Fauci receiving a faculty position at Georgetown is a disgrace
Jack Elbaum
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Dr. Anthony Fauci was among the most ardent, and certainly the most influential, advocates of lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disastrous consequences of these policies may lead you to think he would be precluded from still being a celebrated public figure.
But you would have thought wrong. For his work, Fauci has just been rewarded with a “distinguished” faculty position at Georgetown University in its School of Medicine and its School of Public Policy.
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That’s right. One can still land a cushy job in a prestigious school of public policy after recommending policies that resulted in massive learning loss, a major spike in anxiety and depression due to social isolation, and people getting fired from their jobs due to not getting a vaccine that did not prevent transmission or contraction.
To say this is a disgrace is an understatement.
It reveals that too few in positions of power have actually grappled with the harm their COVID-19 response caused. Making mistakes is understandable. But those in influential positions never actually acknowledged that it would even be possible for them to be wrong about where the virus came from, the usefulness of school closures, or the efficacy of vaccine mandates. Even when the data were uncertain, the public health establishment — people such as Fauci, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and others — acted as if anybody who had an opinion that differed from theirs was a conspiracy theorist.
Once it turned out they got key information incorrect, there was almost no public indication that any of them had stepped back and taken time to reflect on what went wrong. Humility was a virtue nowhere to be found. Even this week, Fauci said in an interview that “we seemed to spend more energy fighting with each other than we did fighting with the virus. That cannot ever happen again.”
A substantive reckoning among those who pursued these policies is necessary. This would include recognizing what they did wrong and taking specific steps to make sure it will not happen again.
This is clearly outrageous, but it is no surprise. Earlier this month, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was named a senior leadership fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. And last month, the far-left former district attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, was named the founding executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. This is the same guy who got recalled and voted out for being too soft on crime, even for the residents of San Francisco.
In other words, this is far from the first case of a failed public official who has landed a cushy professorship after running a city (or, in Fauci’s case, a country) into the ground.
This doesn’t speak well of academia, to say the least.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.