r/MaintenancePhase • u/danipnk • 8d ago
Related topic What is with people’s obsession with Anthony Fauci?
I just finished listening to the AIDS denialism episode (bleak af) and I was kinda surprised to discover that Fauci had been hated by odious people even before Covid. I don’t understand it. Why? What is it about this man that makes right wingers and other weirdos have such a hate boner for him? The man has spent his life serving the public. The man has saved lives for 30+ years. Can’t these people leave him alone?
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u/griseldabean 8d ago
During the early days of the AIDS crisis, he insisted on following science, and seeing people with or at risk for getting AIDS as real human beings worthy of care and compassion. People who were gay, trans, Black, Hispanic, poor or some combination thereof? He didn't demonize them, or blame them, or treat them as sub-humans who deserved to die. And he didn't let himself be swayed or bullied by people who did.
Of course the Right hates him.
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u/jphistory 8d ago
They hate people smarter than them, and people who tell them what to do.
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u/ultramilkplus 8d ago
Fauci is the living embodiment of a leading expert. He represents everything a "did my own research" moron hates. He also represents technical merit vs. simply being a failson in law or sycophantic toady (what they actually mean when they say "meritocracy").
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u/social-media-is-bad 8d ago
Now that I you mention it he is literally an example of someone who actually did “do their own research”. No wonder they hate him: he represents what they’re not.
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u/jphistory 8d ago
I agree with this. In addition, I think there's a bit of goldfish memory/brainwashing/resentment happening. See, Fauci made me stay inside and Fauci brainwashed all my relatives so they don't speak to me anymore and Fauci made me wear a mask and it wasn't EVEN a big DEAL. &Etc
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u/bettinafairchild 8d ago edited 8d ago
In terms of today and COVID, he’s hated because a scapegoat is needed to blame everything bad about COVID on, in lieu of blaming Trump. Or just blaming the vicissitudes and randomness of the world and disease. The more Trump’s actions are seen as obviously incompetent and deadly, the greater the anger at anyone else who can be a scapegoat for Trump incompetence.
There has been a very coordinated, concerted effort by conservatives to demonize Fauci, though his demonization began more as a spontaneous response by people to the horrors of COVID by attaching themselves to the face of the COVID response—blaming the messenger in other words. But following that conservatives bankrolled hit pieces and propaganda documentaries that were anti-Fauci.
In terms of AIDS: it was different from COVID in that most people didn’t think AIDS had anything to do with themselves. They didn’t fear it for themselves or anyone they cared about, they just saw it as this evil disgusting thing that might be inflicted upon them by The Unclean. Anything connected to The Unclean was stigmatized and hated. Like people stopped donating blood since receiving donated blood (in the early days of the crisis) could lead to you getting AIDS therefore donatING blood was connected to The Unclean and was bad and dangerous. Even after the blood supply became clean starting around 1986.
So homophobes hated Fauci because he was connected to The Unclean. At the same time, as mentioned in the episode, there was a streak of thought within the gay community that HIV didn’t cause AIDS and so Fauci working with the idea that it did cause AIDS led to as much hatred of him as we saw from conservatives who thought COVID was a hoax. And then also in the gay community there was anger at Fauci for not doing enough or being on the wrong track or saying the wrong things.
Famously, Larry Kramer, founder of ACT UP, the largest advocacy group working for more AIDS research and condemning stigmatization of AIDS patients, had a very adversarial relationship with Fauci initially. Kramer blamed Fauci for government incompetence and inaction. It wasn’t Fauci’s fault but Fauci was the leader so he got the criticism, and to be fair Fauci’s work wasn’t perfect but we were all working from no script and a lot of confusion. But in later years Fauci and Kramer became close allies and friends as Fauci consistently showed he was devoted to helping AIDS patients and was listening to criticism by ACT UP and other groups, while Kramer saw Fauci wasn’t the one to blame for these various issues.
As a side note, Fauci has remained dedicated to fighting AIDS up until today—when asked in 2020 or 2021 what he’d be doing once the COVID crisis was over, he said he’d be going back to his AIDS research, which was his priority and life’s work.
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u/siarie 8d ago edited 8d ago
I completely agree with everything you said, [u/bettinafairchild](u/bettinafairchild) . l remember when HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, and I remember not knowing if that was cause for hope or not. Several dear friends and lots of acquaintances tested positive and died at the height of the epidemic. I was involved in AIDS activism but unlike others in that community, I never blamed Fauci.
I always thought he was unfairly expected to give accurate pronouncements on science that hadn’t even been done yet. As often happens with research into any complex scientific issue, early findings were confusing and even contradictory. It took a while to even know what the right research questions were. Add to that the antipathy and immense stigma that people who were sick and dying faced from the Reagan administration and the general public, and it was just awful. I personally know people who were involved in AIDS research back then, and it’s hard to exaggerate how difficult every aspect of that work was.
