The Deification, and Demonization, of Dr. Anthony Fauci
In the Coronavirus Crisis, the Need for Experts to Guide Us Has Never Been Greater. Our Trust in Them Has Rarely Been Lower.
Ned Potter
Every crisis needs a Harold Denton. We can certainly use one now. In 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant nearly melted down in Pennsylvania, Harold Denton was America’s voice of calm, the face of the U.S. government when a trusted one was needed. He was an engineer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He advised President Carter, gave straight answers at news conferences, delivered bad news when he had to and good news when he could, and soothed a nervous nation.
“Harold Denton was the true hero of the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis,” Dick Thornburgh, the governor of Pennsylvania, told the Harrisburg Patriot-News.
There have been other Harold Dentons — Rudolph Giuliani after 9/11, General Norman Schwarzkopf in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center in innumerable storms, and many more. It is natural for people to rally around reliable figures in troubled times. They become heroes.
And in the COVID-19 pandemic? Well, of course, there’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, and various state governors have surged in popularity as people turned to them for answers — but things have changed in the digital era. The nation is too polarized today, and too many people distrust experts and the facts they try to offer.
It is hardly Dr. Fauci’s fault. At White House briefings and in interviews, he has been a calm, measured voice, offering proven information when he can and admitting when he cannot; and a Fox News poll in April showed that 80 percent approved of the job he was doing. I first encountered him in 2001, when I was an ABC News reporter covering the aftermath of September 11, and he gave off the aura of an honest broker, a man with very little to sell. He has advised every president since Ronald Reagan, seeing the country through AIDS, SARS, MERS, anthrax and Ebola.
So then why was he given a security detail by the U.S. Marshals Service? It is true that Fauci has committed the sin, as diplomatically as he could, of upstaging and occasionally correcting the president. But the issue is far more complex, as old as America and as new as Donald Trump’s latest tweet.
We Hold These Truths….
We Americans are, of all the people of the world’s powers, uniquely individualistic. Remember that we had a revolution to free ourselves of the British crown. We’ve been taught from childhood that all men are created equal, and that this credo is what made America such a land of opportunity. We cling to these beliefs, even though the opportunities in America have been uneven. We have all read about the growing fissure between the so-called elites — the ones with money, power and college degrees — and the millions of people who feel left behind, struggling to scrape together a living on the shop floor.
It has become all the more acute with the rise of online search and social media: Anyone, no matter who they are, how much education they’ve had or how well they’ve done economically, can presumably get all the information they want if they have internet access. That ought to be a wonderful, democratizing thing, but it can be harmful in crises. It’s important, and often valuable, to be skeptical, especially when the stakes are as high as they are in the COVID crisis. But people are asking why we need a Fauci when we have Wikipedia.
“To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything,” said Thomas M. Nichols, author of the 2017 book The Death of Expertise. “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
Taking to Twitter
Almost as if to prove Nichols’s point, The Associated Press ran a piece about the reemergence of experts like Fauci in the face of coronavirus — and started a flood of vitriol on Twitter.
“What a farce!” wrote a woman who said she was a Trump supporter from Florida. “Your Godlike depiction is of the man who has been spectacularly wrong about EVERYTHING.”
“Yah, what a hero!” tweeted a man who described himself as a “recovering former Democrat.” “Fauci has done nothing but bankrupt America with completely failed projection models.”
You could have predicted this reaction before the tweets were written. Coronavirus was a moving target; Fauci was sometimes comforting but also had to warn against returning to normal too soon. Leslie K. John and colleagues at Harvard Business School have done some experiments to show that when an authority figure delivers bad news, people really do want to shoot the messenger. They dislike someone who tells them something they don’t like, even if it is clear that the messenger — for instance, a doctor reporting a discouraging test result or an airline ticket agent announcing a flight delay — had no control over the message. “A key part of generating an explanation for an event is assignment of blame,” the team wrote in 2019.
Fauci has been blamed by some commentators for underestimating the coronavirus risk in the early weeks, but some of the quotations they cite show that he was more cautious than they give him credit for having been.
“The risk right now, today,” Fauci said in an on-camera interview with USA Today on February 18, “currently, is really relatively low for the American public but that could change, because what’s going on outside the United States, particularly obviously in China and in other countries where there are travel-related cases, that this could evolve, and I think it would be unrealistic to deny that, this could evolve into a global pandemic, which would then have significant implications for us.” His words need to be heard in full — that answer is a single run-on sentence — but the headline on the story was too short: “Top disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is ‘minuscule’; skip mask and wash hands,” it said.
Telling the Truth
How, then, to communicate in complex crises? Here is what has historically worked:
· Be truthful. If there is bad news to report, better that people hear it from you.
· Be empathetic. “I would certainly like to be proved wrong” goes a long way if the news is bad.
· Deal in facts. Sometimes, the best answer is an honest “I don’t know.”
· If you make a mistake, own it. Clear it up before someone else clears it up for you.
These are guideposts, of course, not rules; the hard part is defining “bad news” or a mistake. But would they still be useful today, in this age when everyone is a self-appointed expert?
Let’s skip through Donald Trump quickly, since he’s been written about in a million other places, but even many of his allies would agree that the bombast which served him well in political battles has not been effective in a genuine crisis. (“I take no responsibility at all….” “We did everything right….”) The larger question is whether the model for good communications has been broken — whether a voice of calm can break through in cacophonous times.
I would like to think truth still matters, even when people can pick their own versions of truth so easily, but I’m worried. A Pew Research Center survey in March 2020 found that 66 percent of MSNBC viewers believed the COVID virus came about naturally, but only 37 percent of Fox News viewers did. That’s scary: a wide difference over an issue of fact based on political leanings, not expertise. In a crisis, we need experts. If there’s an outbreak of disease, I want an epidemiologist; if there’s a nuclear accident, I want an engineer.
Which brings us back to Harold Denton. I’ll confess I’m old enough (I was just out of college) to recall that he was a calming influence at Three Mile Island, but perhaps the most memorable thing about him was that he wasn’t very memorable. Pictures from 1979 show a slightly disheveled man with thinning hair; a typical television soundbite was: “Most likely, meltdown would not result in early fatalities, it would result in exposure to the public and latent cancers, and land contamination, probably resulting in economic losses.” He never capitalized on his moment of fame. He spent the rest of his career at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He retired in 1998 and died in 2017.
How would he do today? Would he last for a minute?
