(What other COVID-19 trends am I forgetting? Let me know!)
Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci will testify before the Senate on Wednesday — and it’s expected to be feisty.
Leading up to Fauci’s testimony, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released thousands of pages of diary entries that Fauci wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remember, Fauci and Paul famously did not see eye to eye on pandemic shutdown strategies.
OK, so about those diary entries?: Fauci’s diary entries reveal he was acutely aware of the growing media interest in him. He wrote that he considered some of the attention “flattering.”
Excerpt from March 22, 2020: “Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washington Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic. I am trying in several articles and on TV to clarify that the POTUS is tsalking about hope for therapies although there are no good data, while I must stick to the science and so fundamentally we are approaching this from different, but not conflicting standpoints.”
Excerpt from May 21, 2020: “Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world.”
📕 Read Fauci’s diary entries
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The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu writes how Fauci’s reputation and “empire” have been torn apart over the past few years.
The gist: “Once famed for being America’s consummate nonpartisan scientist, Fauci is now a far more polarizing kind of public figure: beloved and reviled for what he’s said to represent; targeted by threats to end his life. The more he talks, the more he stands to lose.”
Interesting excerpt: “His achievements speak to his scientific credentials, but also to his ambition and savvy. Fauci was a master of the system: He knew how to acquire and maintain scientific power; he had the ear of both academics and politicians. He eagerly courted attention, while maintaining that he was ‘completely nonpolitical,’ to the point that even his close colleagues at NIAID had no idea how he voted in elections.”
Read more: ‘The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci’
