The Fauci eMail Controversy

or How I Learned to Ignore Click-bait and Trust the Facts

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

You’ve undoubtedly seen the social media posts about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s leaked emails, most of them wondering how the “woke” people (i.e., those who in the past felt that Dr. Fauci was more qualified to speak about immunology than, say, Donald Trump) are reacting to the exposé. You need to dismiss and ignore this theory.

There are two primary problems with the theory:

1. There are like 3,200 pages, so I doubt any one single person has read them all, especially the social warriors acting all smug about the “gotcha!” moment, and
2. The emails were not leaked. They were acquired by media outlets through the US’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Now, (2) brings up what should be a sticking point for the people touting how the emails expose Fauci as a fraud (which, according to some, should lead to Fauci’s being tried and imprisoned for his role in misleading Americans, bumping up the suicide rate and ruining countless lives and businesses).

The emails were obtained by Buzzfeed, CNN and The Washington Post, three media outlets that for a year have been vilified for pushing lies about the virus, the pandemic and the lockdowns, by the same people now paying attention the facts expounded by those outlets.

So, in a nutshell, the “gotcha!” conspiracy theorists are relying on mainstream media (their term, not mine) coverage to garner some sort of understanding about what the emails say, and interpret what they mean.

And as with any media coverage, you are going to get the spin according to what ideology the media outlet follows. Now, if you’re only going to listen to one media outlet, or outlets based on one media ideology, then you’re likely to be brainwashed (again, how such conspiracy theorists label those who pay attention to what mainstream media is reporting) into thinking a certain way.

Now, conspiracy theorists want us to believe they are oblivious to mainstream media (although we can tell from their statements that it is not the case), but instead rely on the ideas of social media influencers (many of whom, not coincidentally, have acquired that status through their commentary on mainstream media outlets).

But aside from what may be wrong with the coverage, or how it is represented, is what the emails themselves expose?

I only know what I read from news outlets (both left, right and center), since I don’t have the time to read and try to analyze more than 3,000 printouts.

My main takeaway is that Fauci was under a tremendous amount of unrelenting pressure to offer sound scientific advice on something that was new to the world. He based it, and continues to base it, on the state of knowledge of the moment.

The main takeaway from conspiracy theorists is that Fauci consistently mislead people — the public on the use of masks, and the government on the origin of the virus.

The incompetence narrative is that Fauci early on said mask-wearing was not required, then changed that to say it should be required, and then said multiple masks are better than one.

Again, keeping in mind what he knew about the unknown at that time, he originally said “mask wearing wasn’t recommended” for two reasons:

• Masks protect the infected from spreading their infection; they don’t necessarily protect the uninfected from becoming infected, so
• he wished to deter people from hoarding masks that might best be used by medical personnel.

The wearing of masks has been constant — wear them to prevent spreading germs to others. That is why people flip out when they encounter somebody not wearing a mask. They are scared to death of catching what you may be spreading. And yes, you may be vaccinated to prevent you from getting sick, but you may still acquire virus particles through your breathing and spread them back out to infect the next person.

Only when we knew that mask manufacturing had ramped up sufficiently to allow widespread use did the guideline become to wear a mask (again to prevent spreading what you may be breathing out), and then the idea that double masking is better than one is just a rational deduction — seatbelts + airbags offer better protection than one or the other alone, though yeah, they protect the wearer not the car.

The main contentious email thread, though, relates to the virus’s origin, which was initially proposed to have been released from the lab in Wuhan (initially floated as an accidental leak, but then evolving into a Chinese government plot to unleash a biological weapon).

As reported on Fox News, Fauci knew about the potential of the virus being released from a lab, but dismissed it in favor of a “wet market” transmission from animal to human. A belief Fauci still thinks is the most likely origin (so again, not being inconsistent).

CNN points out that originally Fauci said it was unlikely it came from a lab, but now admits it might have been an accidental leak, as those actually happen quite often in labs around the world — a technician working with virus particles walks out of the lab without going through proper disinfecting protocol, for example.

Fauci adds that he welcomes the investigation into where the virus came from in order to acquire knowledge into what we still do not know, with the hopes that it will help stop such occurrences in the future.

That really is what science is all about — acquiring knowledge on something you do not know so that you can then use it as experience. That is something that has been consistent over the course of the pandemic, even in the acquisition of knowledge on how lockdowns may or may not work.

And like reaction to the virus itself (which some early analysts said would eventually become more of a study on human behavior than on immunology), the reaction to Fauci’s emails is politically polarized, and the BBC probably said it best: “Fauci’s emails are like a Rorschach ink blot: what you see in them reveals more about you than the ink blot, or, in this case, the emails.”

I’ll leave the last word to Fauci, from one of his emails relating to how he had become so vilified by some and idolized by others (both of which apparently made him extremely uncomfortable):

• “Our society is nuts.”