The Top Wildly Misleading Criticisms Of Dr. Fauci, Debunked

Litigating masks

The attempts to discredit Fauci have spread around right-wing websites and come from the mouths of White House officials themselves, running the full gamut of the fever swamp ecosystem, but they all share a common misunderstanding: that single errors or misinterpretations completely discredit the broader thrust of public health advice.

Take Mick Mulvaney’s claim in a July 13 CNBC appearance that it was early hesitation on mask-wearing which fatally damaged Fauci’s credibility before President Trump — the same point made in an oppo sheet circulated by the White House.

“I really admire Dr. Fauci, but I was also one of the persons he told to go on television and tell people not to wear masks,” Mulvaney said, before adding that “it’s tough when you don’t have credibility to work with the president of the United States — I think that’s a fair concern to have. If you’ve been wrong a couple times, it makes somebody wonder if you’re wrong again — that’s only human nature.”

Without litigating the mask-wearing issue, it’s hard to take Mulvaney’s point seriously given the months that Trump has refused to wear a mask. It also overlooks that we are still learning how the virus itself infects people. The recommendations that public health officials began to issue in February were based on far less than is known now — consider early public health recommendations based on the virus infecting people from surfaces, and via airborne transmission.

False narratives

Another statement that the right-wing media has seized upon goes to a July 8 press conference at which Fauci appeared with Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), in which Fauci described the country’s then-declining COVID-19 death rate as a “false narrative” because the virus was “dangerous and bad” in other ways, before warning the public not to “get yourself into false complacency.”

Breitbart described Fauci as “downplaying” the then-declining death rate, and Peter Navarro cited the statement as an example of the public health official contradicting himself.

“Now Fauci says a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening,” Navarro wrote. “The lower the mortality rate, the faster and more we can open.”

Flashback to 1918

Other, arguably more innocuous remarks have drawn ire from those seeking to cast Fauci as perpetually wrong.

Fauci described the COVID-19 pandemic in a Georgetown University webinar last week as being “of historic proportions,” before adding that “if you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people died, I mean that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don’t even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of the possibility of … approaching that in seriousness, though I hope that the kinds of interventions that we’re going to be, and are implementing would not allow that to happen.”

It was then left to Mark Meadows, the current White House chief of staff, to chide Fauci last week for the supposed comparison to 1918, calling the remarks “false” and “irresponsible.”

Never 100 percent

HHS Assistant Secretary Adm. Brett Giroir said on Meet the Press this month that Fauci’s focus on matters of public health obscured his ability to take in “the whole national interest.”

INj January 1919, Washington’s health commissioner urged legislators in the state capital, Olympia, to enforce strict measures against the spread of the Spanish flu, which had just ended a deadly second wave in America. Recommended restrictions included banning dances and other social gatherings, as well as limits on how many people could attend public meetings and how far apart they should sit from one another. Both the city and county voted against those measures. In response, the commissioner sought to get the State Board of Health to enforce its police powers against the county. 

Instead, he lost his job. 

A public health official getting fired over unpopular social distancing measures during a pandemic has an eerie echo today, when business leaders and politicians are chafing against restrictions urged by authorities to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was precisely these restrictions that enabled Seattle and other cities in Washington to protect themselves from the Spanish flu—and similar actions helped Kansas abate another influenza wave in the fall of 1919. 

At the center of public health efforts in both states was a practical, plainspoken, bespectacled scientist: Dr. Thomas Dyer Tuttle, who became a powerful, if polarizing, figure in the fight against the Spanish flu—not unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci is perceived today, in the battle against COVID-19.  

Apart from the passing physical resemblance, both Dr. Tuttle and Dr. Fauci fought global pandemics late in their long public health careers and the perilous balance of science and sociology that entails. Both men attended Ivy League medical schools. Both were commissioned officers in the United States Public Health Service. And both had experience fighting previous epidemics. Fauci first came to prominence in the 1980s as the leading HIV/AIDS researcher for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. For Tuttle, it was a resurgence of smallpox at the turn of the 20th century. 

Tuttle was born in Fulton, Missouri, in 1869. He was the son of a grocer who had married into wealth—his mother’s family, according to a local history, had a home encompassing about a quarter of a city block. He received his bachelor’s degree at local Westminster College (where Winston Churchill would deliver his famous “Iron Curtain” speech some 56 years after Dr. Tuttle had graduated). Tuttle then moved to New York City in 1889 to obtain a medical degree at what was then known as Columbia College. 

