But his emails!?
For the first time in several years, the whole of Washington, D.C. is talking about someone’s emails other than Hillary Clinton’s. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed published more than 3,200 pages of emails that were sent to and from Dr. Anthony Fauci between January and June of 2020 (this just one day after The Washington Post published more than 800 pages of the same). But anyone poring over them on the lookout for any sort of suspicious shenanigans on the part of the good doctor will be sorely disappointed.
As BuzzFeed noted, the immediate conclusion made after reviewing thousands of correspondences “show how Fauci tried to keep Americans calm and develop an effective strategy despite conflicts with the Trump administration.” The Post’s take? “The correspondence from March and April 2020 opens a window to Fauci’s world during some of the most frantic days of the crisis when the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was struggling to bring coherence to the Trump administration’s chaotic response to the virus and President Donald Trump was seeking to minimize its severity.”
In both cases, it’s clear that Dr. Fauci—the longtime director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has served as the chief medical advisor to seven presidents—made a Herculean effort to respond to as many emails as he possibly could, whether they were from world leaders or a concerned citizen looking to make sense of the inconsistent information they were hearing from various sources.
While a good portion of the text in many letters is redacted, they still provide an eye-opening insight into how integral Fauci was in helping to disseminate information on the coronavirus, and just how little sleep the 80-year-old immunologist got during this hectic time.
While then-president Donald Trump was desperately trying to make “China virus” happen, Fauci was forging a professional alliance with George Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, with Gao writing: “Let’s work together to get the virus out of the earth.”
Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote to inform Fauci of the steps Facebook was taking to become a sort of “hub” for COVID-19 information. Most interestingly in this email is that he had the audacity to address him as “Tony.” Rude!
While Fauci did admit that there are “some crazy people in this world” and that “there is much misinformation,” he took the time to assure a total stranger who seemed concerned that he wasn’t able to voice his opinions fully that he had not “been muzzled at all” by the powers-that-be—which is one of the reasons Trump always seemed to be hinting that he was ready to tell him “you’re fired,” and why Fauci stood as the one true beacon of honesty in an otherwise confusing time.
(Via BuzzFeed)