Fauci: When fame comes for the self-obsessed

Dr. Tony Fauci should have been more careful what he wished for

ALEX BERENSON – JUL 31, 2026 – his substack Unreported Truths (i’m a subscriber)

On April 2, 2020, I told a story in 10 tweets.

How it starts:

Suppose you’re a public health epidemiologist in a big city… you make a professor’s salary, so your house isn’t that nice, but you have the joy of doing God’s work (not that you believe in God, religion is the opiate, etc)…

It’s the tale of a well-meaning public health academic who thinks all the right (i.e. left) thinks — and who has fallen in love with the fame he finds from his doomsaying predictions about Covid.

It ends:

And the hospitals are empty, but the economic devastation from the lockdowns you’ve helped cause, the unemployment, it’s real…

You’re a public health epidemiologist in a big city. What do you do now?

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(Support Unreported Truths. I kept them honest then (I tried to, anyway) – and I’ve never stopped. Thanks to you, I can write the stories no one else does.)

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What do you do now?

I thought of this thread after seeing a reader comment in response to yesterday’s piece about Tony Fauci’s failures as a scientist:

There’s a thing that many humans have – the desire to be famous. Say you’re a longtime (aged) bureaucrat. You’ve had some success. You’ve had a long career that you know is coming to an end.

You’re semi-famous among your colleagues. Bc you’ve spoken at some events and been quoted in some articles. Pretty neat! But you’ll never be high profile TSwift famous and that’s ok bc no one like you is ever THAT famous.

Then the Wuhan lab has an oopsie.

Most people don’t deal well with unknowns. Honestly, most people are terrible decision makers. They don’t want to be wrong. In a time where things were uncertain, people looked for an ‘expert’ to make them feel safe…

So in you lean, and throw us into a spiral I’m not sure we will ever fully recover from. Because choosing society’s well being over the possibility that one person might get sick was ghoulish. (Remember them using that word? I was a ghoul).

And man, being a hero is addicting! To be on tv! I bet you George Clooney knows your name! Hey look the mayor of NYC is offering free fries in exchange for a Fauci ouchie! (They named the shot after you, how cute!)

Now here we are. Half of America thinks you’re a savior. And the other half of us just wants to forget you were ever in charge of anything. I appreciate that Paul wants to have the good doctor to answer things but I just want to it to disappear. No one’s going to be held accountable.

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Oof.

I wasn’t thinking about Tony Fauci when I wrote that Twitter thread in 2020.

I had someone specific in mind, though I can’t remember who it was. Not Eric Ding; the Dinger hadn’t gotten famous at that point, and besides he was too obviously absurd to fit in the category of serious scientist who falls in love with fame.1

Besides, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci wasn’t a nobody before the Covid epidemic started. He was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; he’d briefed presidents about HIV and other nasties for decades.

But my take turned out to fit Tony better than anyone else. Because he started with far more juice than the epidemiologist in my story, he reached unthinkable heights of fame. In one entry in the “diary” that Senator Rand Paul released last weekend, Fauci wrote, “I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world.”

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Imagine writing that about yourself, if you can. Imagine putting those words in a private file to read later.

Yet Fauci wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t delusional. Covid did indeed make him famous.

All he had to do to stay that way was keep people frightened, though he surely knew by April 2, 2020 that Covid was — at most — a modest risk to almost anyone who was under 75 and not in terrible shape already.

What do you do now?

In April 2020, a reader had the answer:

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Further, by April 2020, he had two powerful forces driving him to exaggerate the dangers of the epidemic and the need for aggressive countermeasures. The first: the pull of fame. The second: the push of his need to make sure that no one questioned whether Sars-COV-2 had leaked from a lab he helped fund.

I believe the former was much stronger. By April, Fauci had reason to think he had headed off any serious discussion of the lab leak. (Personal wealth was far less important. Fauci liked money and living comfortably, but he would have made far more money if he had quit the government in 2021.)

But his thirst for fame was unslakable. In fact the opposite: the more celebrity he achieved, the more he wanted. He was a Greek tragedy in a white coat. Only he didn’t pay the price, the rest of us did.

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Now the diary is out. Will it matter?

I’d like to think so. Fauci’s own words have revealed him to be a fame whore — and a bad scientist to boot.

No, he will never go to prison. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s Jake Tappers can’t put his reputation together again.

Even the New York Times mocked him earlier this week, writing of the diary: As the death toll rises, so too does the doctor’s status and self-regard. He falls in with a fast crowd and becomes consumed by his own image.

Then again, maybe I’m naive.

After all, I truly believed in April 2020 that once people understood the data, and understood Covid’s true risks — particularly to kids — they would reject lockdowns and demand that schools be reopened immediately.

I was wrong then.

But I still believe the truth matters.

I hope I’m right this time.

1

You never go full Ding is another of my favorite expressions from my prelapsarian era on Twitter. Let’s be honest, I was en fuego back then, the only reason most of you know me.

My cmnt: “prelapsarian” means before the fall or in a state of innocence (from lapse) – “en fuego” is Spanish for “in fire” or in English “on fire” which means performing extremely well, hot-streaking, or unstoppable.