The Memo: As Fauci bows out, public health experts lament ‘venom’ of attacks

Dr. Anthony Fauci is preparing to leave the public stage — but health experts are worried the toxic atmosphere that tailed him will hang around for years to come.

Opinions of Fauci among the general public cleave along partisan lines, but most experts think he did about as good a job as anyone could in managing a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. 

They worry that the unremitting personal attacks he faced are emblematic of a broader, sneering tone toward scientific expertise and advice.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in public health, has known Fauci for almost half a century and considers him a friend. 

“He has got caught in the rabid politicization of American culture,” Gostin lamented, “and he has got caught right in the crosshairs of the COVID culture wars these past years.”

Gostin, who said he shared Fauci’s dismay at the “venom” of some of the attacks, also expressed concern about the general climate surrounding science, which seems unlikely to change after Fauci leaves government service in December. 

“Public health and science itself has been pilloried. There is an enormous fatigue, resignation and sheer exhaustion in the entire scientific community. People are quitting their jobs, or when they are keeping their jobs, they are keeping their heads down,” he said.

It’s striking to think of how different things seemed just a couple of years ago.

At the outset of the pandemic in early 2020, Fauci was largely seen as a reassuring national presence. The White House briefings he led became required viewing for many Americans as COVID-19 took hold.

A New Yorker magazine article in April 2020 carried a headline about how Fauci had become “America’s doctor.” The story noted that Fauci’s approval rating in one poll was close to 80 percent.

In time, however, he would be lambasted as a “disaster” by then-President Trump, the sixth of seven presidents he served; he would require a personal security detail to protect him and his family from numerous threats; and he would become one of the leading targets of conservatives in general.

On Wednesday, two days after Fauci announced he would soon end his 38-year stint as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) told an Orlando rally, “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has frequently crossed swords with Fauci over the specifics of U.S. funding for research in Wuhan, China, complained that if the scientist had been “a family doctor in Peoria,” then the allegedly baleful effects of his advice would have affected only “the people foolish enough to choose him as a doctor.”

“Once you put him in charge of the world, it all trickles down,” Paul added, according to a series of tweets from NBC News reporter Kate Santaliz.

Conservative media figures have piled on too. 

Megyn Kelly, complaining about an equivocal answer Fauci give about whether he would comply with a hypothetical subpoena from Republicans in Congress, told her podcast…