Letter: Cartoon reinforced dangerous message

Every time I think we have hit a new low in civil discourse I am surprised by something like the Dick Wright cartoon about Dr. Anthony Fauci in Sunday's paper and realize we have not hit bottom yet. The cartoon depicts Dr. Fauci as a rat with his tail caught in a trap that is labeled "COVID truth," apparently referring to the controversy over the origins of the pandemic.

To get the facts on the table, we will never know with 100% certainty whether it was a lab leak or came from the Wuhan wet market and anyone with any integrity will admit that. Our intelligence agencies are divided, some concluding with low or moderate confidence that it was a lab leak and others that it was direct transmission from the market. The gold standard of the scientific community is represented by two articles in Science magazine last summer that lean heavily, but not definitively, toward the market. The scientific case is made in the Science articles. No one in the intelligence or scientific community believes that the virus was "engineered" or that the release was deliberate.

However, MAGA Republicans have heavily politicized this scientific and public health policy issue. Some have created and spread conspiracy theories with no evidence that the virus was somehow deliberately created and released. They have spread hate as demonstrated by Sunday's "cartoon." This is very dangerous. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a distinguished American immunologist and physician who has helped keep us safe through every epidemic since Ronald Reagan's time and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by George W. Bush has had continuous harassment and death threats against him and his family.

This type of hate is dangerous not only to the many public servants who endure the threats, but to democracy itself.

Jacqueline Buehring

Naperville