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Fauci’s Moment of Truth
Anthony Fauci has been lauded as America’s great defender of the sciences. Time Magazine named Fauci and frontline healthcare workers their ‘Persons of the Year’ in 2020, stating “In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci led not only the battle against COVID-19 but also the fight for truth—clear, consistent messaging being fundamental to public health. With steadfast integrity, Fauci nudged, elided and gently corrected a President used to operating in a reality of his own construction, buoyed by the fervent repetition of lies.” In 2021, Fauci went so far to say that he was the last word on science in the United States. “It’s very dangerous, Chuck, because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science,” Fauci told host Chuck Todd on MSNBC.
What a moment of comeuppance it must have been today on Capitol Hill, when Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the leader of the COVID-19 Pandemic response for both Presidents Donald J. Trump and Joseph Biden, admitted that much of his public policies on COVID were, in fact, based on no science whatsoever.
In testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Fauci conceded the scientific evidence for many of his most widely distributed health policies, the six-foot rule, was…nil.
Q: Did you see any studies that supported six feet?
A: I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do.
Q: I know. I’m just trying to figure out why six versus three or four or five.
A: Yeah. Yeah.
Q: Like, six is a significant distance. I mean, you’ve testified here. I think you testified in front of Mr. Scalise a couple times when I was working for him. And recalling the hearing rooms, instead of, like, seven members on the top of the dais, there’s two, and –
A: Right.
Q: — it was just two staffers behind.
A: Yeah. Yeah. I think it would fall under the category of empiric. Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished. But I’m thinking hard as I’m talking to you.
Q: Uh-huh.
A: I don’t recall, like, a discussion of, “Now it’s going to be” — it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance.
Fauci was later forced to admit that this lack of science wasn’t limited to the six foot rule. Regarding masking of toddlers and infants:
Q: All right. Thank you. Another question that we get a lot in the masking space is the masking of children, particularly kids down to 2 years old.
A: Right.
Q: The WHO recommended against masking children less than five because masks are, and I’m quoting them, ‘Not in the overall interest of the child,’ and then against children six to eleven from wearing masks because, and, again, quoting, ‘Of the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychological development.’ Was there ever a cost-benefit analysis done on the unintended consequences of masking kids versus the protection that it would give them?
A: Not to my knowledge.
Q: Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children?
A: You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have.
Q: Since the — there’s been a lot of studies that have come out since the pandemic started, but specifically on this there have been significant on kind of like the learning loss and speech and development issues that have been associated with particularly young children wearing masks while they’re growing up. They can’t see their teacher talk and can’t learn how to form words. Have you followed any of those studies?
A: No. But I believe that there are a lot of conflicting studies too, that there are those that say, yes, there is an impact, and there are those that say there’s not. I still think that’s up in the air. I mean, I’m very sensitive to children. I have children and I have grandchildren. So I don’t want to have anything that would do to harm them.
In short, 4 years after the COVID pandemic ravaged this country and the world at large, Anthony Fauci — the world’s leading infectious disease expert — had to admit in open, public testimony that the leading policies they enforced were based on little more than gut feelings and faith-based beliefs.
Fauci tried to argue that the lack of data and confusion over the physiology of the COVID-19 coronavirus helped cause these mistakes. But even that is false. From the earliest days of the pandemic, even from early information from Communist China, evidence showed that the policies they supported weren’t based on any facts whatsoever.
These facts compound the errors made by the U.S. scientific community. Evidence is now clear that Fauci led an effort to forcefully dismiss claims that a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On February 1, 2020, Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, held a call with several scientists to discuss the origin of the virus. A group of evolutionary virologists on the call informed Fauci and Collins that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo.
Three days later, four experts who attended that meeting drafted a research document, which was forwarded to Fauci upon completion for editing and approval. The paper, later published in Nature Medicine, argued that Covid had “mutations” that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals.
One of the four authors, Dr. Kristin Andersen, admits in a cover email sent to Nature that Fauci “prompted” the paper’s drafting in order to “disprove” the lab leak theory.
