January 11, 2024 - 4:30pm
This week Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the US Covid response, sat through a two-day closed-door US congressional hearing aimed at uncovering vital facts about his role in gain-of-function research in Wuhan, scientific censorship and the societal harms of Covid policies. A public hearing is scheduled for later this year.
Chairman of the US Select Subcommittee on Covid, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), released a summary statement yesterday:
For example, the “6 feet apart rule” that formed the core of social distancing recommendations for the best part of two years, was reportedly not based on any data: “it just sort of appeared”, Chair Wenstrup quoted Fauci as saying.
He also added that Fauci admitted that the widespread use of Covid vaccine mandates in 2021-22 would likely increase long-term vaccine hesitancy. Mandates have had severe impacts on public trust and numerous adverse unintended consequences, including job losses. Fauci reportedly urged American universities to adopt them, despite the widespread clinical and social evidence against their use for young people.
Further, he claimed that the lab leak hypothesis is, despite his persistent efforts to vilify and dismiss it, not “a conspiracy theory”. However, despite his agency funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain of function research, he reportedly played elusive semantic gymnastics, again, with the definition of the term.
Dr. Fauci also claimed that he “did not recall” pertinent information or conversations more than 100 times. This is less than the 174 times he did so during a legal deposition in 2022 focused on his collusion with social media companies to censor debate, a case headed to the Supreme Court this year.
Fauci’s role in stifling policy debate included attacking reputable scientists who advocated against lockdowns, school closures and mask and vaccine mandates — most notably the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. In an email obtained through a FOI in October 2020, Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, head of NIH, labelled Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) three “‘fringe epidemiologists” and called for a “quick and devastating published take down” of the GBD in the American media.
They got one: an insidious new public discourse about “medical misinformation” and the “infodemic” emerged that maligned, smeared and pressured public intellectuals and researchers who did not fall into line with the official government Covid approach. Meanwhile, in an infamous interview in mid-2021, Fauci stated that: “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”
It is now clear that the mainstream lockdown doctrine caused significant public health harm and eroded democratic norms. And Fauci, 82, who sat at the apex of American scientific power for 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and was the best paid public employee in the US government before retirement, should be held publicly accountable for his mistakes.
Yet he continues to collect accolades: a recent statement by the American Medical Association claimed that his dedication to “medical science has served the world well” and he has reportedly signed a $5 million dollar contract with a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, for his memoir, on par with the celebrity status of the Obamas.
Incredibly, Fauci rarely mentioned the harms of Covid policies during the pandemic years. In one of the few instances, in a March 2022 BBC interview, he cited the “unintended negative consequences” of lockdowns on children and the economy. We “may never know what the right balance is”, he stated.
The great irony is that public statements by Collins, a geneticist by training, and Fauci, a virologist, reveal a profound ignorance of traditional public health ethics and policy. More holistic assessments of the consequences of Covid policies have shown severe, known and long-lasting consequences on the social determinants of health: “the conditions where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning and quality-of-life outcomes and risks”.
The Covid policies supported by Fauci, Collins and other mainstream biomedical scientists and bureaucrats must be called to account for failing to balance infection control with social harms, wellbeing and civil liberties. It will be a long road overturning the poor legacy of Fauci and others in the mainstream establishment. But growing scepticism about his tenure suggests that America and beyond is moving in the right direction.
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SubscribeReckonings are for the little people.
”No one is above the law!’
haha….
“And Fauci, 82, who sat at the apex of American scientific power for 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and was the best paid public employee in the US government before retirement,”
That, imo, is one of the key problems here. No bureaucrat should be allowed to remain in a senior position for so long. I’m reminded of Hoover’s long reign at the FBI and how he corrupted that agency.
It is important to shine as much light as possible on the government’s response to covid, but I doubt Fauci will pay any kind of price. He could implicate too many senior people so he’ll be protected.