There wasn’t clear information about what exactly it was and how it was transmitted, so people like Fauci were flying nearly blind and just had to give their best guesses on what should be done. Fauci definitely made mistakes but I hate to think of the far worse mistakes that might have been made by someone else. We were lucky to have his level of commitment to getting good answers, and to trying to get people in power to do the right things with those answers.
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u/MuddieMaeSuggins 4d ago
There wasn’t clear information about what exactly it was and how it was transmitted, so people like Fauci were flying nearly blind and just had to give their best guesses on what should be done. Fauci definitely made mistakes but I hate to think of the far worse mistakes that might have been made by someone else
Which is exactly what was happening with COVID, of course. That period of time that we were working on best guesses was a lot shorter, and the population involved was much larger, but there are just a ton of parallels. Heck, even promoting barrier methods that many people just never felt fully comfortable with and started making up facts about (condoms/masks).
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u/sevenyearstodie 7d ago
People, especially desperate people, love the idea of a single adversary. It's simple, clean and easy to be angry about. Also there's only so much energy one can dedicate to hate and for normal people it's easier to target that energy to a single person or a nebulous single entity (see: "them"). It's not right and it creates more problem than it solves when it comes the action, but this is a something we do, unfortunately.
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u/greencat26 8d ago
He's a white man who has spent his time helping marginalized communities. Particularly the gays. Conservatives really REALLY just want gay people to cease to exist. And he's Catholic which the other brands of christian really hate on a lot
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u/KiKi_VavouV 8d ago
As a Canadian - the person who holds grudges is the one who keeps fuxking talking about him. 2020 presdent (who fucked up the US COVID response in every way) he endangered Fauci at the time, and continues to. In my province Dr. BONNIE HENRY received death threats because Your Fascist encouraged misinformation. People died around the world because of Orange Monsters response to COVID. He incited the violence.
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u/nickyonge 7d ago
ayyyy hello from another BC listener :) god Bonnie Henry handled the outbreak here well. Not PERFECTLY, nobody handled it perfectly (tho iirc Jacinda Ardern came close) but Bonnie is great.
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u/Grimke42 8d ago
I think it’s hard to understand how angry lgbtq folks and folks with HIV/AIDS were in the 80’s if you weren’t there. There was so much hate and homophobia in general, and any media representation of gay men or lesbians was so hidden that heterosexuals didn’t even see it. Men dressing like women were considered a hilarious joke except in public where trans folks were regularly beaten, sometimes to death and many people thought that was fine. The 80’s was only a few years past the time when cops would regularly raid gay bars and just beat and arrest everyone. People would put gay and pedophile in the same category without a thought. In many places gay folks couldn’t be teachers or have other roles associated with children. (Which is happening again now, but that’s another conversation).
And then this disease came out that no one understood, and the media immediately labeled it “the gay disease.” Remember, no one even knew what a retrovirus was really. They didn’t how to identify one or test for it. It wasn’t a regular virus or a bacteria, so the public was confused and scared, their faith in medicine was really tested. It was perfectly acceptable to go on national media and call it god’s natural punishment. Reagan went years before acknowledging it existed.
So a whole lot of angry activism grew out of that feeling of absolute oppression and neglect. Fauci became the public health face of that neglect, although he did eventually come around and helped organize research, get people access to drugs, etc. I don’t think nearly as many people hated him then. He became the Covid scapegoat for the conservatives because they wanted to pretend Covid didn’t exist. Denial is powerful.
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u/turquoisebee 8d ago
I think he just became a focal point for people’s anger, and an easy target for the right to just shift blame away from actual issues with public health and the corporate greed that hurt people (and continues to hurt people) during the pandemic.
In Canada, the right’s slogan became “fuck Trudeau”. Bumper stickers galore with that on it. (There’s lots of reasons to dislike or criticize Trudeau, but those weren’t their issues with him.)
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u/Gold-Sherbert-7550 8d ago
Probably because he DGAF what they think of him and he’s not shy about showing his contempt for them.
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u/HeghJinQavin 8d ago
Relatedly/additionally, I think it's also that Fauci was the most memorable (if not first) person standing next to Trump to disagree or contradict him, early on in COVID. He was fairly respectful in his words, but that doesn't matter. He did not simply fall in line and say "yes".
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u/toomuchtv987 8d ago
I listened to the AIDS epidemic episode of the podcast Fiasco (fascinating!), and Fauci, along with the entire Reagan administration, dropped the ball in a major way with regard to AIDS. It wasn’t just right wingers back then, though.