This paper was published in February 2020, as the pandemic was exploding worldwide. Fauci referred reporters to the study at that time, conveniently failing to disclose that he was intimately involved in its drafting. Even in today’s hearing, Fauci continues to deny he did anything wrong and has never admitted that he was involved with the study before it was published.
If this scientific fraud and dishonesty wasn’t enough, Fauci and his band of merry men compounded this by enacting a clear, intentional policy to hide their discussions from the public view, by purposely hiding from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Documents show that Dr. David Morens, who served as Fauci’s primary advisor at NIAID, used his private email account to discuss the origins of Covid-19 with EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak. They had discussions on how to hide these efforts from public view, proven by emails released last month by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Fauci has repeatedly denied knowing about the efforts to evade Congressional oversight.
Whether Fauci was involved with the concerted effort by scientists to hide their discussions or not, this goes to the larger effort by the entire Federal scientific community, led by Fauci himself, to hide their honest communications regarding the science. It took four years, and 1.2 million American deaths, for many of these facts to come to light.
Compounding this absolute failure is the fact that the Biden administration has gone out of its way to hide his administration’s complicity. The White House has blocked every Congressional effort to have a non-partisan independent commission study the response to the pandemic and make recommendations on how to improve the system for future infections.
With the growing evidence of at least the possibility that the virus came from a Chinese laboratory, most scientists feel we must have more transparency on the entire issue, to ensure the public gains trust in the system again. Most other major countries have had extensive investigations into the matter; the vast majority admit that major mistakes led to unnecessary infringements of individual freedom, not to mention unnecessary morbidity and mortality. But here in the United States, we are still awaiting any such honesty.
Some Democrats have slowly started admitting these failures. In testimony that brought to light the actions of EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and the communications with Dr. Martens, Democrat California congressman Raul Ruiz, a physician himself, was critical of the questioning during the Congressional hearing. Ruiz and a few other Democrats now concede there was wrongdoing, including the actions of EcoHealth that hid some of the risky viral studies being done in China. For example, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services suspended funding to EcoHealth last month, based partially on the work of Ruiz and others.
“When we have the next emerging virus that’s a pandemic and is killing thousands of people daily, do you think that they’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh, thank goodness, we caught that misconduct,’” Ruiz said. “Do you think identifying this misbehavior is somehow going to lead to better protective equipment, better protective protocols so that we can respond to the [next] pandemic and save lives? … I personally don’t think so.”
To be fair, Republicans are certainly culpable in this ever-growing politicization of science. In today’s hearing, firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly attacked Dr. Fauci personally, without actually bringing any additional facts to light. Such superficial partisan games clearly do not advance the cause of science, nor better government policy.
Published in Healthcare
Wow. Not even an apparition of Louis Pasteur giving his spectral blessing.
The ways of The Science are mysterious indeed.
My pre-covid era experience working with public health personnel at the field level and with some of their upper echelons in the National Guard led me to believe that, within that work culture, they were (1) elitist in the sense that they resisted providing thorough explanations, (2) insular insofar as resisting any accountability outside their group, (3) too comfortable with being evasive. Anecdotal experience only, but in comparing notes with a few peers I found that others had similar opinions.
Covid reinforced the above perspective and extended it to arenas beyond the National Guard. None of the above proves anything, but perhaps is an indicator of a significant issue within the profession.
Fauci’s use of “empiric” is the opposite of what it really means. You’d expect better from a “scientist.”
Great post, Pradheep. I have a combined question and comment about the “Chinese laboratory” issue.
I think that it was a Chinese lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it’s a bit misleading to suggest that the problem was just the Chinese. From what I’ve heard, there was US government funding of gain-of-function research at that particular Chinese lab, through Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance group.
Is this your understanding?
My most recent source for this is Tucker Carlson’s interview of Jeffrey Sachs.
Empiric (“it’s happened to me”) weighs in somewhere between anecdotal (“it is said to have happened to someone”) and scientific (“it has been established via rigorous experimentation”).
