America Got ‘Faucied’

We first got Faucied with the masks, and the record is written in Fauci’s own voice. On March 8, 2020, he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that “[t]here’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” He added that a mask “might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.” Weeks later, Fauci flipped. He was not only endorsing masks, but he eventually was promoting double masking, including cloth, with the confident claim that “if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.”

The man who once declared that attacks on him were attacks on science was not using science when he lied about masks. Treating the public like children who require managed messaging does not qualify as science. Fauci instructed that we did not need masks with the same scientific, medical authority he later used to try to sell double masking. And his explanation for his first story: He needed to tell us something so that we wouldn’t use up all the PPE supply. Or as he might suggest, he lied to us for our own good.

The same top-down posture extended to families. Prolonged school closures were advanced and defended despite clear evidence that children faced far lower risk of severe illness than adults. Parents who wanted their children in classrooms where learning, socialization, and mental health could be preserved were treated as obstacles rather than primary decision makers. That is not public health. It is substitution of bureaucratic preference and social manipulation for parental authority.

Americans were also denied the full range of information needed to combat COVID on their own terms. Discussion of early treatment options, natural immunity, and the limits of certain interventions was often discouraged or dismissed rather than openly debated. When the nation’s leading health official positions himself as the final arbiter, he leaves little room for the free exchange of ideas that free people and free markets require. Free enterprise depends on informed individuals making voluntary choices. A system that withholds or shapes information to produce compliance undermines that foundation.

None of these reasons means a successful criminal prosecution is realistic. As a former prosecutor, I would love to evaluate the evidence of all his actions with the goal of holding Fauci criminally accountable. But intent to kill or destroy the lives of millions remains difficult to prove under our evidentiary standards when decisions rest on evolving data, institutional pressures, and public messaging under crisis. Former President Biden’s broad preemptive pardon covering Fauci’s official conduct further complicates the federal criminal door. Any prosecutor must acknowledge the difficulty of producing a case. Being caught in demonstrable inconsistencies and overconfident claims is not the same as proof beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal specific criminal conduct.

But the potential absence of a criminal case doesn’t mean Fauci gets a free pass. The nation’s preeminent health official during a once-in-a-century crisis does not get to impose sweeping costs of disrupted childhoods, eroded trust, and constrained personal choices, and then retreat behind Fifth Amendment silence and a presidential shield. Ordinary Americans are living with the consequences of decisions made by Fauci – who is owed no continued deference.

Accountability does not always require a courtroom. Sometimes it requires only that we stop pretending we don’t see the truth. It requires that we restore the principle that free people, not unaccountable bureaucrats, retain the right to make their own medical decisions.

Yes, he gets his own word – a verb. Enshrining the term “to be Faucied” ensures his name remains the permanent cautionary symbol of the approach we must always remember – and never accept – in American health care.