Dr. Anthony Fauci was the face of the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has sought to defend his tenure in government in a new memoir publish this week. He has also faced renewed congressional scrutiny in recent weeks. This Washington Examiner series, Fauci Unmasked, will look at his record and legacy. Part 1 focuses on his record of statements on critical pandemic measures.

The legacy of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has come under new scrutiny more than four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many questions resurfacing regarding Fauci’s advice to presidents and the American people.

The former head of the largest branch of the National Institutes of Health released a new memoir this week detailing his nearly 60 years in public service, including his service as a top adviser for both the Trump and Biden White Houses during the height of the pandemic that made him a household name. 

But Fauci’s testimony this year before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, both in a transcribed interview in January and his public hearing in June, has raised questions regarding his guidance on masking, social distancing, and vaccines during the height of the pandemic.

At that time, Fauci denounced criticism of his recommendations as “attacks on science.”

“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science,” Fauci told Chuck Todd on MSNBC in June 2021. “So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.”

This month, three years after this comment, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), the chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, reminded Fauci of his words before questioning his record in a public hearing.

“You took the position that you presented ‘the science’ and your words came across as final and as infallible in matters pertaining to the pandemic,” Wenstrup said.

Here are the three biggest areas of concern related to Fauci’s COVID policy statements: face masks, social distancing, and COVID-19 vaccines.

At the outset of the pandemic, Fauci appeared skeptical of masks.

On March 8, 2020, Fauci told 60 Minutes that “there is no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it is not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” Fauci said, adding that wearing masks can encourage people to touch their faces and potentially transfer germs. 

By May, however, Fauci said wearing a mask was a necessary precaution for everyone, sparking many state and local governments, as well as private businesses, to institute mask mandates.

Fauci said in a May interview with CNN that he wore his mask to “be a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”

“It’s sort of respect for another person and to have that other person respect you. You wear a mask, they wear a mask, you protect each other,” Fauci told CNN on May 27. 

Asked later why he seemed to change his tune on wearing masks, Fauci suggested that he initially downplayed the utility of masks to prevent demand from soaring, thereby protecting the supply for medical professionals.

Fauci told the Street on June 12 that the public health community was collectively concerned about supply shortages and “wanted to make sure that the people, namely the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm’s way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.”

This rationale for the change of tone sparked many critics to say Fauci and other public health officials engaged in a “noble lie” in an attempt to shield the public from the gravity of the public health emergency.

It is worth nothing, though, that in his original skeptical comments about masks in March 2020, Fauci did also say that everyone choosing to mask up “could lead to a shortage of masks for people who really need it.”

When asked by Republicans about the face mask switch this year, the former NIAID director said his position was based on exaggerated information about the severity of the shortage of KN-95 and N-95 masks.

When asked by Republicans about masking children, Fauci said he did not recall reviewing studies about the effectiveness of their protection for children. He also said he had not reviewed any subsequent studies about the unintended consequences of masking children, such as learning loss or developmental delays.

Fauci and the whole White House Coronavirus Task Force, of which he was a key member, led the charge in proposing social distancing as a necessary step to slow the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines recommended avoiding coming within 6 feet of people from other households.

The 6-foot rule was used by authorities around the country as the scientific justification for shutdowns of schools, businesses, and other institutions.

Four years later, however, Fauci told Congress that the 6-foot rule, rather than being based on specific evidence, “sort of just appeared.”

“I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever,” Fauci told Republicans when asked behind closed doors in January. “It sort of just appeared that 6 feet is going to be the distance.”

Fauci said it was “just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished,” noting how difficult it would be to conduct a reliable scientific study on virus particle movement.

Although Fauci insisted during his public hearing before the select subcommittee this month that “it was [the CDC’s] decision to make” and had nothing to do with the NIH, Fauci was part of promoting the 6-foot distancing rule as a member of the task force.

In a March 17, 2020, video, alongside Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, the then-NIAID director defined social distancing as allowing a “space between you and others who might actually be infected.”