Fauci was the man responsible for AIDS when it appeared! He killed enough people to fill a mega sports stadium with his AZT regime, it is allegedly claimed. One thing is certain – the Pharma ‘Truth’ industry has gone into overdrive ‘Debunking’. What is known as ‘Protesting too much’, these years since covid.
here is the standard article headline
”The claim: HIV drug AZT, backed by Fauci, killed hundreds of thousands of people”
and then the article is ‘Fact-Checked’ and found to be the opposite – fact-checked by all the usual suspects naturally.
“Fact-checking” is the politically correct term for “censorship”.
Throughout history, censorship has always targeted the truth. Lies are not worth the effort of censorship.
I’m a gay man. Your statement is unfortunately hysterical nonsense. Fauci responsible for AIDS?! Really?
It is truly depressing that a balanced assessment seems to be increasingly impossible in our polarised times
I agree that balanced assessment is becoming impossible but I don’t think he was actually suggesting that Fauci caused aids. I think he was suggesting that Fauci was ‘responsible for the policy’ regarding aids. That at least is how I read the bit about it AIDS ‘appearing’.
I agree no official should be around for so long. But this begs the question how did this happen? He must have had powerful supporters. I assume they were the major Pharma companies. I find more and more that the ultimate explanation of many problems is the capture of parts of the State by corporate, NGO and other players with their own agendas. Trying to deal with the symptoms is unlikely to be successful unless the underlying disease is treated.
Big pharma maybe, but this is becoming a go-to simplistic RW “explanation”. The imposition of lockdowns had nothing to do logically with vaccination and predated them.
Yes term limits for highly influential public sector positions make sense. However I thought Fauci did his worst as a special advisor to the President? Was this concurrent with his long-term job?
Fauci is too old to make judicial vengeance a worthwhile pursuit. Instead the system needs reform to prevent a future Fauci 2.0.
In the UK we have the opposite problem with senior public sector career profiles. They all seem to be rotated around jobs on a 3 year cycle and as a result expertise in a role is not developed fully and neither is accountability or ultimate responsibility.
An extremely important point FG. Bureaucracies insulate themselves by both techniques. Monopolizing institutional memory (thus power) and, or, musical chairs, so it’s no ‘one’ at fault.
“However I thought Fauci did his worst as a special advisor to the President? Was this concurrent with his long-term job?”
Yes. He was Director of NIAID from 1984 to 2022.
Yet he continues to collect accolades:
What was the title question about a reckoning again? The UK’s own experience in reconciling policies with their consequences should make abundantly clear that not a single bad actor will face reprisal in any way beyond a stern lecture from some political official who is invested in pharma.
The definition of “expert” implies the qualification “in the relevant field”.
Fauci is at best an expert in virology (though his forty years as an apparatchik make me doubt that, too); referring to an expert in virology for an epidemiological question is like referring a traffic management problem to an expert engineer in combustion engines.
It belongs to the ethics of an expert to admit lack of expertise in the issue in question. In this – like in so many other things – Fauci and the other “government experts” have roundly failed.
Fauci was at the apex of the public health care hierarchy for four decades. In that time, public health in the US has deteriorated dramatically. It is a complete mystery to me how this close-minded, smarmy, vindictive, amoral, power-hungry and by his record evidently incompetent man can still garner any respect at all.
He’s an expert in expertology.
The pharmaceutical lobby, led by Pfizer, which in the US seems to sponsor a worrying percentage of ‘news’ programs, is very powerful indeed. It has also made a lot of powerful people a lot of money.
Last year Pfizer paid a whopping $43billion for Seagen an oncology focused bio-tech company. They too a bet on the massive rise in cancer rates which is currently manifesting across the West.
I am not a vaccine denier, but your statement is right. However it doesn’t explain the lockdown policies. Groupthink has much to with that, in my view, and the unfortunate “progress” (lol!) tendency to demonise opponents rather than engage with them.
Lockdown policies are just a winning democrat wedge issue.
They literally destroyed peoples lives to garner the votes of the sheep.
