Fauci’s lasting legacy will be the damage he did to science and government

Anthony Fauci isn’t faring well in the court of public opinion. His recently divulged “diary” and subsequent July 29 appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee didn’t help matters. In fact, his reliance on the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions served only to discredit him further. Because he received a blanket pardon, he faces little legal jeopardy — but the hearing served as a trial in the court of public opinion, and the jury looks ready to convict.

Through his actions during the COVID-19 crisis, Fauci often put fame and politics ahead of science, and damaged public confidence in both scientists and policymakers. That’s the verdict that will outlast any hearing or bad news cycle — not a finding about one man, but about the institutions he came to personify, and that are now paying the price for it. The question is how one man came to personify an entire institution, and what can be done to prevent repeating that mistake.

Fauci became an entrenched government figure. He entered the public sphere in 1968, was made director of NIAID in 1984, and served in that position until his retirement in 2022. Throughout his career, he never experienced fame and fortune like he did with the pandemic. COVID-19 was the most consequential American pandemic in roughly a century. It could have been an occasion for government, government employees, and scientists to demonstrate how effective they could be in saving lives and minimizing disruption. Because of the state of media and politics, however, it became instead one man’s opportunity to chase fame and celebrity — painfully on exhibit in his diary entries.

This confluence of events led Fauci to become the personification of science, experts, and capable government. It was in his own interest and the interest of the media to project this image. But the image was an illusion.

This illusion is most obvious in the ways Dr. Fauci voiced public positions differently from his private statements, or differently from what a neutral scientist would say. Instead, he aligned his positions with the prevailing opinions of the media. For example, while Fauci defended the six-foot distancing rule in public, he admitted later to Congress that it was not based on any underlying scientific studies and “sort of just appeared.” On school closings, despite the scientific studies and experiences internationally suggesting health risk was low, Fauci continued to defend the closures. He similarly defended masking children.

The origin of the virus is now a debated issue. Fauci was early to argue that it originated not in a lab, but by moving from animals to humans. Rather than remaining open to competing scientific hypotheses, as a good scientist and public servant would, Dr. Fauci worked to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis and helped marginalize scientists who argued in support of it.

His diary also raises questions about his motivations. Fauci wrote that he learned of a push to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine before the election through a contact he described as working closely with Nancy Pelosi — and concluded the effort was “a ploy for Trump to get re-elected.” He offered his support to senior FDA officials as they resisted pressure for a pre-election authorization.

In the years since the pandemic, the public came to believe that many of the highly contentious issues from the pandemic were not as clear cut as Fauci and the conventional wisdom suggested, and many of them were actually wrong — school closings, masks on children, the vaccine’s ability to stop infection, COVID origins, and more.

As these things were better understood, the reputations of Fauci, science, government, and media collapsed. The proportion of people in the US who claimed they had “a great deal” or “fair amount of confidence” in science dropped by 14 percentage points between 2020 and 2023. Trust in media continues to reach new lows — down to 28 percent in 2025, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded. Trust in government fared no better, falling to just 17 percent by the end of 2025, near the lowest point in the seven decades pollsters have asked the question.

We want to think of government officials and elected leaders as being the best of us, focused entirely on exemplary performance in service of the public interest. But Fauci shows us that this ideal is rarely achieved. The media elevated Fauci as a model public servant, and in the end, he serves instead as an exemplar of the reality of government — that it is just as prone to failure as anyone, though its failures are much larger in scale.

The Fauci legacy is a lesson that being in government doesn’t make someone saintlier or smarter than others — his failure was as large as it was because so much power was concentrated in one official facing so little scrutiny. Limited power and heavy scrutiny are the only reliable safeguards against it happening again.