Dr. Fauci, All Too Human
If you had spent decades in a position of public authority, signing off on government funding for laboratories conducting dangerous research on certain types of infectious diseases, including funding for overseas laboratories conducting research so dangerous that your own government had once instituted a moratorium on allowing such research to be done on your own country’s soil, and then one day a new, highly contagious disease came to light, clearly originating from one of the few cities on the planet which happened to be the home of a laboratory conducting just this sort of research on just this sort of disease, a laboratory you had knowingly supported, and one about which there had been reports of work being done under conditions that did not meet the industry’s accepted safety protocols for such work — if, I say, such a situation arose, you would suddenly be faced with a test of personal integrity the likes of which men rarely face in life.
Would you admit the likelihood that your zeal for, and practical efforts to support, this dangerous research might have helped to foster the conditions that led to the global outbreak of a laboratory-created infectious disease, thus bringing upon yourself whatever fallout might be considered appropriate by your country and the world for dealing with a person so culpable? Or would you panic at the havoc this revelation would wreak upon your whole life, career, credibility, and legacy in your field, and thus seek to hide or undermine any suggestion of the most obvious hypothesis as to the outbreak’s origins, and further seek to discredit as ridiculous, unqualified, or even mendacious and conspiratorial, any person or group that dared to proffer this most obvious hypothesis in public?
Quite a test of one’s manhood, responsibility, and respect for one’s fellow citizens, wouldn’t you say? And if you had to guess which kind of person would be up to it — that is, which kind of person would have the basic courage and integrity to face the music and do his honest best to help undo any harm he might have done — where would “life-long successful bureaucratic climber and feeder at the public trough” rank on your list of human types that might have the character necessary to pass such a test?
In the wider scheme of outrage carried out against the human race over the past three years, Dr. Anthony Fauci is merely a minor player. No great mastermind or world controller; just a high-level functionary doing his job, and trying to keep himself out of trouble. The problem is that the world’s bureaucracies are rife with Dr. Faucis, all of them people who, beginning in 2020, faced similar tests of their integrity, as well as similar opportunities to enhance their public profiles and feelings of power in the face of conditions they were in no way capable of understanding or solving, let alone of understanding well enough to be qualified to restrict the public words and beliefs of others with an air of authoritative expertise, or to micromanage the personal behavior and choices of their fellow citizens. We know all too well which choice almost all of those bureaucrats, agency directors, and deputy ministers made, and none of us should be at all surprised that they fell in line so uniformly. Most of us in the late modern world would have done the same, if we are to be honest.
This is not to excuse any of them one bit, or to diminish by a hair the evil they have done; it is merely to acknowledge that these individuals are human beings, and humans of a particularly normal, if unsavory, kind. The all-too-human kind, shall we say, namely the kind that ordinarily appears to be “just living his life” or “just doing his job,” until the occasional extraordinary test comes along, and we see what those “justs” mean in practice.