Fauci the omnipotent

What does Anthony Fauci have to do with a starship? The good doctor’s staggering claims and admissions during his Sunday interview with Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan recall a classic scene from Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country. The crew of the Enterprise are taken to a mysterious realm to face a being claiming to be an all-powerful god. To question the being would be to question God himself. The being, of course, turns out not to be a god or the God, but rather an alien entity, trapped and trying to escape.

Now, Dr. Fauci seems to be borrowing from the alien’s playbook.

When Fauci was asked recently about Senator Ted Cruz recommending prosecutorial action against him to the attorney general, he grew incensed and defensive, even throwing in a reference to the Capitol riot on January 6 for some reason. It was a nakedly partisan attack, the kind you might expect from our politicians and bureaucrats, but not the nation’s bedside doctor, who should be led by the Hippocratic Oath and not Jim Acosta.

Then came a broad swipe at anyone who dared to question the omnipotent Anthony Fauci, despite his many, many backtracks over the last two years. Fauci decreed that to question him, his decisions or his motives, is to question the very foundations of science itself.

When Brennan referenced Fauci’s testimony to Congress, he responded, “I’m just going to do my job. I’m going to be saving lives and they are going to be lying.” He continued, “If they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci. It’s easy to criticize. But they are really criticizing science. Because I represent science and that’s dangerous.”

Tony Fauci has apparently anointed himself the Science, or at least the ambassador speaking on behalf of Science. This is the second time he has made such a declaration. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in June.

This is where most criticism of Fauci misses the mark. Breathless tweets from anonymous accounts depict him as a war criminal, worse than Hitler. Senators threaten him with jail time over misleading testimony to Congress. But when Fauci declares himself a representative of Science, it’s a statement of his religious devotion. He’s not referring to the science of, say, the human manipulation of viruses that can lead to a global pandemic, research Fauci once said he believed was worth the risk. Or to the science that has possibly led to eleven million deaths worldwide and altered the lives of every citizen of every industrialized nation on the planet.

Fauci believes himself to be a force for good, no matter how many people or puppies have to die to achieve that good. He does not believe in the laws of Congress or man, which is why when pressed, even by Brennan in that same interview, about the origins of this virus and why it seems engineered differently than other SARS viruses, he retreats once again and pushes a wet market theory that not even the Chinese government is willing to stand by anymore.

Fauci does not consider himself to be accountable to us, or to Congress. He is accountable only to Science. He’s not going to be prosecuted. He’s not going to prison, no matter how many Twitter users crow about it. He will, however, be judged by science, real science, when this is all over. And the real science shows that eleven million people and counting have died so far.