Georgetown University beclowned itself yet again this week by hiring Dr. Anthony Fauci to teach at the medical school as a distinguished professor.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci will serve as a distinguished university professor in Georgetown Medicine’s Department of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, an academic division that researches and trains future physicians in infectious diseases, starting July 1,” the university announced. Fauci will also serve in a role at the McCourt School of Public Policy.
Fauci retired as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the end of December 2022, but said he intended to remain in public life by writing a memoir and becoming affiliated with a university. Georgetown, which happens to be where Fauci and his wife got married in 1985, took the bait.
It’s insulting enough that Fauci, who repeatedly misled the American people, is collecting a pension worth more than the president’s annual salary. To be labeled a “distinguished professor” by the oldest Catholic school in the country and cash in on his horrific handling of the Covid-19 pandemic makes it even worse. Georgetown claims that Fauci earned the position due to his decades of public service; have they forgotten that the Jesuit tradition also requires the seeking of truth?
Fauci publicly rejected the idea that the novel coronavirus could have leaked from a Wuhan lab, despite privately conferring with scientists who believed that might have been the case. Americans later learned that the National Institutes of Health was funding risky gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a non-profit grant. An investigation published by The Spectator also revealed how a Chinese real estate company pledged more than $100 million to Harvard Medical School as Fauci and the US’s other top scientists shifted to the conclusion that Covid-19 was a naturally occurring virus. Fauci has refused to take responsibility for any of this.
Fauci initially told Americans to “STOP BUYING MASKS” because they are “not effective in preventing” Covid, supposedly a ruse to keep PPE available for medical providers. He pushed for vaccine mandates, insisting that they would allow the country to return to normal because vaccinated individuals become a “dead end” for the virus. Not only can vaccinated people still get and spread Covid, but the benefits apparently wear off much more quickly that natural immunity. Fauci also warned Americans they’d be in trouble if they didn’t get both the vaccine and the booster shots, even though data doesn’t support the boosters being effective for any significant period of time.
He even admitted to not sharing the true percentage of individuals who needed to be vaccinated or infected in order to reach herd immunity, asserting that the American people weren’t ready to hear it yet.
If Fauci’s repeated dishonesty were not enough to make him ineligible for a distinguished professorship, how about his failure to live up to Georgetown’s commitment to the Jesuit principle of Cura Peronalis, or “care for the whole person?”
Fauci failed to care for the whole person when he advocated for national stay-at-home orders that targeted the entire populace rather than just the most vulnerable, leading to a rise in poor mental and physical health among adults. Children, despite having practically zero statistical risk for severe infection or death, were kept out of schools under his guidance. The youth suicide rate increased, and children are suffering severe learning loss, increased anxiety and depression and speech delays. Fauci failed to care for the whole person when tens of millions of people were unable to work or lost their jobs entirely due to shutdowns of “non-essential business.” He failed to care for the whole person when he advocated people skip going to the hospital or the doctor unless they have Covid, leading to millions of delayed or missed diagnoses. He failed to care for the whole person when his public guidance discouraged hospitals from allowing people to visit their dying loved ones and convinced states not to allow funerals or memorial services.
Americans were stripped of their basic dignity under policy directives that didn’t even work the way they were intended. Never mind Fauci’s narcissistic moral grandstanding by declaring himself to be the personification of science, his smug assertion that children want to be like him and his icky poolside photoshoot for InStyle.
Sadly, it’s not surprising that Georgetown would reward someone who so disastrously upended the lives of so many. My alma mater was one of the worst offenders when it came to boneheaded Covid policy. Georgetown was fully virtual for the 2020-21 school year. A full year and a half after the start of the pandemic, Georgetown canceled its homecoming celebration, despite the most popular events taking place outdoors and most of the attendees being young adults. In December 2021, despite having a mask mandate and requiring all students to receive a Covid vaccine and a booster before stepping on campus for the spring semester, the university announced that students would no longer be able to eat or drink in public spaces on campus. Students were again subjected to virtual learning until January 2021. Georgetown finally lifted its mask mandate in March 2022 for the 99 percent-vaccinated campus, only to reinstate it just a few weeks later. A Georgetown Law graduate claimed he was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for daring to question the illogical policies.
Georgetown seems to be quite committed to the idea that the academic institution is a place not for rigorous inquiry and debate, but for liberal orthodoxy. Why else would they hire disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok and Dr. Anthony Fauci? Why else is the medical school teaching future doctors that puberty blockers for children suffering from gender dysphoria are “fully reversible” and that the only way to “help” transgender people is to “fix” their bodies?
Since Georgetown clearly no longer lives up to its stated principles, maybe it’s time to adopt new ones.