“Social distancing is really physical separation of people where in circumstances where there are crowds, you remove yourself from very close contact,” Fauci said.

Fauci, Birx, and Adams in the March video also strongly encouraged companies to introduce teleworking protocols as well as shutting down bars and restaurants in order to maintain social distancing.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottleib said in December 2021 that the 6-foot rule was a compromise between the CDC, which initially asked for 10 feet, and Trump administration officials, who wanted guidelines that could allow certain social settings to remain open, including schools.

Gottlieb said the 6-foot social distancing rule was “probably the single costliest recommendation” from the CDC because “the whole thing feels arbitrary and not science based.”

Much of the discrepancy on the exact measurement to socially distance came from early data that suggested COVID-19 was only spread via respiratory droplets rather than aerosol particles. Respiratory droplets, which are significantly larger than aerosols, do not move as far or remain suspended in the air as long as aerosols.

In part due to the conflict about droplets versus aeresols, the World Health Organization updated its language guide on viruses spread through the air in April 2024.

Fauci’s position on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines evolved over the course of the pandemic. His critics accuse him of flip-flopping. He has said that his commentary has shifted with the changing data.

Toward the beginning of the widespread use of the vaccines, Fauci suggested that they would eliminate or dramatically curb transmission of the virus. In May 2021, Fauci told Face the Nation’s John Dickerson that the vaccines were effective to the point that even if a vaccinated individual were to test positive, “the likelihood of their transmitting to someone else is really very, very low.”

“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community’s health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. And in other words, you become a dead end to the virus,” Fauci said to Dickerson.

Eventually, however, it became clear that breakthrough infections were common and that the efficacy of the vaccines waned over time.

When pressed by Republicans in June 2024 about vaccine efficacy, Fauci acknowledged that the efficacy of the vaccines only lasted several months rather than providing sustained protection against infection.

“In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people, but the durability of its ability to prevent infection was not long. It was measured in months,” Fauci said during his public hearing. “Early on it did, it prevented infection, but what became clear was that it did not prevent transmission.”

But Fauci’s explanation of vaccine efficacy also became clearer and more specific when he spoke with members of the medical community, as opposed to his appearances on mass media.

In early November 2020, prior to the approval of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, Fauci had an interview with the CEO of the American Medical Association, James Madara. 

At that time, Fauci said the third-phase large-scale human trials for both Pfizer and Moderna were measuring with approximately 78% efficacy against the virus.

Fauci told Madara that, even presuming that efficacy between 70% and 80% was the best possible product, increasing vaccine uptake would be the best way to regain societal normalcy.

“There’s two parts of the equation: There’s the efficacy of the vaccine itself, and then there’s the number of people who take the vaccine,” Fauci said. “What we need to do is to really put a lot of the effort on the herd immunity that’s vaccine induced. We need to just get a lot more people vaccinated.”

It may be a fairer assessment that Fauci flip-flopped on the use of mandates and social pressure to increase vaccination rates.

When asked by Madara in 2020 about getting vaccine hesitant people to take the shot, Fauci said criticizing the views of vaccine skeptics “is going to get you nowhere.”

“If you have somebody that’s an anti-vax approach, you don’t want to ridicule them, but you want to try and explain to them what the reason is for getting vaccines,” Fauci said in late 2020. “I think when you start getting frustrated with people who don’t want to be vaccinated and you have a tone of blaming them for that, that’s not going to win anybody over.”

This stance sharply contradicts his statements later in 2021, when he suggested that colleges and workplaces should be used as pressure tools to get nonvaccinated students and employees to take the shot, something that has continued to be a lightning rod for vaccine skeptics.

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“It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives they lose their ideological bulls***, and they get vaccinated,” Fauci said in 2021 in a biography written by Michael Specter, the audio clip of which was played at the doctor’s public hearing in June.

When confronted with the clip at the public hearing, Fauci insisted that he was not being derogatory of all vaccine hesitancy.