Celebritizing Dr. Fauci: Risk, Public Affection, and the “Total Package” of Scientific Expertise

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the earliest days of COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci earned a reputation that transcended the typical boundaries of public trust. Among progressive science advocates—particularly in social media spaces—Fauci developed an admiring fandom who saw him as a symbol and distillation of official scientific knowledge. In this essay, I combine insights from scholarship on ethos, public feeling, and risk to unpack the implications of Fauci’s “celebritization” on rhetorical understandings of expert-public relationships and the construction of risk and expertise. Specifically, I examine tweets from one viral X (formerly Twitter) account, the Anthony Fauci Fan Club (@FauciFan), to show how fans augment Fauci’s expertise through affection and moral praise, while carefully reiterating his (and science’s) reluctant, apolitical orientation and empirical commitments. These emotional engagements, I argue, constitute a potent form of tactical risk communication whereby publics claim a voice in larger discourses, and which acknowledges the entangled relationship between facts and feelings.