Six feet under: How Fauci buried public trust in ‘the experts’

Dr. Anthony Fauci became a symbol of the pandemic in the United States — loved or loathed, depending on your political leaning. But recently he’s been off the national stage, allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to drift out of the public spotlight and away from the psychological scars of the past.

This week, Fauci returned — hauled in front of the House COVID subcommittee to comment on America’s response to the pandemic, and his role in it. Despite time and new information, Fauci remained defiant and indignant, refusing to budge an inch toward introspection over how he swayed the public toward mitigation efforts that have since been proven either irrelevant, wildly overstated or outright wrong.

Fauci was a D.C. bureaucratic lifer until his retirement in January 2023, but he represents something far worse than a typical politician — while not alone, he is perhaps the most specific reason for the decline in public trust in “the experts” when it comes to the scientific establishment, and “The Science” more broadly.

Take the issue of “social distancing.” In a transcript of his private testimony from January, released in advance of his public testimony this week, he was asked about the “six feet” rule put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “It just sort of appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion about whether it should be five or six or whatever,” he said. And later: “It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance.”

Unsurprisingly, this particular revelation was a focus of his testimony Monday. He was given a chance to clarify the remarks, and he shifted blame to the CDC. “The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines for schools, not me,” he said. He went on to note how the CDC used the belief that COVID was spread through “droplets,” not “aerosol” transmission, to arrive at that number — but pointed out it was “incorrect” based on “what we know now.” (“Now” is doing a lot of work — we’ve known this for years.)

He later got a chance for a “Resistance”-bait moment by sparring with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who incorrectly asserted Fauci said the distancing rules were “made up,” because she cited a Daily Mail headline that implied it was a quote (the phrase was not used in the transcript). It was a distraction from the key issue.

So, let’s stay on Fauci’s revisionist history about the “six feet” framing. It’s true it was a guideline for schools and was a key factor in why so many schools remained closed for so long — unnecessarily and irreparably harming young kids. A highly-cited July 2020 New York Times column by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Saskia Popescu and James Phillips made “six feet” of distancing a prerequisite for reopening schools.

But it wasn’t just classrooms. The six-foot rule was a key reason why businesses remained closed or severely limited. It played a role in the closures of houses of worship. It was even part of outdoor activity restrictions — outrageous in retrospect.

As the Washington Post pointed out, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb described the “six feet” rule as “the single most costly intervention” of the pandemic in his book, “Uncontrolled Spread.”

You had places like PBS asking if six feet is “far enough for social distancing” in April 2020. Fauci himself would cite the “physical distancing” rules as a key “public health principle” needed before the country could be reopened in August 2020.

Then, in March 2021, a new study found three feet of distancing — the norm worldwide — was more than enough. A week later, the CDC revised their rules. But even then, Fauci was being cagey, refusing on CNN to answer whether schools and other locations could relax their “six feet” rules based on the new “science.” “Data are accumulating making it look more like three feet are okay under certain circumstances,” he said, but “I don’t want to get ahead of official guidelines.”

But before that, the guidelines on social distancing pushed by Fauci and his CDC “expert” buddies, with the enthusiastic and unquestioning support of the establishment press, were used as political fodder against Trump when it came to the issue of reopening schools in September 2020.

The New York Times wrote then about how “President Trump’s election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as quickly as possible” and “their demand for schools to get back to normal” was antithetical to science, and dangerous. The CDC, wrote the New York Times, was “alarmed at the degree of pressure” from the Trump administration; to bolster the CDC’s credibility, the Times said it was “long considered the world’s premiere public health agency.” Sure.

Meanwhile, that same month we were watching Anderson Cooper adhere to the six-feet rule in his outdoor town hall with candidate Joe Biden — that is, until they thought they were in commercial break and Biden literally whispered something in Cooper’s ear.

It’s not just distancing. The same expert class embarrassed themselves over masking, like when the CDC massively changed the guidance on how vaccinated people could mask in just two weeks after public pressure. Or with vaccines more broadly, like when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s comments about them in April 2021 brought headlines like this in Fortune: “It’s official: Vaccinated people don’t transmit Covid-19.”

Fauci and the scientific elite, boosted by the consensus-pushers in the media and government, had a choice at the height of the pandemic. They could be honest about how this was an unprecedented health crisis, and many of the mitigation methods they were suggesting were just their best guesses. Or they could push their directives on social distancing, masks and vaccines, and if the science proved them wrong, they could admit their error to the public, explain how it happened and treat everyone like adults.

They chose a different route. They chose lies, obfuscation, condescension and gaslighting. Fauci continued that same tactic this week.

His credibility is shot — six feet under. And, of course, it’s not just him. But his smug evasiveness is instructive for the public to witness, as just another reminder of how misled we were as a country when we needed honesty more than ever.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.