Fauci will 'continue to play the media game' long after retirement, medical critic argues

Dr. Anthony Fauci may be retiring, but he continues to receive both attention and admiration from the mainstream media. According to Dr. Phil Magness, that might not change anytime soon.

"I imagine he is going to continue to play the media game… That seems what he likes to do is to get in front of the camera," The American Institute for Economic Research director told Fox News Digital.

In Oct. 2020, Magness’ organization originally coordinated with the Great Barrington Declaration, an assembling of doctors, scientists and infectious disease epidemiologists that criticized Fauci’s lockdown approach to the coronavirus pandemic while promoting herd immunity and what they referred to as "focused protection."

Fauci denounced the declaration "nonsense and very dangerous," though lockdowns were found to have caused immense harm to people in the years following its publication.

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Magness suggested that this came from Fauci’s love of the spotlight as well as "great contempt for democratic governance."

"There is a deep authoritarian extreme from what he has approached with the pandemic," Magness said.

During the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, Fauci originally advised against wearing masks to avoid the spread of the virus and warned about "unintended consequences" of masking on "60 Minutes."

Since then, he has continued to push masking and even insisted on MSNBC in July of this year how difficult it is to convince people to mask up nowadays.

Fauci also appeared to undermine the use of vaccines after they became more widely available in 2021. 

In Apr. 2020, Fauci originally stated Americans couldn’t completely resume normal life without vaccinations. However, by October of the following year, he admitted on CNN that it was "tough to predict" when Americans could stop masking indoors, despite vaccines having been available for several months. 

Throughout the pandemic, the media has lavished praise on Fauci, with the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson referring to him as "the greatest public servant" he’s ever known back in October. He also continued to be featured in various news segments across mainstream outlets like CNN and MSNBC, with anchors and hosts routinely thanking him and gushing over his service. Several different outlets conducted "exit interviews" with him in recent weeks as he gets set to leave his government position.

Magness credited this affection for Fauci to his "symbiotic" relationship with the media that seeks to benefit both Fauci and their industry.

"It’s clear that he gathers what he thinks the media wants to hear and then he goes on TV and repeats it back to him. And they’re like ‘oh, Fauci has spoken. This is a matter of fact now.’ But he’s only repeating their own talking points," Magness said.

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He added, "I think it’s symbiotic with them. Here’s a guy who’s been in office for 40+ years. He’s cultivated very strong relationships by playing the media game all the way back to the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. So, he’s a known entity in that respect."

Magness further attacked the media and Fauci for appearing to politicize the virus, despite the doctor’s claim otherwise.

"The other part of the media is they were trying to make a very clear political line. The media does tend to lean toward the left for various reasons, [and] [d]uring the pandemic, Fauci became a hero of the political left by the pandemic narrative and therefore sort of rallied around the guy as sort of a foil to Trump, even though Trump himself was originally pro-lockdown and involved in appointing Fauci," he said.

Magness added, "And next thing you know, you wonder why trust in public health authorities has been undermined because they aren’t actually doing their job. They’re playing the politics route."

Fauci’s experience with the media dated back to his work with the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, Magness noted, with a lot of the same mistakes.

During that time, Fauci warned Americans that AIDS would "devastate" the population and could even spread to small children through "close contact," creating what some advocates described as stigmatizing of the homosexual community. Less than two months after the accusation, Fauci later claimed that it was "absolutely preposterous" to suggest the disease could be contracted by basic social contact.

The AIER and Magness also documented Fauci’s AIDS missteps in an analysis from 2021 on Fauci’s original claims about the virus.

"We now know of course that Fauci’s theory was wrong…The damage was already done though, as the media went to work stoking alarm about AIDS transmission through simple routine contacts. Hundreds of newspapers disseminated the distressing theory from Fauci’s article," the analysis read.

Although Fauci’s conflicting narratives were documented in journalist Randy Shilts’ book "And the Band Played On," Fauci continued to be pushed by the media decades later.

"There’s an entire chapter in there about how Anthony Fauci spread fear and just basically fed off this panic… and that’s just all been kind of swept under the rug the last couple of years during Covid. Unfortunately, some of the people who were the loudest voices against him, the Larry Kramer types have passed away, so they’re no longer here to remind anyone that this guy botched a previous epidemic," Magness said.

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A similar case of what was described as "flip-flopping" occurred with the infamous "lab leak theory" regarding the origins of the coronavirus. Fauci originally insisted publicly in 2020 that he was "very, very strongly leaning" towards the idea that the virus was not "artificially or deliberately manipulated." However, emails released in 2021 revealed that scientists seriously considered the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a lab as far back as Jan. 2020, despite Fauci insisting the opposite. 

Nevertheless, Fauci later claimed that he and other scientists always kept an "open mind" regarding the claim as experts began confirming the possibility of the lab leak theory.

By contrast, some scientists and reporters revealed trepidation in even discussing the lab leak theory in the interim due to appearing to go against Fauci’s claims and agreeing with then-President Trump. 

Although Fauci has attempted to portray himself as an apolitical figure, he became increasingly hostile towards GOP figures who criticized his pandemic advice, his doubts on the lab leak theory and his potential financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He later argued that these attacks on him amounted to attacks on science and truth itself.

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"Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people and there was pushback against me, so if you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science, and anybody that looks at what is going on clearly sees that," Fauci said.

Magness remarked how Fauci’s denial as well as his promotion in the media could at least show the dangers of an overly politicized pandemic long after his retirement.

"The dangers of politicization of a pandemic in either direction and on either side….It all becomes about empirical control," Magness concluded.