Actually Fauci isn’t that bright. Take HIV. He pushed an antigen based vaccine against the Virus which has 3000 antigens on the periphery of the virus. Prof Angus Dalgleish, much more intelligent than him told him it wouldn’t work as they were decoys. He has with Norwegian Sorenson developed a vaccine that attacks key areas of the body of the virus. Similarly they said attacking the spike protein of Sars CoV 2 would not work and they developed a vaccine to attack the body of the virus. The Fauci approved vaccine for HIV failed and we know the disaster that is the mRNA vaccines he pushed. We will go on producing variants as long as they continue to use that technology.
There – added the missing bit.
Fauci may have a case to answer about his support for gain-of-function research prior to the pandemic. The rest is just ideological gang warfare.
haha, Rasmus, still the vax man….
No, it is way beyond Ideologically, the harms of the covid response being horrifically destructive are now as proven as Galileo’s one of the Earth going around the Sun – and still as doggedly fought against by the big Pharma owned, as the wrong side maintained geocentrism till long past reason those centuries ago. As the future will look on the Mandates, Lockdown, mRNA ‘vax’ of the 2020s, as being crazy.
An ideological opposition to “Collective Health Measures.”
Collective Health Measures are only possible if they’re undergirded by a collectivist Ideology. Namely, Dialectical Marxism, which ironically is exactly where they come from. The Dialectic is not Science. What we call Science is empiricism and a movement committed to empiricism doesn’t say things like “Trust the Experts” or “Trust the Science.” That is the height or Orwellian Doublethink. A functioning empiricism in a free society would adapt to changing conditions because it wouldn’t censor and punish those with contradictory evidence. Whatever merit the initial lockdowns had were vastly outweighed by a catastrophic failure to adapt.
The idea that you would impose draconian movement restrictions on the entirety of the population to save a “vulnerable” yet highly flexible classification of people “The Immunocompromised” is something that only a Marxist Ideology could produce.
But I forget the existence of Marxism is just a “conspiracy theory” even though its probably the world’s third biggest religion.
Some problems can only be dealt with collectively. Throwing my litter in the park is easier for me and makes no big difference overall – you only get a clean park if everybody collaborates. The same for reducing disease spread – it only works if everybody collaborates. Nothing Marxist in that.
Litter in a park is a terrible comparison. That’s a specified public space with clearly outlined rules that can be modified by the public at public hearings if they’re pointless.
This is just you getting to tell me that “everything is interconnected” so you get to order my life. Absolutely a Marxist concept. Its not Democratic. It’s Bureacratic.
Excellent response thank you
WHO 1948 definition of “Health”
“A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Err, Fauci made recommendations and advised. Trump and others went with them. The buck stops with the decision-maker, period.
They can’t even use the time immemorial excuse ‘I was only taking orders’. Don’t like the advice, sack him and get someone else. They didn’t. End of.
Yes, I did rather have the impression that politicians were supposed to be in charge & to take responsibility – hence the iconic ‘The Buck Stops Here Sign’ on Truman’s Oval Office desk. We’ve come, or rather fallen, a long way since individual & collective ministerial responsibility.
Capital punishment has its advantages.
He is just a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. He is nothing conformist bureaucrat who catered to the expectations of his peers and went with the flow of the given moment. The government is full of people like him, he was just higher up the chain, an exemplar of the rot that eating away at the system. Too many people are trying to blame him for everything, such as conspiracy theorists trying to make him out to be like Ernesto Blofeld(which he isn’t) or Josef Mengele(which is sick), he just another incompetent elite. Don’t expect the political class to do anything meaningful about him, they cant be trusted to do anything right these days. The guy who kind of doing this is Rand Paul, but he just being a self-prompting drama queen as usually, which is an example why they cant be trusted.
