By Cory Franklin

September 18^th, 2026

A rough estimate of the devastation caused by the COVID pandemic from 2020-2024 in the U. S. includes 1.2 million COVID deaths, four million excess deaths overall, and more than 12 trillion dollars in economic costs. This is above and beyond the social and emotional damage suffered by the public and the tremendous harm done to our children.

Given current knowledge, it is reasonable to assume that every caregiver in the public health community would be looking inward and reevaluating what might be done differently in the future. That would include, among other things,  reassessing lockdowns and school closings, streamlining vaccine distribution, concentrating on indoor air quality and promoting rapid home testing. Yet at least one prominent public health official has not signed on to any reconsideration.  Anthony Fauci.

Fauci broke his self-imposed silence after a disastrous July appearance before Congress in a two-hour September interview with healthcare academic Lawrence Gostin at Georgetown, as (I’ve boldfaced and italicized some of Fauci’s comments from the full interview.) Regarding the public health response to COVID, he recently said, somewhat defiantly, “I’m not sure we would change much.”

Gostin, an especially amicable interviewer, lobbed softballs and deemed Fauci a “national treasure.” A somewhat curious assessment, considering the dubious assertions Fauci made during the interview about his role in the pandemic, some of which are directly contradicted by the historical record:                   Rather than describing his actions in a forthright manner, Fauci’s standard defense was sarcasm:

On his overall management of the pandemic: “I’m the bad guy. I created the virus. I shut the schools. You know, I did everything, I did everything. Throw away the key.”

For a guy who sounds like he is looking to evade responsibility , it’s worth noting that his name appeared in 2,378 articles in the New York Times between January 1, 2020, and January 1, 2023 – two-and-a-half times more than the combined mentions of all the CDC directors during the same period. And writing in his diary, he called himself “the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”

His dumbfounding take on lockdowns: “We didn’t lock anything down, were you locked in your house? I wasn’t locked in my house. In China, you were locked in your house.”

Anthony Fauci may not have been locked in his house but he definitely pushed for lockdowns. In a July 13, 2020, story from Reuters headlined, “Fauci Blames Virus Surge on U.S. Not Shutting Down Completely”, the first paragraph read: “Top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Monday ascribed the surge in U.S. coronavirus cases to the country’s failure to shut down completely, then a rush to reopen too soon, and urged a commitment to guidelines to snuff out the disease. ‘We did not shut down entirely and that’s the reason why when we went up.’”

This turned out to be a misreading of the data as well as a look into his strategy throughout the pandemic, which was to completely suppress the viral spread (“snuff out”),  rather than mitigate its effects. At any cost to the public.

His reference to China is likewise disingenuous. When the pandemic began, he sent one of his assistants, Clifford Lane, to China. Lane witnessed the severe lockdown the Chinese put in effect and returned believing the U.S. might  have to employ the same extreme measures to suppress the viral spread. Fauci praised Lane’s assessment and pushed for the U.S. to implement many of those measures, which this country did. Ultimately, suppressing the spread of the virus by lockdown did not work in either country.

“I closed the schools,”

Once again, Fauci’s sarcastic take on a serious issue that was devastating to millions of students nationwide – socially, emotionally and academically – and continues to resonate today. This was part of his all-purpose excuse that he was not in charge of school closings – that was the responsibility of local politicians, school administrators and health officials. Nor did he ruffle teacher unions by mentioning the role many of them played in urging school closures.

As if those state and local bureaucrats didn’t base their school closing decisions on his pronouncements. On March 12, 2020, Fauci publicly called for a shutdown of schools nationally. To his credit, at that point case numbers were high and rising, and he took responsibility.

But the story continued.  On April 11, 2020, an article in the New York Times reported: “The mayor said the decision to close schools was made on Friday evening, after he spoke with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Fauci supported the decision, Mr. [Bill] de Blasio said.” (Fauci’s diary confirms this.)

Schools in New York City were not simply closed till the end of that academic year. Those schools and many across the country did not reopen in the fall for the 2020-2021 academic year, while in Europe and certain parts of the U.S., many schools opened after the initial two months.  New York City schools and many others did not completely reopen for full in-person instruction until the 2021-2022 academic year began – a full 18 months of closure.

While Fauci did not directly order closures, his advice was consistently that schools could open when certain metrics were reached. Those metrics were arbitrary, vague and confusing.

This allowed politicians, bureaucrats and teachers unions to default to the status quo, which was school closure. Nowhere is Fauci ever quoted as urging schools to open when localities achieved specific guidelines.

Related to this is his self-description as a man of science: “I’m a scientist, and I go by data.” Yet, in the case of school closures, he neglected extensive data from Europe, and some from the U.S., which showed that  children were not significant transmitters of the virus and that they had an extremely low morbidity and mortality from COVID; schools were basically not dangerous. The data were available for more than a year – and “the scientist who went by data” never referred to it.

In which situations did Anthony Fauci actually go by data during COVID? He admitted in The New York Times that he deliberately misled the public on the figures needed for herd immunity (which never materialized.) He essentially made up “the six-foot separation” rule. (Ironically, there was data on this from the 1940s, which he seemed unaware of, but that data pertained to tuberculosis, not coronavirus, anyway.)

He never explained that the data on masking was complicated and often contradictory. Regarding the comparatively high death rate in the U.S., he said “something clearly went wrong” (not his responsibility, of course), but failed to say it was likely the result of an older, more obese population. Once again, the data were out there for anyone to see.

Anthony Fauci is in love with his own mythology; his diary is a clear indication of that.  So, it would be naïve to expect any sort of apologia. But, especially in light of the current interview, is he really the “national treasure” as his interviewer claimed? At least he didn’t take the Fifth.

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Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine. 

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.