08/24/2026
What I find especially galling is watching people with nowhere near Anthony Fauci’s expertise in infectious disease, epidemics, and public health portray themselves as authorities on his work.
Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist. RFK Jr. is not a physician or scientist. Yet they publicly interrogate and discredit a physician-scientist who spent decades confronting HIV/AIDS, other infectious diseases, and public-health emergencies—as though their opinions carry equivalent scientific weight. They don’t.
I lived through the worst years of AIDS. I watched friends and their doctors try anything that might keep them alive another month, week, or day. When someone you love is dying, you want the best doctors and scientists using every legitimate piece of knowledge available. You don’t want politicians and laypeople rewriting that desperate history as though imperfect medicine confronting a terrifying new disease were a murderous conspiracy.
Then came Covid. Fauci and thousands of doctors, nurses, researchers, and public-health workers again had to understand a new disease in real time. Recommendations changed as evidence accumulated, treatments evolved, and mistakes were made. Scientists can be wrong, and institutions can be criticized. But changing guidance is not proof of conspiracy, nor does it make expertise irrelevant.
It is embarrassing that Rand Paul and RFK Jr. can be treated as though they exposed a career infectious-disease scientist simply by attacking him loudly enough. While Fauci and countless others were trying to keep people alive during AIDS and protect the public from Covid, these people weren’t doing that work.
I remember who was.
Anthony Fauci did not set out to become a political lightning rod. But, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg explains, he couldn’t escape becoming a polarizing figure in Donald Trump’s Washington.