Seems like he did conspire with Collins and others to suppress and discredit the lab leak theory even while considering it probable. He might even have been funding related research at Wuhan via the Eco Health Alliance. On top of that he ordered a campaign to discredit the authors of the ‘Barrington Declaration’ as ‘fringe’, such are Stanford and Oxford Universities regarded by this man. So yes a bureaucrat, but a pure functionary with no ill intent… I think not.
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – TR
Covid was an unprecedented historical event. How leaders responded to it must be given leeway because there was no way of knowing what was the right thing or even if there was one.
Unproven responses, such as masking, social distancing, school closings shouldn’t be criticized after the fact. Nothing was known about what would work and what wouldn’t.
There was no time to reflect on papers, declarations, research. When there’s a new and lethal virus, what do you do? You try to reduce the spread and you try to find a vaccine. Anything that might work you try. Especially confronted with a ventilator shortage that meant you had to defer infections so as many victims as possible would have access to them.
Most of the criticism of the main Covid responses is 20/20 hindsight. Criticizing them on the basis of their side effects is likewise harping because every response,used or not, would have had side effects.
But, Fauci must bear the responsibility for starting the Covid epidemic by funding the research that caused it. Even if it was only 1% of the funding, he is guilty in some proportion. He is also guilty of organizing the cover-up of its origin, although how this guilt contributed to the response to the epidemic is less direct.
First of all, your claim that this epidemic was an unprecedented event in the history (from the medical point of view) is just false. Humanity has been through much worse epidemics. It was unprecedented in the sense that in the 21 st century we went back to scientifically dubious practices of lockdowns and face covering that were characteristic of earlier epidemics, didn’t help, and against of all scientific knowledge, we deployed them on mass scale. This is why they must be investigated and discarded, as they actually were, by dozens of scientific papers and meta analyses.
Sure. Discard them now. But criticizing them for being used then on the basis of what is known now is Monday morning quarterbacking.
How much father back can scientific knowledge be said to extend? Smallpox, the Black Plaque, might have been mitigated by quarantine practices but how much science was responsible for this is questionable. People knew on their own to avoid the ill. And there were and are instances where face coverings, etc. do work to some extent.
And besides, the point is that something had to be done. No leader could afford to do nothing or appear to be doing nothing. The world where this is possible doesn’t exist. (Have studies really found that masking and shutdowns didn’t flatten the curve?) Except for Sweden and Florida, that is.
And besides, the point is that something had to be done. No leader could afford to do nothing or appear to be doing nothing. The world where this is possible doesn’t exist. (Have studies really found that masking and shutdowns didn’t flatten the curve?)
A life in politics awaits you.
John Pade, Andy Moore You guys are funny! Please learn to read!
Here we go again for a thousandth time.
First of all – scientific status quo pre-SARS-CoV-2 pandemic agreed, contrary to what was sold to the public that sweeping measures against respiratory, airborne-spread viruses are not effective. Just take a look at Cohen & Lipschitz landmark paper (2008, Too little of a good thing), where they argued that the epidemic theory advises against strict interventions because the spread of viruses “can paradoxically increase the burden of disease in a population.” Indeed, WHO’s pandemic preparedness plan from 2019 was in line with this core premise, strictly advising against widespread lockdowns.
The 2014 Ebola lockdown in Sierra Leone was the ultimate case in point. As reported by media outlets in 2014, the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) group repeatedly warned against such measures. The MSF representatives argued that lockdowns (1) do not contain the spread of the virus and (2) aggravate the epidemic by concealing potential cases (Thomson Reuters, 2014). As expected, they led to extreme food and water shortages and riots across the country. It’s no surprise – studies show that in isolated humans and mice, the levels of tachykinins (TaC1 and TaC2) rise to very high levels: and increased levels of these neuropeptides increase anxiety, a sense of friction with the world and, ultimately, aggression. Again, just look at what happened in the USA during the cynically labelled “summer of love”.
