Fifth Amendment Fauci’s Narcissism Destroyed Faith in Scientific Methodology

If you believe in karma or that chickens always come home to roost, you have to explain why Mao and Stalin died in bed, and Hitler was able to choose his own way out. But watching Anthony Fauci on the witness stand before Congress taking the Fifth as fast as his lips could flap (more than 100 times), you could see some evidence that at least some hens become broiler chickens.

There he sat — the undisputed grand vizier of American public health — hedging his answers and reciting the familiar line about “following the science.” To the uninitiated observer, perhaps it looked like the noble defense of an overworked public servant unfairly hounded by partisan inquisitors. To anyone who has tracked his career since the 1980s, it looked like something else entirely: another verse in a long song of dodge, delay, and quiet goalpost-moving in furtherance of a career fueled by narcissism so extreme it should have its own place on the Periodic Table. (RELATED: Tracking Dr. Fauci’s Fallout)

The hearing was ostensibly about the origins of COVID-19, gain-of-function research, and the shifting, often contradictory directives that governed life for 300 million Americans during the pandemic. But the real subject was never the virus alone. It was the institutionalized rot of a public health establishment that has long preferred terror-driven consensus to rigorous, skeptical inquiry — an establishment Fauci built, nurtured, and came to embody. (RELATED: The Scientist Who Saw It Coming)

I first learned of the man’s blatant dishonesty when I worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1986-87. As I wrote in these pages almost four years ago, I had invited him to testify at a hearing, and he accepted. I received his CV in the mail, and it was surreal. I think the New York City phonebook back then might have been thinner. (RELATED: Fraudulent Dr. Fauci Bows Out Way Too Late)

Various online bios claim Fauci is “author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks,” or words to that effect, but definitely including the 1,300 figure. This would be extremely impressive in any case, but remember we’re talking about someone who spent his career as a full-time administrator. Would you believe that General Dwight D. Eisenhower killed 30 Germans on D-Day with an entrenching tool?

As one can see by entering Fauci’s name in PubMed, the government’s archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, there are simply too many papers listing Fauci on too many disparate subjects, and too often as lead researcher, including animal studies. (Fauci enters the lab every morning to check on the mice.)

Keep scrolling, and you find Fauci is apparently a published expert on virtually every medical topic.

Something is going on here. And unless Fauci has had himself cloned, the best guess might be labeled “plagiarism by consent.” There is always steep competition to get in the top-ranked journals or any journal of any reputation at all. It would appear that the true researchers were putting Fauci’s name on their papers to push them up the ladder, in exchange for which he got yet one more academic publication attributed to him, as noted, usually with him as lead researcher. It’s a shame he’s not part of Marvel’s Avengers.

Strip away the publication count, and the background is thin in the specific disciplines a global viral outbreak actually requires. Fauci earned his M.D. from Cornell in 1966 and went straight into the federal apparatus, becoming director of NIAID in 1984. He holds no advanced research degree — no Ph.D. — in molecular biology, genetics, or quantitative epidemiology. He is a clinical physician who became a high-level administrator half a century ago, managing research budgets and political relationships while invoking the unimpeachable mantle of “Science” itself, as he put it on CBS’s Face the Nation in 2021. (RELATED: Standing Up for Bureaucracy Is Not Standing Up for Science)

COVID-19 wasn’t an anomaly in Fauci’s career. It was the logical outcome of a method he perfected decades earlier, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

To understand how a bureaucrat with that background held such sway over public health policy for four decades — through absurd social-distancing metrics and mask-mandate reversals — you have to look back. COVID-19 wasn’t an anomaly in Fauci’s career. It was the logical outcome of a method he perfected decades earlier, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In May 1983, Fauci published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (now JAMA) that set off a wave of national panic. Reflecting on a handful of pediatric AIDS cases, he wrote that if the disease could pass between family members through routine contact, “then AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension” — raising the possibility that ordinary household contact could spread it.

It was a reckless leap. Even then, the epidemiological data pointed clearly to blood-borne and sexual transmission. But by floating the idea that sharing a dinner table or a bathroom might infect an entire family, Fauci lit a match under public terror. He quietly walked the casual-contact theory back not long after — yet the damage was done, and the strategic value of catastrophic messaging had become obvious. I first reported this study in my 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, and it still gets lots of play.

Having primed the public for irrational fear, the public health apparatus under Fauci faced a new problem by the late 1980s: how to sustain federal funding and public urgency once casual transmission was off the table. The answer was to convince everyone that, as headlines put it, “Now We’re All at Risk of AIDS.” Except heterosexuals were somehow more at risk.

We were told, with total confidence, that a “heterosexual AIDS explosion” was sweeping middle America. The data eventually caught up with the claim: the general heterosexual explosion never happened. It had been manufactured to maximize funding and political leverage. By the time the truth arrived, the panic had already done its job. The budget was secured. The agency had grown. The director had made himself indispensable.

That playbook got reused for Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Zika — low-probability threats elevated to existential crises, alternative views treated as heresy, and the inevitable failure of each doomsday scenario quietly recast as a victory of bureaucratic intervention.

