(CNN)Dr. Anthony Fauci said something radical during his Senate testimony Tuesday on the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"I am very careful, and hopefully humble in knowing that I don't know everything about this disease," he said in a contentious exchange with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who challenged the longtime infectious disease expert as "not the end-all" of wisdom about the virus.
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Those 17 words from Fauci might not seem like such a big deal upon first read. But consider what they mean.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, is, without question, the most famous doctor in the world at this moment. He is also a man who has been the single most recognizable expert on infectious disease for more than three decades -- serving under six presidents during that time.
This is a guy who has a right to feel pretty good about himself. Who knows a whole hell of a lot about the coronavirus -- maybe more than any other single American. And yet, he admitted -- in front of a committee of US senators and the country watching at home -- that he didn't know "everything" about the disease. And that he was wary of making predictions about the disease's impact on children, the possibility of its reinfecting people who have already recovered from it or the efficacy of a possible vaccine because, well, he just wasn't sure where the virus would head from here.
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Contrast that humbleness, that admission of not knowing what we don't know, with how President Donald Trump -- Reminder: not a medical doctor -- has talked about the virus.
"We have met the moment and we have prevailed," Trump said on Monday in the Rose Garden.
"I've felt things a lot over my life, and I've made a lot of good calls," Trump said in that same press conference.
"I saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And Anthony Fauci admitted that," Trump said in an interview on Friday with "Fox & Friends."
"We understand it now, and you can never fully under the invisible enemy," he added.
"We've learned a lot of things about it and we may have fires and we're going to put the fires out," Trump concluded.
Striking, no?
On the one hand, a man very much in position to say he knows best refuses to say so. On the other, a man who is neither a doctor nor an epidemiologist nor an infectious disease expert is declaring victory and patting himself on the back.
While Fauci has been reluctant to criticize Trump for the many exaggerations and, in some cases, outright falsehoods pushed by the President about the coronavirus and the administration's handling of it, what the doctor did on Tuesday is best understood as a quiet rebellion against the know-it-all-ism that is a defining trait of Trumpism.
What Trump would have wanted to Fauci to tell Congress and the country is that everything regarding the coronavirus is going even better than he would have expected. That Trump has done above and beyond what he could be expected to do in dealing with the virus. That a vaccine was on the way and would definitely work.
Fauci didn't do any of that. But rather than simply be contrarian, he was contextual. He noted that there was "no guarantee that the vaccine is going to be effective" even when it is developed. (He later noted that he was optimistic that the vaccine would work because people had and continue to recover from coronavirus.) Rather than condemn states for reopening without meeting established federal guidelines to do so, Fauci was matter-of-fact: "There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you will not be able to control." In response to a question about where the country is in terms of controlling the coronavirus, Fauci said "If you think we have it completely under control, we don't."
Over and over again, senators -- from both sides of the aisle -- tried to pin Fauci down on absolutes. And time and again, Fauci fell back on the cold, hard reality of this virus: It is new, it is evolving, it cannot be predicted effectively -- at least not by him -- just yet.
That might not be the answer that Americans wanted to hear. And we know it wasn't the answer Donald Trump wanted to hear. But Fauci's humble approach to the virus is the only way that we as a country can hope to one day move beyond it: With an acknowledgment that certainty is an elusive beast, and that admitting what we don't know is just as important as touting what we do.
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