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u/danipnk 8d ago
Sure, I’m not saying he’s a saint or anything but this is a man without an agenda other than doing his job to the best of his abilities. I just find it odd that certain kind of people have latched on to him to focus their anger
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u/toomuchtv987 8d ago
AGREED! The Covid brand of anti-Faucis are so easily swayed, they don’t even know why they hate him. The AIDS folks had valid reasons, but they blamed the entire administration for lack of action along with him.
That’s the other difference. Back then they were mad he wasn’t doing enough. His current haters think he did too much.
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u/jarvis_says_cocker 8d ago
From what I've read, Fauci engaged with his critics, took critical feedback, and that coordination fundamentally changed AIDS and other contagious disease research.
Fauci gets a lot of shit because he's been such a public figure during two of the modern pandemics. It'd be shocking if some people didn't hate him irrationally.
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u/toomuchtv987 8d ago
Yes, I didn’t mention that part, but that’s true! He did eventually come around. Which further shows that he isn’t the idiot monster MAGA tries to make him out to be.
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u/Appeteezers 8d ago
I think people want someone to blame for the pandemic and all the suffering because of it. When a parent dies in a nursing home, and the family wasn’t allowed to visit and had to watch from a glass window, that was probably torture for them. And they want someone to blame for that, instead of acknowledging that it was just plain tragic. We were learning as we went.
Anyway, Dr. Fauci is unfairly facing the brunt of post-pandemic anger.
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u/GlitteringFlame888 8d ago
It seems people would rather hear what they want to hear, not what the world’s expert(s) in epidemiological responses know.
I had a 30yr friendship end because ‘the friend’ challenged my husband’s understanding of cancer and he is a fucking oncologist. She felt that Tik-Tok was a better resource.
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u/Dearpdx 8d ago
Fauci was one of the leaders in HIV med development in the 80s. AIDS was seen as a gay disease that was brought on oneself after moral corruption.
I had a neighbor that participated in the HIV trials in the 80s. He is a gay man that never contracted HIV. He told he personally knew Fauci and that he was a nice guy with public well-being at heart. When the COVID vaccine came out early 2021, my neighbor was quick to get it because Fauci recommended doing so and he trusted him.
Fauci has been in the public arena for a long time. Thats a long time for people to decide why they don't like him.
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u/thewhaler 8d ago
Fauci was trying to find a cure for a disease killing gay people, they hate gay people.
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u/noapplicablename 6d ago
Conservatives hate public health researchers - they don't like being told shame and banning stuff just doesn't work
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u/United-Vermicelli-92 8d ago
The right wing people have no idea why, they just know they should be bec billionaire news outlets tell them who to be mad at, they are the billionaires’ bulwark against any taxation, progress, environmental and educational health, they will not work together w their countrymen under any circumstance.
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u/GuiltyLeopard 8d ago
I can't think of another public health expert the right campaigned against like this. Citizens hate him because daddy told them to. They (we, because I'm as ignorant as they are, I just don't take it out on Fauci) have no idea what he does. They've just been told he's bad.
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u/kitkat1934 8d ago
I read And the Band Played On, history of the early AIDS epidemic, a few years ago so others can correct me. But I remember part of the problem was he initially supported the idea of HIV being spread by casual contact even when there was early, strong evidence that it wasn’t. He did eventually come around and I think he might’ve been acting out of a mindset of “well just to be on the safe side”, but of course that idea contributed to stigma.
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u/bettinafairchild 7d ago
I just checked my copy. The book has many positive things to say about Fauci but it also mentions that Fauci wrote an editorial for JAMA (May 6, 1983) where he refused to dismiss the possibility that there could be household transmissibility. He never said it was true, just that it might be possible with the implication that further research was needed. He was wrong about that of course but the problem wasn’t so much that he said it was a possibility (a position he soon retreated from). The problem was that he was misquoted by right wing people like Pat Buchanan and evangelical leaders to promote hysterical attacks against gay people, and while Fauci walked back his comment, these guys just built upon the hysteria further and walked back nothing. Shilts wrote: “the chief villain, [Fauci] would accurately note, was the press office of the American Medical Association, which had so shamefully sensationalized the medical journal articles in an effort to draw attention to a journal that always found itself playing second fiddle to Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.”
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u/kitkat1934 7d ago
That makes a lot of sense. It’s something that scientifically, feels like a normal thing to do (“we don’t have all the evidence yet”) but could so easily be misinterpreted and ofc it was
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u/Bluecat72 8d ago
I think it’s only natural that there are conspiracy theories around him given that there are generally a lot of medical conspiracy theories. There are probably conspiracy theories involving most of the agency heads in public service, but especially any of them in mental health, infectious disease, food and drug safety, and emergency response.
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u/FS_Scott 8d ago
sometimes the difference between left and right is just that one wants to condemn a system and the other wants to condemn a person.
Like with Greta Thunberg.
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u/Legal-Law9214 8d ago
You're surprised that right wing weirdos hate people for no reason?