Last week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year after a long and storied career. Leading Republicans predictably responded by promising to "hold him accountable" for the pandemic. They threatened to send him to prison for "his Frankenstein experiments. " The ensuing character assassination against this long-time government scientist is something to behold and it's worth taking a look at how it happened.
I imagine that most people had never heard of Fauci before the COVID pandemic hit but it was not surprising that the Trump administration brought him forward to speak to the public as one of the nation's top scientific experts on viral epidemics. Fauci guided the research on HIV/AIDS and helped create the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has helped save millions of lives throughout the developing world. His pioneering work in the field of human immunoregulation has been key to our understanding of the human immune response.
