The Politicalization of Dr. Anthony Fauci - Gary Sasse

Monday, December 06, 2021

The pandemic has focused us on what role experts should play in making public policy and explaining their scientific conclusions. A case study of this is the role Dr. Anthony Fauci has been asked to play. Dr. Fauci has served honorably in the public health sector for over fifty years. He has advised every president since Reagan. He has been Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor our nation can bestow on a civilian.

Today you cannot turn on a cable news broadcast without hearing from Dr. Fauci. While his analysis and commentary are generally respected, some see his observations as going beyond providing scientific facts and analysis. As a result, Dr. Fauci has been the brunt of harsh criticism from Trump partisans who believe his comments were intended to politically undermine President Trump as he ran for reelection.  Today several conservative governors and their supporters also see his commentary as being partisan.

Scientific knowledge is indispensable in informing both elected decision-makers and the public. The public value of scientific expertise, however, can be compromised if experts are the spokesperson, and their comments are painted by one side or the other as being political. When this occurs the expert’s credibility can be compromised in the public’s eye. Regrettably, this may have happened to Dr. Fauci. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute reminded us “the pandemic shows there are no purely technical solutions for problems that demand political leadership”.

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John Dewey, one of the most prominent American 20th century philosophers of democratic institutions opined, “no government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.”

Listening to scientists is an invaluable resource for elected officials. However, it does not change the reality that compromise and trade-offs are the currency of our democratic system. One need look no further than mayors, governors and the president who are trying to manage the pandemic while balancing the economic, social and political pressures to reopen schools and businesses, including mandating vaccinations and the wearing of masks.

At the end of the day, experts cannot lift the burden that elected officials have to make judgments with incomplete and conflicting information to balance differing interests.

In the current hyper-partisan environment followers of President Trump have voiced conspiracy theories about expert advice when it does not conform to what they see as their political advantage. They claim scientists purposely mislead decision-makers in order to promote their own agenda. Trump supporters may see scientific and technical institutions as the English politician Nigel Farage described as “another club of clever people who want to bully us.”

We must guard against our leaders falling prey to the false choice of either government by expert rule or by impulsive-driven demagogic populism.

 

Gary Sasse is the Director of the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University

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