As for “flattening the curve” and “saving lives”. First of all, scientific status quo is that the net efficacy of lockdowns (notwithstanding their negative impacts on society, economy and healthcare), was on the verge of statistical error. UK’s lockdown architect, Neil Ferguson has been producing grossly exaggerated and utterly erroneous epidemic models since 2001. The staples of applied statistics is that you can’t base sweeping social/economic measures based on models that reduce NP-hard problems to simple metrics. Effectively – no lives were saved, and no “curves were flattened” (every lockdown in the UK was introduced after the infections, aka positive test results peaked). Jus mind you, the global lockdown policy was based on his outdated model run on a 13-year-old computer by a scientist whose track record showed that he was utterly unfit for producing any sound result.
As for “saving lives”. Just to throw in several telling examples from the actual scientific research. It’s a well-known fact that prolonged isolation damages the brain, raises the risk of dementia, and shortens the lifespan of older adults, while research on the effects of isolation in rats shows their tendency for opioid and alcohol abuse, the longer their isolation is prolonged. In a similar vein, Wang et al. (2022) have shown that psychological distress after a pre-COVID-19 infection led to an increased risk of post-COVID-19 infection conditions.Similarly damning were early estimates by UNICEF (2020) and other institutions on the devastating toll that lockdowns would have on children that were later confirmed by their updated version of the report (2021). UNICEF’s reports estimated that 463 million children globally – were unable to access remote learning during shutdowns. In the US alone, as Christakis et al. estimated in another analysis, missed school classes would lead to 13.8 million years of life lost. It is only now, with student test scores decreasing rapidly as a result of the shutdown, that we can see the first damages incurred by the lockdowns. Still, more damage is to come: The UNICEF report warned against additional 200,000 stillbirths, 2 million under-five deaths, 124,000 additional cases of HIV, and 80 million children left out of the vaccination program due to reductions in routine health service coverage. Another report by Headley et al. warned that the shutdowns would cause an additional 140 million people to live in extreme poverty and malnutrition, with 265 million people living globally in food insecurity. As opposed to that, in the so-called first-world countries, sugar and alcohol consumption increased dramatically during lockdowns, which, combined with the lack of movement, led to a global average increase in body weight. This is in stark contrast to the fact that WHO lists diabetes as a risk factor for severe COVID-19 infections.
I could list these adverse effects ad nauseam, and let me be clear. It’s not speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Most of these facts were known either pre-pandemic, or emerged very early in the pandemic (May-June 2020). Our hindsight only confirmed these conjectures.
Saving lives, or flattening the curve were just catch phrases, sold to the public so that the already frightened public saw that the politicians were doing something. Indeed, it was quite in line with the famous Fridman’s doctrine of “disaster capitalism”: That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. So, lockdowns being unscientific and harmful from the very beginning, were quickly sold to the public, and from unconceivable back in March 2020, they became a new social dogma. To the utmost harm of global society, I’m afraid.
I so agree.
Actually, we do not know that the COVID epidemic was caused by the virology research. It is quite plausible, but so is the hypothesis that it came from wildlife. That still does not get Fauci off the hook for funding some highly risky research and covering it up afterwards, though.
The long slow collapse of the Covid consensus will ultimately make the Horizon Post Office crimes look miniscule. Only WWIII can save the expertocracy and its political and media enablers from the consequences. Worryingly it looks like they might be getting their way again.
Fauci, “I am science “ has destroyed what little credibility any government agency had or ever will have.
One only has to view the statement by Dr David Martin at the 3 May 2023 Covid conference at Brussels to see Faucis part in all this. He is impart to the greatest act of terrorism committed against the world.
So my post in favour of Fauci (short, polite and heavily downvoted) has been removed after several days. Is it now official Unherd policy that only anti-lockdown viewpoints are allowed?
…and it isn’t apparently possible to upvote your complaint. Odd.
I just did. Don’t like AF but do like free comment…
In the coming 2nd American civil war there will not be North and South, Yankees and Confederates or even Republicans and Democrats. There will be Masks v. Smiles. Please god let the Smiles win.