the right-wing landscape. Of note: on Tuesday night, the entire Fox News primetime lineup took various shots at Fauci. (Also note: Lowry incorrectly identified the agency Fauci leads, it is the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)
“Although Fauci’s every utterance is now examined with the same care as pronouncements of the pope, his words weren’t exactly earth-shattering,” the conservative columnist pointed out. “He said that if there are careless reopenings in the wrong conditions, ‘we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.’ Does anyone doubt that’s a possibility? Or that, per Fauci, new uncontrolled outbreaks will not only lead ‘to some suffering and death that could be avoided but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery’?”
“Fauci is an important voice in this debate, if only one voice. He is neither the dastardly bureaucratic mastermind imposing his will on the country that his detractors on the right make him out to be nor the philosopher-king in waiting that his boosters on the left inflate him into,” Lowry continued. “This is why it’s a tautology for Fauci’s critics to say that he’s focused on the disease above all other considerations. This is like saying the Commerce Secretary is too consumed with finding business opportunities for American companies or the head of the Joint Special Operations Command has an unhealthy obsession with killing terrorists. What else are they supposed to do?”
“Fauci’s views should be taken seriously, but they can’t be determinative,” Lowry concluded. “Which is why if Trump did fire Fauci, some other meddlesome epidemiologist would emerge soon enough. If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
