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Quote of the Day: Fallen from the Pedestal
“Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.” — Daniel J. Boorstin
During the beginning of the pandemic, I was seriously worried. Things were not going well, and a lot of the Democrats seemed to be more interested in virtue signaling than disease control. As someone trained in public health, I know that epidemics need to be managed aggressively. Contrary to what many people say, you can stop a virus from spreading with proper quarantine and infection control practices. Trump was taking decisive action on border control (similar measures of containment have been used throughout history), but he needed a trusted advisor who knew about fighting disease. Then we saw the nightmare in Italy, and people really wanted to avoid it.
Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci. A trained microbiologist, who seemed to know what he was doing. My boss, who I respect greatly, had nothing but good things to say about the man. He seemed like a consummate professional, wanting to achieve one last victory over disease before he retired. He actually seemed to avoid going behind Trump’s back or undermining him, which made me respect him. If I was working on a public health crisis for Obama, Biden, or whatever Democrat, I would either work with him, or resign. That’s the role of a public health expert.
I was not alone. Many of my colleagues and friends were reassured by Fauci. He was now a nationwide celebrity. But cracks were starting to appear. I was not troubled by the reversal on masks. In fact, I took to wearing a mask just fine. (My positions were recorded in posts I made at the time) What bothered me was the lack of pushback on excessive lockdown measures or nursing home practices. You do not need to be a public health professional or doctor or scientist to know that keeping vulnerable seniors away from infected people is a smart move. Furthermore, it seemed odd that there would be a full-court press against the lab leak theory. Totalitarian countries are not known for their safety records, and we have to make a point to maintain containment and protection in our laboratories. I had actually asked my boss if there was any discussion of the lab leak theory in the biosafety community, way back in April or May last year.
The BLM riots were pretty much the breaking point. Either large outdoor gatherings are safe, or they are not. The cause does not matter. Fauci was safe, Trump would have had his back if he condemned large outdoor gatherings, but he did not. Our public health establishment chose wokeness and hypocrisy, and lost the trust of many Americans. Fauci also became a celebrity, an icon. He was making pronouncements without much judgment – to be honest, it was as if he was trying to be like Trump. The contradictory pronouncements torched his credibility. Trump said whatever he thought, but earned credibility through actions. Fauci just made it seem as though he was giving random opinions, not considered scientific judgment.
They say in DC that the coverup is worse than the crime, and Fauci’s attempt at covering up his role in supporting research in Wuhan and gain of function research generally should have face charges for lying under oath. The really disturbing question to me is whether the gain of function research actually produced any valuable data for the pandemic response. After all, the whole point is to make the Wuhan Coronavirus before it shows up in nature, so we can stop it more easily. One of the chief criteria for evaluating GoF studies is scientific merit. I saw a different type of GoF study get shot down in committee at my institution over scientific merit and crazy risks. (When your expert virologist says “this should not be allowed to exist”, that’s a bad sign…) The American people are waiting to hear what the benefits of GoF studies were in this crisis.
The recent release of the Fauci emails has fully kicked him from the pedestal. He knew that asymptomatic spread (the whole justification for masks) was negligible, yet pushed masking. He worked closely with China, and coordinated to stop discussion of the lab leak theory. He was working on a biopic film on his life during the worst part of the pandemic, and had a book ready to roll, since he obviously had plenty of time to write a book. The man is a disgrace to the scientific community and to all public health history, merely a bureaucrat in a lab coat. In short, Fauci had the chance to either be a hero or a mere celebrity.
He chose… poorly.
Published in Healthcare
COVID cases were up all over Massachusetts in December and January. Lucky for you, the Brazilian Anti-Difamação Aliança has no litigation arm in your area.
To a large extent “public health experts” (and the CDC) began to lose my confidence several years ago when they started trying to sweep political issues like “racism,” “poverty,” and “gun violence” into the “public health” categories. They were demonstrating that they were no longer as scientists.
I’m not sure of all the implications, but apparently the HIV spike proteins found in covid (or at least four coding sequences for the spikes) were patented by fauci in 2015. It is an ironic accident that fauci’s (actually, I suppose, the INH’s) patented sequences showed up in the pandemic virus five years later — and that fauci argued that they were picked up in the wild.
His centerfold shoot for Playgirl was also in bad taste.
I don’t know. Cuomo has been saying that we’re all idiots because we don’t realize that the virus didn’t come to the American shore from China, but from Europe.
So maybe they will take the blame. We can send Cuomo over to talk to them about it.
