It seems that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s outgoing top medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is a little embarrassed that The New York Times saw his gigantic wall filled with portraits of himself in his home office.
The career bureaucrat doesn’t want his critics to see that as more evidence that he is some sort of narcissist.
Fauci, whose last day in public service was on December 30, recently sat down with the Times for an interview. As pointed out by The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy, the opening line of the article in question read, “The walls in Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s home office are adorned with portraits of him, drawn and painted by some of his many fans.”
The author of the Times article observed that “Dr. Fauci seemed a little uncomfortable with people knowing about the pictures.”
“He said that previously, when they were captured on camera, the ‘far right’ attacked him as an ‘egomaniac,’” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote. “If someone goes to the trouble of sending him a portrait of himself, he said, he would ‘feel like I’m disrespecting them’ if he discarded it.”
Yet Fauci should know that there are plenty of other reasons that Americans would view him as a self-obsessed individual — and it’s not just the “far Right.”
For example, perhaps the most revealing comment of Fauci’s came when he argued that COVID critics were “attacking science” when questioning his decision-making during the pandemic.
In 2021, Fauci told NBC, “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.”
“Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people, and there was pushback against me,” he said at the time. “So if you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you are really attacking not only Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science.”
Not everybody sees it that way — including one of the smartest and most successful men in the entire world.
In reaction to the Wall of Fauci revelation, Musk tweeted, “creepy.” Then, he joked, “maybe he just loves looking at science.”
Musk, it should be noted, is not “right-wing” either.
Indeed, it would appear Musk is right and that Fauci does love looking at “science” — aka himself. Americans previously saw his home office thanks to the documentary “FAUCI” released by Disney+.
There were other portraits and bobbleheads of himself in his own office — yet he insists he is just a humble public servant who is happy to talk to anybody who will listen.
Much ink has been spread about Fauci, and his errors are well known — but Fauci insists that he has nothing to hide from a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
For now, though, he’ll retire as the highest-paid federal employee ever and walk away with a $417,667 annual pension. Just remember, if you criticize him at all then you’re “far-Right” and against “science.” And he insists he isn’t political.
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