But it isn’t science.
I don’t think that’s what “empiric” means.
Fauci could not have had – nobody could have had – any kind of “empiric” or “empirical” evidence – not even “it happened to me!” – that 6-foot distancing was beneficial.
And even the “empiricism” of “it happened to me!” is just anecdotal to the rest of the universe.
Actually, D. Birx said in an early news conference, when introducing the 6 Foot rule, that it was based only on one presumption that the effluvia from a sneeze (or presumably a cough) travelled 6 feet. And so, she said, that’s why we recommend six feet of separation.
It was lame even then. And on top of that she went from advocating wearing no mouth covering, to wearing silk or cotton bandanas over the face as a personal option, to mandatorily wearing a mask, to Fauci recommending on TV wearing two masks.
It was all fakery, and only accepted by the public because of the unknown nature of the virus, even though it had been known by scientists and in production for years.
I kinda doubt that’s true either, really. Also the 6-ft spacing wasn’t just for people who were sneezing and/or coughing. It was for EVERYONE. Because Covid was Cooties, I guess.
His definition of “empiric” is “pulled out of my a$$.”
Yes, Fauci was sensitive to children. Children give him hives. He wanted them to be kept masked and locked away at home.
This is a great post. I had heard little snippets of that exchange, but it’s shocking to read the whole thing in context and see how careless Fauci was about the scientific foundation of life-altering policies that he forced on us.
When the distancing started and the lines were marked on the floor of grocery store checkouts, I started calling them 6-6-6 lines as a reference to conditioning for protocol mandates required for a new “crisis” in the future. At the height of the insanity the manager of my local Costco threatened to terminate my membership, call the police and personally escort me out of the store if I didn’t put my mask on. And when the Wuflu shots became available my wife and I resisted the 24/7 fear porn piped in through store public address systems, freeway signs and local media as well as pressure from both our families to take it. I was forced to take the 1976 Swine Flu shot while in the army so this wasn’t my first rodeo. My wife and I are post-Vietnam 70s army veterans and can see a dog and pony show coming from a long way.
I want to believe that Fauci, Birx and other culpable officials will pay some price for their part in the Covid disaster, but I’ve become quite cynical and have no faith left in our current legal system or our lawmakers in congress.
They have learned that those in nominal authority (those with the purse strings) are mostly not very well educated, nor smart; but also have remarkably little curiosity about and willingness to work to learn in any depth things they know nothing about. So – “public health” professionals have learned they don’t have to be forthcoming, nor timely nor truthful in any response to questions. And nothing happens. So they lie with ease and without guilt. The purse string holders just don’t deserve answers. I don’t think they are concerned about anyone’s health. They are part of the money laundering bureaucracy that’s wholly corrupted DC agencies.
It was first about stopping Trump’s rallies and then about control. Then they just added their objectives and counted their money.
I didn’t say it was empirical, Fauci did.
The tale I heard back during lockdown was that a German official with the Imperial German health service set a distance at 2 meters – roughly 6 feet – over a century ago. He didn’t appear to have any science to back him up either.
No, but you included “it happened to me!” as empirical, which it really isn’t. As mentioned, “it happened to me!” is just anecdotal to everyone else.
During Covid I was impressed, in a negative way, with the conduct of public health personnel at the local level (so likely not among those profiting financially – but perhaps believing they profited in prestige). An example was our County Public Health Office making up additional restrictions (e.g. quarantine after crossing state lines) and presenting those under color of authority on social media. When challenged, they would just delete the posts – no corrections, no explanations, no willingness to discuss over the phone. This type of conduct reminded me of the difficulties working with many of these same “professionals” in the Guard.
Along the lines of your point, the elected County Commissioners could not be bothered to reply on inquiries to this and it never came up in the meetings (closed to public input due to the “emergency”). And now we should all just move on . . . . (I guess).
