As he leaves public office, Dr. Anthony Fauci says the biggest change in public health has been the normalization of falsehoods

Dr. Anthony Fauci (Associated Press photo by Alex Brandon)

As Dr. Anthony Fauci retires after five decades in public health, he says he worries that lies and misinformation are creating a "profoundly dangerous" time for science and the public.

"Untruths abound and we almost normalize untruths," Fauci told The Associated Press. "I worry about my own field of health, but I also worry about the country."

Fauci has made the same point in several other exit interviews. In August, he said on MSNBC, "There's no much lying going on over there that people accept it as part of the norm," and when lots of people accept it as truithful, "that is the beginning, I believe, of the destruction of our democracy."

In December, he told ABC News, "Misinformation and disinformation is really hurting so many things, including people's trust in science. It becomes very difficult to get people to fully appreciate the truth of what's going on — which will ultimately impact how we respond, in this case, to a pandemic, like Covid-19."

AP notes, "Fauci, who turned 82 on Christmas Eve, has been a physician-scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 54 years, and its director for 38 of them. Because he candidly puts complex science into plain English, Fauci has advised seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, about a long list of outbreaks -- HIV, Ebola, Zika, bird flu, pandemic flu, even the 2001 anthrax attacks."

Fauci said his policy has been to "stick with the science and never be afraid to tell somebody something that is the truth -- but it's an inconvenient truth in which there might be the possibility of the messenger getting shot/ You don't worry about that. You just keep telling the truth. That's served me really quite well with one exception that, you know, the truth generated a lot of hostility towards me in one administration."

AP sums up: "As the world enters another year of Covid-19, Fauci still is a frequent target of the far right -- but also remains a trusted voice for millions of Americans. . . . The public did struggle to understand why some of his and others' health advice changed as the pandemic wore on, such as why masks first were deemed unnecessary and later mandated in certain places. Fauci said one of the pandemic's lessons is to better convey that it's normal for messages to change as scientists make new discoveries.

"That doesn't mean you're flip-flopping," he said. "That means you're actually following the science."