R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nine when his uncle was murdered and fourteen when his father was. Even in his youth, he recalled, he doubted that Oswald had acted alone. But, where his father had hesitated, he charged ahead. He came to see evidence of C.I.A. involvement as “so insurmountable” that it lay “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
The Kennedy assassination sent dark suspicions swirling through the national psyche. Distrust of experts crescendoed again in the nineteen-eighties, with the appearance of a mysterious new disease. In 1981, as otherwise healthy gay men started dying of unexpected cancers and infections, a government immunologist named Anthony Fauci pushed aside his other research to focus on the puzzling malady. Fauci sent off his first article on the subject late that year, when there were only two hundred and ninety recognized cases. Still, he warned that the syndrome, soon to be called AIDS, was “of essentially epidemic proportions for a particular segment of our society.”
Fauci’s early research positioned him as the government’s central figure in crafting AIDS policy, with considerable power to decide which treatments would be tested. This made him an intense focus of activists, who distrusted his judgments. In 1990, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, stormed the National Institutes of Health campus where Fauci worked. They carried caskets with the words “Fuck you, Fauci” and burned him in effigy.
David France’s “How to Survive a Plague” (2016) describes this clash between insiders and outsiders. ACT UP’s slogan was “Drugs Into Bodies,” but prominent members like Larry Kramer were skeptical of AZT, the drug Fauci was focussing on, and pushed for alternatives. “In the absence of adequate health care, we have learned to become our own clinicians, researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, pharmacists,” the activist Derek Hodel explained. A drug called Compound Q, derived from a cucumber-like plant, seemed promising; Kramer declared it a cure. Patients sourced it from Asia and received infusions at “guerrilla cliniQs.” When Fauci declined to test it, the advocate Marty Delaney recruited physicians, an ethics panel, and a lawyer to run secret drug trials.
AZT turned out to be crucial to the first antiretroviral cocktails, whereas Compound Q was abandoned because of its dangerous side effects. Still, Fauci proved willing, with time, to accept off-road researchers as collaborators, not cranks. (It surely helped that the citizen scientists tended to be well-educated white men. “Would the government have listened to dykes, street queens, and women of color?” the movement veteran Sarah Schulman asks in her 2021 history, “Let the Record Show.”) Before long, Fauci was describing ACT UP members as “intelligent, gifted, articulate people coming up with good, creative ideas.”
It was a triumph of trust. ACT UP pushed the reluctant F.D.A. to approve aerosolized pentamidine, a vital treatment for a deadly opportunistic lung infection, and to allow fast-track access to experimental medicines for those not in formal drug trials. These hard-won victories saved lives. “Scientists themselves do not have a lock on correctness,” Fauci conceded. “Activists bring a special insight.”
Over the years, friendships blossomed. Fauci established the Martin Delaney Collaboratories at the N.I.H. for H.I.V.-cure research, and delivered a eulogy at Delaney’s memorial service. In 1988, Kramer had called Fauci a “FUCKING SON OF A BITCH OF A DUMB IDIOT” and a “murderer” in an open letter. Yet, when he was dying, in 2020, he told Fauci that he loved him. “I love you, too, Larry,” Fauci replied, through tears.
This doesn’t mean no lines were drawn. As the causes of and most effective treatments for AIDS came into view, Fauci and many prominent activists closed ranks against heterodox theories. The publisher Charles Ortleb, whose gay biweekly, the New York Native, had offered the most comprehensive coverage of AIDS available, rejected the idea that H.I.V. caused AIDS as a Big Pharma lie. For this and related heresies, ACT UP ostracized Ortleb and boycotted his paper. Fauci felt Ortleb’s type of skepticism to be “so preposterous” that it didn’t merit debate. Shortly after ACT UP’s victories in the nineteen-nineties, the word “denialism” entered common parlance, largely in reference to nonconformist beliefs regarding AIDS.
Which skeptical views merit consideration? Which are denialism? Those questions haunted the Kennedy assassination and the early AIDS crisis, and they returned with COVID-19. As before, the gravity of the situation reduced tolerance for open-ended inquiry. “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts,” the Washington Post’s Peter Jamison wrote. “But it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”
The experts would require a lot of trust, because they were recommending astonishing measures. It was no small thing to issue stay-at-home orders, shut schools, close businesses, and mandate masks. But early reports from China, where authorities were physically sealing off apartment buildings, were encouraging about the efficacy of such tactics.