Who has gone to jail or even lost their pension? All the way back to Louis Lerner…
I guess having a government job means you never have to say you are sorry.
Ignaz Semmelweiz was a Hungarian physician. Postpartum infection was a leading cause of childbed deaths in the 1800s. For some reason, the infections were more common in a hospital than they were in births at home, or even in the street. Semmelweiz proposed that the doctors and other staff wash their hands before working in the obstetrics ward. Postpartum infection dropped from a rate of 18% to less than 2%.
Louis Pasteur had not yet developed germ theory. Semmelweiz didn’t have an explanation for his observations. All he had were results. He was insulted by fellow physicians who didn’t see the need to wash their hands. Semmelweiz eventually suffered a nervous breakdown from the abuse and died in a sanitarium.
Empirical, but not (yet) scientific.
Ignaz Semmelweiz is one of my heroes because he figured out the truth of a matter (why more women died of postpartum infection in a particular hospital) without understanding the why. It turned out the hospital had a morgue attached, and the doctors were going between autopsies and births. They were carrying bacteria from the corpses to the birthing mothers, even though he didn’t know about bacteria. But empirically he knew the morgue was the only difference and that handwashing in a disinfectant solution was the solution. He was brilliant, but he also cared about the mothers who were dying. It took both traits for a person to expend the effort to find the problem and a solution.
Did the hearing bring up what Fauci and his pals did to Dr Jay Bhattacharya?
The COVID scare unleashed the inner fascist of every member of our local health department staff. It was as if they had become hosts for some exterrestial invaders.
When i first saw Brix on TV speaking I thought – this is the first time she’s had more than 12 people listening to her and she loves it. Real makeup and everything. People marveling at her scarf collection for Pete’s sake. (A lOT of women ove 60 do that.) Local public health people are rarely stars – since the 1918 flu our country has been phenomenally clean and healthy. Covid got them all on TV and gave them power to tell other people what to do. Meanwhile some really bad people used the circumstance to oppress, weaken or eliminate rights, make a big bunch of money for themselves and their friends (the public health and pharma people in Boston immediately started buying really pricey Beacon Hill and Newbury St properties and it was noticed,) and expand radical power when they weren’t actually killing and injuring people with their medical interventions and diktats. And they got rid of a President they hated and feared. They will do a lot to retain it.
I gave up hope of them ever paying when they use their power to attack the citizen. (If they go against the state or bureaucracy, they will pay)
Q: All right. Thank you. Another question that we get a lot in the masking space is the masking of children, particularly kids down to 2 years old.
A: Right.
Q: The WHO recommended against masking children less than five because masks are, and I’m quoting them, ‘Not in the overall interest of the child,’ and then against children six to eleven from wearing masks because, and, again, quoting, ‘Of the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychological development.’ Was there ever a cost-benefit analysis done on the unintended consequences of masking kids versus the protection that it would give them?
A: Not to my knowledge.
This interchange points out a major problem with the whole process. Even Fauci had been 100% data-driven and correct with his assessments of the effects of masking and social distancing–it was not his job to factor in the social, economic, and psychological negatives of such policies. It was the responsibility of higher-level leadership, and Fauci should have pointed this out.
It is very rare that an important decision needs to draw on only one source of expertise. Would you let your sales manager decide on what products to produce at what prices without also seeking the advice of your manufacturing and finance people on capacity and cost? Would you let the manufacturing guy decide to cancel a product because it’s too hard to make without understanding the importance of it to Sales and also talking to R&D about ways to make the product easier to fabricate?
The whole ‘Trust the Experts’ thing tends to ignore the above point.
Fauci is the worst kind of technocrat. He’s also my least favorite person in government, which is saying a lot.
If empirical is acceptable, then the initial reports of the apparent effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin should have been treated as promising avenues of future study, instead of being lambasted. The Governor of Michigan threatened the medical licenses of doctors found to be prescribing these drugs for “unapproved purposes.”
People may well have died because of that.
There was certainly a lot more evidence for that, than for what Fauci was pushing.