Dr. Fauci and Medicine's Branding Crisis

Dr. Anthony Fauci frustrated much of America by refusing to testify before the Senate hearing earlier this week. He was granted a sweeping pardon by then-President Joe Biden, so he need not worry about federal charges, but he may be concerned about his brand. His newly released diaries show that he exhibited glee and excitement as he became a household name, so branding is not naught to him. In truth, how we are remembered (and understood) matters to most of us. That said, Fauci’s “brand” is tied to something bigger—to the brand of medicine itself.

During the collective panic of the covid era, Fauci wasn’t just one doctor in a white coat. He wasn’t even just the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) or just the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. He was the personification of medicine as a unified body. One might go further still and say that he personified scientism, as made clear by the “Follow the science” maxim. (Scientism is a heretical ideology that raises empiricism and skepticism as unerring and as the only methods to know truth.) As the embodiment thereof, Fauci could neither lie nor be wrong. His intentions must be pure and noble.

Doctors and nurses were fired for questioning the policies that he recommended, and which so many (blindly) implemented. The damage is still largely untold as people not only lost their livelihoods, but young children failed to learn to discern emotions from facial expressions that were hidden beneath masks during formative years of their lives. Students did so poorly in work-from-home environments that schools and colleges auto-passed them because it became impractical to do anything else. Depression and suicides soared. Sick people died alone in hospitals and nursing homes. The grieving were denied funerals in which they might find closure and pray collectively for the dead. And these are merely the social consequences of such “scientific” policies.

The face of it all—whom we were told not to question—was connected to the lab that likely started it and to the media figures that accelerated the panic. Now, there’s a desperation to get Fauci to testify and to get to the truth of what happened. But the truth is much more disturbing than one man. The truth is that the cultish adherence to medical authorities during that period revealed the true allegiance of most Americans. Under the auspices of “the science,” every public and private function could be rent asunder.

As such, medicine has a branding issue. Trust in the industry has been greatly weakened. But scapegoating one man (however guilty he is), does not fix the faith problem that was exposed during the covid years. Too many people have a faith in medicine and science that is pseudo-religious in nature. Medicine’s self-presentation as a force against human suffering and death at any cost poses it in a god-like role and its practitioners as saviors. Yet because medicine is merely a human institution, it will fail by error and by vice. Thus, it presents a poor foundation for any society.

Medicine doesn’t merely have a branding problem; it struggles to fill a deific role as a human industry. The “brand” of medicine as purely altruistic needs to collapse, because it was always a lie. We can and should be grateful for the advances of medicine that have reduced human suffering and extended lives, but when we exalt it beyond its nature, we do tremendous harm to the social fabric and can even create an unsustainable civilization.

In an environment of widespread professed secularism within our institutions, we create a void for religious attachment, if only because Man is inherently God-seeking. G.K. Chesterton warns us that, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The covid saga exemplified his warning, as a supposedly areligious industry developed a zealous fervor and devoted disciples.

It is possible for us to bring good out of that era if we can come to the widespread realization of the limitations of medicine, and of our propensity to idolize those who work in the industry. Dr. Anthony Fauci was a high priest in an unadmitted religion of our age. It is well that he is dethroned, but let us not miss the rest.