It was a moment of choice—did you trust experts or not?—and there was a clear partisan skew. The previous Democratic President, Obama, had been a Harvard-trained law professor who had used the word “smart” to justify his policies more than nine hundred times. The sitting Republican President, Trump, was a blunt businessman who had declined to nominate a science adviser for more than a year and a half.
For liberals, veneration of expertise became a shibboleth. The ubiquitous “In this house, we believe . . .” signs usually included “science is real” as an article of faith. There was something “deeply ironic” about formulating the support for science as a religious creed, Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson observe in “The Weaponization of Expertise” (M.I.T.). But this support veered toward dogma, and had a pope: Fauci, or St. Anthony Fauci, as votive candles bearing his likeness called him. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci declared.
If there was an apostate, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The “F” stands for Francis, as in St. Francis of Assisi, about whom Kennedy has written a children’s book. Kennedy admires St. Francis for choosing to live among people with leprosy. Since becoming a pariah himself, after his vaccine-safety crusade, Kennedy has warmed to other spurned beliefs, no matter their plausibility. He has publicly contemplated whether cellphones cause cancer, tainted tap water leads to “sexual dysphoria,” and the white trails behind airplanes contain toxic chemicals. Although claiming not to be a doubter himself, Kennedy devoted two chapters of one of his books to airing “legitimate queries” about whether H.I.V. causes AIDS.
Already a professional heretic, Kennedy became the pandemic’s leading skeptic. Lockdowns were authoritarian, masks were pointless, vaccines were unsafe. An expensive antiviral drug Fauci backed, remdesivir, was “deadly,” whereas two off-patent, cheap drugs—hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—had shown “staggering, life-saving efficacy.” And COVID-19 probably came not from a wet market but from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where (this part is true) scientists funded by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had modified bat viruses to experiment on. Kennedy raised the “ironic possibility” that Fauci, having warned about pandemics that never materialized, finally decided to create one.
In his suspicion of pharmaceutical firms, support for unsanctioned drugs, and wild accusations against Fauci, R.F.K., Jr., resembled ACT UP’s Larry Kramer. But Kennedy didn’t receive the Kramer treatment. Rather, his ideas were treated like contagious diseases. YouTube removed videos of him; Instagram cancelled his account. Although “The Real Anthony Fauci” was an energetically researched best-seller on an important topic by a well-known author, it was nearly impossible to find a review of it in a major periodical. Russell and Patterson regard such deplatformings as “intellectual tyranny.”
A popular subreddit, r/HermanCainAward, featured screenshots from the social-media accounts of people who, like the politician Herman Cain, had spoken against the medical orthodoxy and then died of COVID. Comments were gleeful and marbled with élite scorn toward “spreadnecks.” (“Another 6th grade educated gravy neck.” “Bye fatty.” To a deceased mother of four: “Rest in piss.”) At its peak, in late 2020, the subreddit—essentially a snuff website—had nearly a million daily visitors.
There was a reason that medical dissent stirred so much hostility. People were dying, and the urge to take swift, decisive action was overwhelming. Anyone refusing to go along was an impediment, or, worse, a vector. It was a panicked moment, when erroneous ideas could actually kill.
Still, enforcing a “consensus” risks purging the countervailing views that make intellectual inquiry work. Fauci and his colleagues had benefitted from the adversarial pressure of ACT UP. Yet they had little patience for COVID activists. Did this closed-mindedness lead them into error?
“In Covid’s Wake” (Princeton), by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, offers a revelatory look back on the pandemic. Its conclusions are devastating to both the left and the right; most of us got big things wrong. (I certainly did.) Given this omnidirectional confusion, the imposition of a tight orthodoxy—more J.F.K. assassination than AIDS crisis—retrospectively seems to be one of the most unfortunate choices in a sea of them.
The establishment’s rigidity is most evident with respect to COVID’s origins. Might it have come from the Wuhan laboratory that was experimenting with bat viruses? This was “so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this kind of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” the biologist Kristian Andersen wrote to colleagues investigating the matter in early 2020. Yet blaming the lab risked angering China, stoking racism, and embarrassing U.S. health agencies that had funded the Wuhan research. After hearing from Andersen’s group, Fauci declared the lab-leak possibility to be “in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” With Fauci’s guidance, Andersen’s group published a paper that declared, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Facebook duly banned lab-leak posts. (By the end of Joe Biden’s Administration, the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy had cautiously accepted the lab-leak hypothesis.)
