Faucis follies time to toss the science is settled groupthink

One lesson stands out among the many we must take away from the debacle of COVID-19: No more Faucis.I don’t mean keeping petty, preening public servants out of positions of authority; that’s probably asking too much. Anthony Fauci proved himself to be both last week, when he cited the Fifth Amendment 111 times to skirt questions in Congress — yet still managed to convict himself. His dodging looked bad, and the release of his diary made him look worse: a shallow, vain, dishonest man more concerned with politics and media coverage than with doing his job, which he did poorly.  But while I’d be happy to see Fauci in the dock, his reputational downfall can’t be the end of the COVID reckoning.So let me repeat: No more Faucis.  By that I mean we should never again allow a single bureaucrat or a small group to exercise the sweeping and largely unchecked institutional power that Fauci wielded for decades.Fauci served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until the end of 2022. In this role, he was the senior federal official overseeing the bulk of US government-funded research on infectious diseases, immunology, allergy and related areas.Thirty-eight years is too long for anyone to head a bureaucracy. And while Fauci didn’t control all of America’s biomedical research — NIH as a whole, other federal agencies, private foundations and industry fund more — his long tenure at NIAID made him particularly influential.Cumulative funding under his direction ran into the tens of billions of dollars.After 9/11, NIAID became the lead civilian agency for biodefense research against Category A agents like anthrax and smallpox, vaccines, diagnostics and medical countermeasures.This included expanded work on “dual-use research of concern” — that is, research on pathogens that could be used either to treat illness or to maliciously spread it. Fauci’s continuous four-decade tenure, unprecedented for an NIH inst...