By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-08-03 23:59:44 | Updated at 2026-08-04 02:20:39
2 hours ago
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 institute director, gave him deep institutional knowledge, relationships across government, and high public visibility.
After so long in office, he had connections everywhere — and he used them with relish.
People who crossed him were unlikely to get funded; people who pleased him had a much better shot.
No wonder he saw himself as the embodiment of science itself.
But science isn’t something that people are; it’s something people do.
It’s a system in which hypotheses are tested, supported or falsified, and developed further.
And allowing one person, with all his human biases and weaknesses, to hold so much power over science for so long can only do that system harm.
It’s not just Fauci.
Look at the field of Alzheimer’s research, where for decades the so-called “Amyloid Mafia” — a powerful, self-reinforcing network of scientists, grant reviewers, journal gatekeepers, conference organizers and industry figures — pushed the amyloid cascade hypothesis of the disease.
Key figures like Dennis Selkoe at Harvard and Paul Aisen at the University of Southern California saw to it that their pet theory took precedence over alternative ideas.
It was nearly impossible to get grant approval for proposals in the field that didn’t include an amyloid angle, and papers pushing alternate hypotheses were frequently rejected.
Meanwhile drugs based on the amyloid hypothesis didn’t really work — and one of the most important papers promoting the theory turned out, in 2022, to be fraudulent.
According to investigative journalist Charles Piller, who detailed the “fraud, arrogance, and tragedy” last year in his book “Doctored,” the incestuous, self-protecting nature of the amyloid clique meant that a decade or more of potential progress was lost.
(That’s a loss I feel personally: My mother has Alzheimer’s and is currently in memory care; my father, too, suffered from it before his death.)
The granddaddy of scientific groupthink is the Soviet school of Lysenkoism, the Marxist-influenced theory of evolution that dominated Russia’s agriculture across three decades, with disastrous results.
But because Josef Stalin found the concepts espoused by Trofim Lysenko to be congenial, it was deadly dangerous to contradict them.
Science advances by criticism, dialogue and challenges to widely held beliefs — even if those beliefs are held by those in power.
Systems in which the powerful can steer money to their friends and away from critics tend to do bad science, or no science at all.
Science is never really “settled,” in other words — and the insistence that it can be was one of the most damaging messages of the COVID years.
We need to fix NIAID, NIH and other science agencies to make open communication and diversity of ideas easier, and to make it harder for those at the top to build empires and stifle critics.
No more Faucis, ever again.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