Dumb Americans, sheesh!
He was the one with the mustache?
Again, why would you want to keep it from spreading? If it passes through most of the population with little or no notice?
How many people keep saying they “think” they must have had it last summer – that weekend when they weren’t feeling well. Yup, musta been the Covid.
If most people aren’t even sure if they had it or not, it doesn’t seem nearly as serious as they keep telling us that it is. Pretty lame pandemic.
Everyone who tests positive must “have” it. That means in a little while, with little or no discomfort, they will be as immune as if they had gotten the vaccine. Why aren’t you encouraging everyone to get it asap and get this damned thing over with?
Every positive test (that does not result in a death – which is 99.9%) should be a cause for rejoicing. You will soon run out of people who are still susceptible – pandemic over.
More like 98.6 percent at best, now down to 98.3 percent or something closer to that. I looked at the numbers this morning but may be off by a smidgeon.
Only if all the deaths attributed to Covid were the result of Covid. I suspect they are grossly overinflated, perhaps as much as by 2/3rds.
Honestly, I’m afraid to look.
Well, not everyone has an easy time of it. A lot of people are in bad shape, especially after a lockdown . Also we would have to rely on people to not visit the elderly and people with co-morbidities. Fewer people infected means fewer morons not staying at home.
That’s the point of the vaccine. With enough of both types of immunity, we turn COVID into a cold . The spread becomes endemic instead epidemic .
That’s certainly true. But I would rather not see it spread to vulnerable populations. I am really happy that we have vaccines now.
I would have to have a lot more than a suspicion for adjusting the numbers by anywhere near that much. Keep in mind that our country has a lot better survival rate than most others, so if it’s cooking the books it’s doing a bad job of it.
#metoo
For any vaccine, there will always be a portion of the population in which it is not effective. Vaccines work like wanted posters showing our immune systems what the “bad guy,” the virus or bacteria, looks like. If someone draws a mustache or glasses on the wanted poster, it becomes less effective. Some times one person’s antigen-presenting cells (like the bulletin board where the wanted poster is) don’t show the most useful identifing features to their front line fighters. These people have to rely on the rest of their community being vaccinated so that there is no one to spread the virus to them. This is “herd immunity,” you vaccinate everyone so that there is no one left to spread the disease.
All true with the proviso that people who have already had the disease already have (better?) immunity than the vaccinated and thus don’t need it. Given that there also appears to be a significant amount of pre-existent resistance out there, the bug would have a hard time being a pandemic again even if only a sizeable majority of the population were vaccinated instead of all.
Another thought: what if some small percentage of the population (not immuno-compromised or fragile who should all be immunized) remained non-immunized? Would that hasten or retard the evolution of variants?
I’m not sure that’s true. The research report is a few months old by now, but Shane Crotty said that the level of immunity from getting the disease is much more variable than from the vaccines. Do you have more up-to-date information?
That would be difficult to predict. At first doctors thought this was only an upper respiratory virus. Then they found it inflaming areas other than the lungs. Then they found it in the blood system. Finally, about a year into the pandemic, they discovered that some 20 percent of infected people get only GI symptoms. That it apparently survived the stomach acid bath that kills so many virulent viruses and got to the lower intestines was a surprise, but it also was a new wildcard in that it is in the intestines that viruses and bacteria often mutate.
I may be out of date as well, but my impression was that infection produces longer-lived protection but vaccination provides a wider array of iG goodies. People who were infected and then get the vaccine later show big boosts in good stuff but not necessarily for a longer time. If your immune system sucks and/or you are metabolically challenged (obesity), the benefit of the vaccine is far less. (Those last two sentences largely exhaust the list of things I am pretty sure about.)
It is probably way too early to tell but the real measure will be T and B cell immune response over the longer term and against how many potential variants. This is the kind of thing that the infection does that I am not sure the vaccination does but again, it’s early.
Acquired immunity and vaccination both seem to fend off variants pretty well. The fear-mongering fascist control freaks were really hoping that variants would mean masks and Zoom meetings forever but that is not happening.
I would also like to see more on how exposure to other kinds of COVID can provide cross-protection. Would a couple of lungsful of other random COVID viruses provide resistance such that a vaccine to some new variant of any of them would be unnecessary? Here is a study (really just more modelling) about that kind of thing. (I am a little baffled as to why these authors think that might explain why kids are so resistant to this pandemic–you would think that they have not had as much time to get exposed to as many strains of COVID as us old-timers–but that was their focus.)