Fauci Goes Viral
April 16, 2020 — Much to the chagrin of President Trump, Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the star of the daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings. Having served as a public health advisor to every US president since Ronald Reagan, Fauci’s notoriety spans decades of deadly outbreaks, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, MERS, Ebola, and today: COVID-19. In recent weeks, however, Dr. Fauci has emerged as a partisan lightning rod, attracting strong praise from critics of President Trump, while being portrayed as a sinister fraudster by Trump’s most ardent supporters.
As a public health, economic, and political event, COVID-19 is unparallelled. First, the US is on the brink of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate teetering at 13%. Second, there are vastly higher stakes at play given that it’s an election year, already besieged by ballot errors, and where a number of primaries were compromised by dangerous voting conditions and postponements. Lastly, Trump’s presidency has been laden with intense partisanship, which has created a spillover effect on the state-led responses to COVID-19. For these reasons, Fauci embodies partisanship, either as a villain peddling deep state interests or a saint set on flattening the curve.
To gain attention online, political memes rely on stickiness and in-groups for amplification. When it comes to Dr. Fauci, meme posters divide themselves along the #FireFauci or #TeamFauci ideological fault lines. Perhaps the most popular pro-Fauci is a riff on the Terminator meme template, hinting that Dr. Fauci, like Arnorld Schwarzenegger’s titular character, is the only hope to stop a global apocalypse.
As a meme though, Dr. Fauci not only represents a pro-science position, but also a political wedge in Trump’s plan to reopen America as fast as possible. For example, conspiratorial memes, political cartoons and rumors circulating about Dr. Fauci include “the plandemic,” where he is accused of purposefully slowing Trump’s reopening of the economy, or working clandestinely on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, China, and the World Health Organization.
Despite these falsities, Fauci is a meme-able reaction character and has, pun intended, gone viral on social media. Reaction memes play off figures in politics and popular culture to quickly capture emotional responses for sharing on social media. Fauci’s facial responses during White House task force briefings can be comical and are sometimes interpreted as subtle signals to undermine Trump.
Themes in right wing memes celebrating Sander’s withdrawal include references to popular culture, condemnations of his socialist economic policies, and topical jokes about COVID-19. Many incorporate the sexual assault allegations hanging above the head of presumptive nominee Joe Biden.
On Sunday night, Trump retweeted the hashtag #FireFauci and set off widespread speculation about an impending exit. By Monday afternoon, however, the Deputy Assistant to the President, Hogan Gidley, tweeted a statement clarifying the misleading retweet, emphasizing that Trump “is not firing Dr. Fauci.” Despite having debunked the rumor, speculation about an internal feud persists across social media platforms. #FireFauci has become a central discussion space for networks of anti-vaccine activists spamming replies to Trump’s tweets and online conservative pundits and talk show hosts who have been leading the charge against Fauci.
The most notable figure driving the conspiratorial attacks against Dr. Fauci is Shiva Ayyadurai, a former MIT bioengineer and full time right wing troll. According to Politico, “Dr. Shiva” as he is known to his many fervent followers, claims that Fauci has deep ties to big pharma and advocates for mandatory vaccines. Dr. Shiva started a petition calling on Trump to indict and fire Fauci, which to date, has garnered nearly 67,000 signatures. COVID-19 is a rallying point for anti-vaccination activists, who are attempting to influence discussion on all platforms.
Through it all, rumors, conspiracy, and health misinformation are quickly attaching themselves to Fauci’s name. This creates an indexical challenge for search and social companies in terms of fighting misinformation. Although search terms like “COVID-19” and “coronavirus” redirect users on Google or Twitter to local health authorities like the CDC, keywords like “Fauci” and “plandemic” do not. As it stands, separating medical recommendations from dangerous health misinformation is an immense challenge for our media ecosystem. While many social media platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter, have doubled-down on purging misleading and false content, the sheer volume of information about COVID-19, good, bad, and indifferent, is unprecedented.
Our point, though, is a simple one: to believe the science, one must believe the scientist. While social media users will take any opportunity to insert memes into the online discourse, our dire global situation will not be solved with pithy reactions. This polarized distrust fermenting online amongst the conspiratorial right will continue to endanger public health, and we expect to see the further politicization of Dr. Fauci’s COVID-19 response plan as we head deeper into the 2020 election season.
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Meme War Weekly is a newsletter addressing political messaging that comes from the wilds of the internet, produced by the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Each week, we will look closely at the use of popular slogans and images and how they are shifting political conversations.
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