During that first year of medical school, he unwittingly found himself in the midst of one of the deadliest flu pandemics, the so-called “Russian flu,” which had killed tens of thousands in Europe that fall and arrived in New York in December. That flu would end up causing more than 2,500 deaths in New York before subsiding in February 1890. 

Battle Ready in 1918: Soldiers under quarantine in Washington state during the Spanish flu and Red Cross volunteers sewing masks. (Washington State Historical Society, Gregg Courtwright Collection)

After graduating from Columbia in 1892, Tuttle worked at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital. He later returned to Missouri, where he married his wife, Lucile, in 1896. A few years later, the couple moved to Montana where Tuttle pursued a medical career and became Secretary and Executive Officer of the state’s Board of Health in 1903. 

It was in this role that Dr. Tuttle first learned to value science over unpopular public opinion. In 1909, Tuttle made headlines in local Montana newspapers—ironically, by coming out against quarantines—much to the consternation of the public. Smallpox had ravaged the population in the early 1900s, but Dr. Tuttle’s reasoning behind the order was that lifting quarantines would encourage people to vaccinate. (In 1905, the Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts upheld states’ authority to require smallpox vaccinations in the interest of public health.) Tuttle and the state’s Board of Health had promoted mandatory smallpox vaccinations by offering them free of charge and by circulating a Tuttle-penned pamphlet touting their benefits. Those instructions included sharp words for the anti-vaxxers of the day:

“It is the firm belief of the author that the most effectual way to rid this country of smallpox would be to give a few months warning, in order that all might have time to be successfully vaccinated,” Dr. Tuttle wrote. “And then let any cases of smallpox that might appear go at large, without disinfection, so that those who would not be vaccinated might have the disease and be done with it. Such a move would result in a radical ‘change of heart’ on the part of many, if not all, ‘anti-vaccinationists.’”

In 1915, with smallpox under control in America, Dr. Tuttle accepted a new position as health commissioner of Washington. Three years later, in July 1918, the Spanish flu reached the state. The first set of infections hit the Army’s Camp Lewis, where more than 300 cases were reported. As summer went on, the number of cases appeared to decline and the “alarm went down,” says historian Gwen Whiting. 

But the numbers started to creep up again in September, and public health officials became concerned about a second wave. The state’s Board of Health met in late September specifically to discuss concerns over the flu, and after the meeting Tuttle spoke to a newspaper to warn citizens that the flu would return. Because of limitations on the state Board of Health’s authority, Dr. Tuttle wasn’t able to enforce many orders until November, says Whiting. But he did use his position to encourage local officials to announce stringent measures to contain the pandemic in early October. 

Dr. Tuttle, who lived in Seattle, worked closely with the local health commissioner, Dr. J.S. McBride, to manage the trajectory of flu cases. Alarmed by hundreds of hospitalized cases of flu in the nearby Naval training station, Tuttle declared that the Spanish flu had arrived in the city. Both McBride and Seattle’s mayor, Ole Hanson, acted quickly in response—taking advice from Dr. Tuttle.

Thoughts and Prayers: After closing Seattle’s churches in 1918, Mayor Ole Hanson said, “Religion which won’t keep for two weeks is not worth having.”On October 5, 1918, Mayor Hanson laid out his measures to curb the epidemic in Seattle. “He closed the churches. He shut down public places. They even raised fines for spitting on the sidewalk,” explains Whiting. “You could be fined if you weren’t wearing a mask to get on the streetcar. All of these strict restrictions were put into place in Seattle. And other cities followed suit.” Meanwhile, Dr. Tuttle took to the newspapers to spread health advice— sending letters to the press statewide, proclaiming that the flu might be prevented from becoming epidemic with “the earnest, conscientious and intelligent help of every citizen of the State” following a now-familiar set of precautions: Don’t sneeze or cough in your hands, keep away from crowds, and stay at home if you have any symptoms.  The Cold War: To warn Kansans of the perils of another Spanish flu wave, Dr. Tuttle took his message to the local papers.

As with the COVID-19 pandemic, the response to Spanish flu in Seattle, Spokane and other Washington cities had parallels across the country. New York, St. Louis and Los Angeles also saw success through the use of austere public health measures, while cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia were less restrictive and saw increased flu deaths as a result. But those higher mortality rates are also due, in part, because the severe measures simply weren’t popular. Even in Seattle, “there was a lot of protest.
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protest” over public health restrictions, says Whiting.