Often, Fauci was involved. In 2022, after Monkeypox temporarily broke its African bonds and began infecting Americans and Europeans — albeit with a low death rate — his concern wasn’t epidemiology but rather that “the government must fight homophobic stigmas surrounding monkeypox.” (I’m not making this up; the WHO was so worried about alleged stigma that it changed the name to “mpox.” No word on whether it reflected input from Minister of Science and also Chief Defender of the Faith, Dr. Zaius.) (RELATED: Here We Go Again — The Woke Democratization of Monkeypox)

Elsewhere, Fauci emphasized “the risk for … children and pregnant women,” adding “We’ve got to understand the modality of transmission.” Yet before his remarks, the data showed the disease was afflicting almost exclusively homosexual men who disproportionately spent a lot of time in bathhouses. Again, outside of Africa, it was much more of a gay disease than HIV ever was. (RELATED: Yes, Fauci, Monkeypox Is a ‘Gay Disease’)

Still, by 2020, the machinery ran on its own, proof that perpetual motion machines do exist. When a novel coronavirus emerged out of Wuhan, the public health establishment didn’t offer nuanced risk communication, targeted protections, or sober cost-benefit analysis. It offered panic and unilateral mandates.

Consider the six-foot social distancing rule. When pressed on the empirical basis for closing schools, shuttering businesses, and putting one-way arrows on grocery store floors, Fauci admitted during that the rule “just sort of appeared,” with no rigorous clinical trials or controlled studies behind it. It was, in his own words, an empirical decision, not grounded in solid data. Millions of children lost years of developmental and educational progress. Small businesses went under. Families were torn apart — over a metric that had essentially been made up.

Then there were the masks. In early 2020, Fauci told us on CBS’s 60 Minutes that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Months later he reversed course entirely, championing double-masking and insisting cloth masks were vital shields against transmission, despite a body of pre-existing randomized controlled trial literature showing negligible efficacy against aerosolized respiratory viruses. Asked about the shift, he didn’t concede bad data or poor communication. He said flatly that he kinda, sorta prevaricated at first to preserve masks for healthcare workers. In this world, lying to the public isn’t a breach of ethics. It’s a tactical maneuver.

Perhaps the worst chapter concerned the suppression of debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The hearing revisited late January and early February 2020, when a group of prominent virologists privately warned Fauci and his colleagues that the virus’s genomic sequence looked consistent with laboratory manipulation. Within days of those calls, several of the same scientists authored a paper (aided by Fauci) in the prestigious Nature Medicine, publicly dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as a fringe theory. Millions of dollars in NIH research grants flowed to the signatories not long after, although it’s impossible to prove a connection.

Asked about funding gain-of-function research (experiments that enhance a pathogen’s biological capabilities beyond its natural state) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci fell back on semantics. It all depended on your definition of “gain-of-function.” NIH sub-grants routed through the EcoHealth Alliance were used to engineer chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan — that much isn’t disputed — but Fauci maintained, straight-faced, that this didn’t meet the strict federal definition. Redefine the terms, escape the culpability.

The tragedy here isn’t that Fauci got things wrong. Scientists are allowed to be wrong, provided they have the humility to correct course as the data changes. But the H-word was never in Fauci’s vocabulary. His career comprised furthering his career, whether with essentially fake citations or saying what the mass media and quasi-Marxist public health establishment wanted to hear.

The Atlantic, in a post-hearing article, noted that Sen. Rand Paul had published with the writer declaring Fauci “was spending part of his time cataloguing his own growing fame with the excitement of a child star who had been asked to sign an autograph for the first time,” calling it “embarrassing to an excruciating degree.” It speaks volumes that his home office in 2022 was shown with a huge portrait of him, plus two separate images … and a Fauci bobblehead. His diary notes he was particularly proud of the toy.

The tragedy is that he dismantled the core habits of the scientific method in favor of dogma, censorship, and institutional self-preservation…

The tragedy is that he dismantled the core habits of the scientific method in favor of dogma, censorship, and institutional self-preservation — that he built a climate where dissent was treated as betrayal, where peer-reviewed debate gave way to media-managed consensus, and where the collateral damage of lockdown policy — overdoses, skipped cancer screenings, economic ruin, learning loss — became a footnote. I’ve revisited several countries where I used to live before the pandemic, and all have changed, apparently permanently, for the worse because of the rules and the social isolation. The U.S. is definitely not least among them. (Please note that pathogens don’t dictate governmental edicts.)

“‘Playing God’ is a trite expression I normally detest, but that’s exactly what Fauci has been doing,” I wrote in The American Spectator in 2022. “He repeatedly throws the fear of, well, God, into us. His advocacy of lockdowns will surely live well past his own lifetime.”

As this week’s hearing wound down, the underlying problem remained exactly where it started. Public trust in the public health establishment hasn’t collapsed because of “disinformation” or “anti-science” sentiment. It collapsed because people finally saw behind the curtain — saw officials playing politics, managing budgets, and shifting goalposts while claiming a kind of unquestionable authority.

Whenever Fauci said, “Trust the science,” he meant “trust me.” The result of which is that many people who should trust scientific methodology do not. He’s not entirely responsible for that, but more so than anyone else. The result is that social media influencers often have more sway than medical doctors and scientists, even in highly established non-political areas such as sleep apnea.

Fauci can now enjoy a comfortable retirement, delivering well-paid lectures and polishing his legacy. But the legacy itself is broken trust, degraded scientific standards, and a template in which fear always outranks fact. Until that template is dismantled and we start demanding real, data-driven accountability from public health officials, the next crisis will look exactly like the last one.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, and journalist who, over the past four decades, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

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