HIGH MODERN AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE DOCK.

Yes, in the argot of academic political science, when democratically elected representatives delegate responsibility to government employees, and those employees go astray, that's something gone wrong in the way the democratic republic implements policy, not an authoritarian dictatorship at work.

That delegation might be a necessary evil in a complex world.  Something happens that elected officials conclude requires their oversight, and they'd rather identify the outlines of the challenge and delegate the messy work to an independent regulatory commission; or expand the set of inferior officers as they think proper, then delegate by enacting legislation with "The Secretary shall issue regulations" language; or in a pinch, find some Highly Qualified Functionary and with no irony at all refer to that person as "czar."

That sounds pretty authoritarian, dear reader, particularly when such a functionary issues ukases on insufficient information.  "The problem is that these process-worshippers are comparing an ideal technocratic vision, a Michael Munger unicorn, if you will, with a messy reality that the best epidemiologists are still attempting to quantify and contain."

It looks even more authoritarian when such a functionary issues all manner of ukases, a faction of the elected government brooks no criticism of that functionary, other government employees claim that criticism of the ukases not to mention evidence of the ukases going wrong are misinformation or disinformation or downright dangerous, and so-called journalists choosing not to interview people who offer differing perspectives, and the leading social media companies enforcing The Narrative.  Maybe influential politicians and journalists pile on by referring to skeptics as "science deniers," weaponizing a term that originated to shame people who questioned the existence of Nazi Germany's ethnic cleansing.

Under such circumstances, aren't dissident Militant Normals understandably going to bridle at an unelected bureaucrat behaving in an authoritarian way?

So let it be with Don Antonio.

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor suggests the corona czar did an adequate job.

Do I think that Fauci was perfect in his time managing the COVID-19 pandemic? Clearly not, but I don’t think any human would have been. He did cause confusion over the masking issue. I think that we can look back and question any number of ways public policy was made to combat the spread of the disease. I do not think Fauci should be beatified, but I do think that he did a pretty good job, especially given the administration he was working with.

Yes, if Officialdom had recognized that a novel coronavirus is going to pose all sorts of challenges, and there might not be a useful playbook to appeal to, and that differing perspectives might be helpful.

That's not how things played out.  The younger Robert Kennedy wrote a book about it.

Kennedy chronicles a federal public health establishment that wields nearly monopolistic control over America’s medical research, funding, and messaging. That establishment ensures that university researchers are almost entirely dependent upon federal grants, regularly stifles free inquiry and open debate, effectively “cancels” those who deviate from the establishment orthodoxy, seems uninterested in any sort of care or prevention not involving a pharmaceutical patent, ensures that government public health employees are enriched by pharmaceutical royalties, and—all in all—represents one of the worst examples of the pitfalls of centralized power and control anywhere on our shores.

A book ostensibly about a particular villain in the play, The Real Anthony Fauci ultimately reveals that the problem goes well beyond one especially truth-eschewing, self-serving, camera-hogging bureaucrat. Anthony Fauci was never elected, has essentially never practiced medicine in a clinical setting, is not a health policy expert, and is not even an epidemiologist. Why would anybody have listened to him or cared what he thought during two of the largest-scale public health crises in recent history? The answer is that he was a senior representative of the public health establishment. That goes a long way with a leftist press corps that loves the idea of rule by government, of rule by “experts,” and especially of rule by “government experts.”

To be sure, it matters greatly who leads, and if Fauci’s role had been filled by Scott Atlas or Jay Bhattacharya, the Covid response would have been quite different.

Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, ignored if not dismissed by officialdom.

The public health establishment, as Kennedy observes, could hardly have failed more miserably than it did during Covid. Its ugly authoritarian streak and myopic worldview were both on full display. Public health officials amazingly denied the existence of natural immunity, stubbornly insisted on the efficacy of masks, and blithely suggested that they couldn’t care less whether locking down the economy and shutting kids out of schools caused the ruination of many thousands of businesses, the borrowing of many trillions of dollars, and the impoverishing of many millions of childhoods. Public health officials also wildly asserted, in the words of Biden’s CDC director Rochelle Walensky, that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” and “don’t get sick”—a claim shown to be pure nonsense.

Yet Covid merely shined a spotlight on a public health establishment whose ineptitude, self-interestedness, insulation, and indifference to genuine scientific inquiry dates back at least 40 years, to the AIDS crisis. Instead of having independent research be conducted by inquisitive, truth-seeking scientists from coast to coast, almost all such research has been funneled through a small cabal of interested individuals who control, shape, and limit that research. Essentially all of the money for such research flows through the federal government, and only those who toe the party line get the government’s—that is, the taxpayers’—money.

Stated bluntly, "Americans were told to trust the experts. Those experts helped produce one of the greatest government failures in modern history."

Don Antonio's record?  "One of failure," notes Reason's Robby Soave.

Many liberals continue to revere Fauci for the course he charted through COVID-19 and are in the habit of excusing his mistakes as unfortunate but necessary; this was a once-in-a-century pandemic, they say, and hindsight is 20/20. Maybe so, but if we can't criticize government advisers for being wrong about their specific area of expertise, then we can't criticize anyone.

And Fauci got a massive number of things wrong. He recommended lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, social distancing, and forced isolation. In blue states, Fauci's word was as good as law, and government officials militantly obeyed his guidance. Many red states, on the other hand, eventually told him to take a hike and reopened their economies. This provided a natural experiment, and one we now have the answer to: In the time period before the vaccine rollout, there was little difference in overall mortality between red states and blue states. In other words, vaccines made a difference—in that they made it much less likely that elderly, obese, and health-compromised Americans would suffer severe disease and death from COVID-19. There's not much evidence that the other mitigation efforts—mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing—had a discernible impact on deaths.

That should be Fauci's legacy. He pushed the nation's leaders to implement heavy-handed social controls aimed at reducing the death toll of COVID-19, and these vexing, perplexing restrictions on personal freedom accomplished very little.

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball notes,

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2019–2020, Fauci was the veritable face of science. He told us so himself. He appeared countless times on the podium next to President Trump as the hysteria over the disease mounted. No matter that his advice was contradictory, he somehow emerged as the consoling incarnation of paternalistic nannydom, the perfect foil for the deployment of coercive state power. Remember the nauseating signs proclaiming “In this house we follow the science,” etc., etc.? The “science” in question was defined and transmitted by the Wizard of Oz, Anthony Fauci.

He might have been a very good doctor, but he was a very bad wizard, one who gave Technocratic Expertise a bad name.  "Here we have a cause in which appointing someone without expertise is going to have long-term damage to the country. Kennedy is actively destroying the actual capacities of the HHS and is utterly undermining public trust."

Reap what you sow.  "Don Antonio has become a LIVING SYMBOL of all that is wrong with the unelected federal bureaucracy and the blind, unquestioning allegiance to faulty 'science' that have plagued our lives these many decades."

If, late in life, Don Antonio's legacy is as a figure of fun, representing what can go wrong when the political class puts too much confidence in its court experts, perhaps the next step, rolling back the conceit that a few unelected bureaucrats in a remote capital can arrange our affairs, will be easier.