This past week, they released the diary of Dr. Fauci when they subpoenaed him and then ultimately charged him with contempt of Congress. 85 years old, he is retired after a remarkable lifetime of public service. It is worth noting to those who don’t know that, he was, of course, renowned years before Covid, and I’ve proudly owned a Harrison’s Internal Medicine edited by him since 2002.
Let’s put the diary in context. Many researchers keep a journal of sorts. While there is no expectation of privacy as they contain intellectual property, no one reads them. And if you look closely at the photo of my then-desk in first days of the Pandemic, there’s mine started on a notepad.
Mine is boring, though. My thoughts on first patients, notes from international meetings. Early thoughts about previous polio lockdowns, post-viral syndromes from Spanish Flu. Messy pathway diagrams on virus and target. Over 6 years, it is a binder now of scribbled thoughts, meetings, equations, studies. Unlike Fauci’s, it would bore most to tears.
A millenia worth of previous pandemics show us that survivors react later – we look for blame, scapegoats. We interpret the facts differently in retrospect. We need to do this to survive at some level. But journals starkly remind us of the limits of knowledge at the time, not how we wish or hoped it was as time corrupts memory. While it may serve political interests to stage hearings and assign blame — it doesn’t serve human interest. Another pandemic WILL happen to humans. What we really learned should not be twisted by a political or populist agenda.
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