Fauci's Abandonment of Transparency

During the pandemic, public health officials worked to hide their communication and debates. It's time to rebuild trust through transparency.

I have always thought that the drive towards higher levels of government transparency has been one of the more noble non-partisan endeavors. So it was with frustration that I learned that the investigations into Covid response have been hampered by high-ranking officials implementing strategies designed to foil transparency efforts.

The latest little bit of this scandal involves Dr Anthony Fauci’s Chief of Staff Greg Folkers who, in an attempt to avoid having his emails caught up in any FOIA requests by using a poor man’s leet (spelling a word with number or punctuation substitutes) when writing about key phrases and people.

This would be even more infuriating if I thought that the FOIA process was something that mattered. FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal and was meant to give inquisitive citizens and journalists the ability to demand access to certain forms of government information. But attempts to get information from members of the government public health response have been met with results so opaque that they are almost comical.

For example, here is an email delivered via a FOIA request. It is from Anthony Fauci regarding Covid in early February, 2020 and sent to officials in the HHS and NIH.

There are valid reasons to redact things when collecting information for a FOIA request. There are several compelling and relevant carveouts to redact information, such as state secrets, private information, or impact on legal proceedings.

But the FIOA’s related to Covid are page after page after page of fully redacted emails and communication.

Why does this matter? Because…

Transparency Is A Cornerstone of Trust

The drive towards transparency was born not out of a sense of trust, but from a default position of distrust. In the early part of the 20th century, scientific institutions were just starting to build themselves up as trustworthy organizations. At that time of enormous scientific upheaval, results were rarely taken at face value; everything needed to be verified through either mathematical replication or through experimental investigation.

There is this great scene in Oppenheimer where American scientists are reeling at the news of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann splitting an atom, but they refuse to believe it until they have themselves done the math and run the experiments.

I love this scene because scenes like this are recounted time and again in the Oppenheimer’s biography American Prometheus. Academic scientists (at least the physicists) at the time never took any report of a scientific advance at face value, they had to check it, test it, verify it.

It is into this era that many of our scientific institutions were born. The establishment of transparency in science was born not out of a sense of trust, but through a sense of distrust. This isn’t a form of malicious distrust but a laudable effort to double check the work.

The Rise and Fall of Transparency