The core premise of this argument seems to be that if Fauci had taken a hard line, the greater medical community would have stuck with him and done everything he suggested after he was fired and replaced with a sycophant capable of far worse. I don't buy it. Even if the medical community listened (which isn't guaranteed and which I find unlikely), the public at large wouldn't. It was far more beneficial to have someone publicly walking a fine line, not lying but refusing to endorse the Trump administration's lies, than to have a unified government leadership telling us all to go out in crowds to Starbucks to buy hydroxychloroquine lattes.
How much power did Fauci actually have to implement things? I think he took the wrong stance re. masks during the early stages (following the WHO's lead) but for the rest, it looked more to me like he was threading the needle between supporting Trump's inanity and getting evicted by the same (thus ending any chance he might have had to influence policy).
O.k : Fauci, Trump, Biden. Fair enough.<p>But the whole saga has played out exactly the same throughout the West. Look at the UK or the EU in general.<p>We might not have our Trump's, but we have our Fauci's and they behaved exactly the same.