Anthony Fauci & Covid 19 “Vaccines”

Commentary

 

It’s been six years since most people in most countries were told to shelter in place, do not socialize with friends, do not go to church or school, do not open your business or hold a wedding or funeral. Stick to video only when possible and otherwise mask up. Only four per elevator. One-way grocery aisles. No surfing or skateboarding. Easter was canceled in most places in the world and even the Vatican closed down.

 

It was a pandemic panic for the ages. China’s early response—very draconian—set the model for most of the world, including the United States, the UK, and the EU. Only three nations resisted (Sweden, Tanzania, and Nicaragua). The rest fell in line as the World Health Organization issued the edicts and national public health followed in lockstep.

 

The policy response was unlike anything ever done in the history of respiratory infections. The extreme nature of what governments did was driven by fear above all else: fear of a new pathogen that many people worried came from a lab.

 

The deeper problem was epistemic: overconfidence in top-down control of a respiratory virus, suppression of cost-benefit analysis, politicization of science, and the near-total absence of humility about trade-offs.

 

In February of 2020, we had more information than people recall. It was calm. Most mainstream commentary said it would be like a rough season for the flu but with a more targeted and vulnerable population. All existing data revealed an unusual feature of the virus: it posed a serious medical risk to the aged and infirm, whereas children were not threatened and working adults could shake it off with off-the-shelf therapeutics.

 

 

 

That common wisdom changed rather suddenly later in the month of February. Nothing about the data had changed. What shifted was the level of panic. Writing furiously at the time, I did my best to highlight the facts that we knew, none of which justified draconian actions but my platform was too small to make a difference. The censorship had already begun by the first week of March.

 

The leading voice in the response in the United States was Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He had no official role as Pandemic Czar; he was one of many members of a task force. Crucially, he took the lead in communications with his gift for smooth and impressive media appearances. He also enjoyed the confidence of Donald Trump early on, until he later lost it (on April 23, 2020, to be precise).

 

For most Americans, Fauci became the face of knowledge and science about what was happening. Having traveled in the spring and summer of 2020 from several towns in New England to several towns in Texas and back, I recall how sad everything seemed at the time. Downtowns were boarded up. Malls closed. The theaters were empty. Restrictions on how many people can be in a store at a time existed, leading to long lines outside in which people were separated by chalk lines.

 

Nothing much made sense because in most parts of the country—save only concentrated urban areas—the hospitals and medical facilities were largely empty. This is because an order had gone out from the CDC urging all medical services to be restricted to victims of this particular pathogen and other emergencies. People were also scared even to be out, so routine diagnostics were foregone.

 

Even dentistry briefly ended. I worried that I needed a root canal and could not find a dentist who would do it. I called my mother in Texas who tried to get me an appointment but that did not work either. Texas medical boards insisted on a two-week in-state quarantine before I could go to the dentist. Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm.

 

Fauci was everywhere on television, celebrated as the great man of science who knew exactly what he was doing. Follow the science, we were told day and night. Anyone who wondered if this was the right approach, or was otherwise puzzled by the extreme actions that were bankrupting businesses and harming the kids, was treated as a dangerous dissident.

 

You know the story because you lived through it and remember it all. The November election was pure chaos, mostly because the CDC had urged all states to enable widespread mail-in balloting, and Congress had funded the effort. I personally received notifications to download ballots in three different states, triggered only by location services. What looked like a landslide for Trump turned overnight into a victory for his opponent. Incredulity dawned immediately and did not relent.

 

The new president in January 2021 had the chance to dial back all of this destruction. The early data had been confirmed over and over. It was a respiratory infection with a focused risk and not a danger to children or healthy adults. We had always gotten through such waves of infection with exposure-acquired immunity. In this case, however, soon after the election, major pharmaceutical companies released shots they said would be the fix.

 

The agenda of the new administration became one of vaccine maximalism. They wanted 70 to 90 percent of the population to accept the shot despite very short trials and a pathogen that every expert knew for sure would mutate in ways that would defy vaccination. Uptake was slower than they wanted so the next steps became as draconian as the previous year.

 

Cities were segregated by vaccinated and unvaccinated, just as the workforce had been previously segregated between essential and nonessential employees. Then came the mandates on all large businesses, government employees, and health-care workers. Millions were forced to partake in a medical experiment or lose their jobs.

 

For my own part, I had taken a major role in pushing an alternative to what I saw as madness. The previous October, I pulled together the event that led to the Great Barrington Declaration which pushed a different approach. It was attacked much more than I expected. The authors themselves faced major professional reprisal.

 

These days I remember nearly in slow motion, nearly hour by hour. But after all these years, it’s been a bit of a mystery as to precisely what happened to cause the world to go so crazy. Eventually, the pandemic faded out and the news media moved on to other matters, including celebrating new tools of artificial intelligence. Mostly people have wanted to forget about the whole experience.

 

Let’s return now to the role of Anthony Fauci, the world’s leading spokesman for the pandemic response. As Joseph Biden was leaving office, he issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci for all actions during this period and prior, even though he had never been accused of any crimes. Several times he had testified in the Senate that neither he nor the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the kind of research that would risk the leak of man-made viruses. Senator Rand Paul, a physician who opposed the lockdowns, however, stayed on the case.

 

Senator Paul has issued a subpoena for Fauci to appear before the Senate, even though the statute of limitations on possible perjury has run out and he has already been pardoned. However, he does face the risk of new charges from a testimony that is misleading, incomplete, or contradictory to the record.

 

Leading up to this testimony, Senator Paul has released a Reading Room of documents. For people like me, it is enormously interesting to see the emails, messages, and especially the diary of Fauci himself. Fauci kept this detailed diary the entire time and it is intensely revealing of his outlook and rationale, complete with a list of media appearances and personal exchanges.

 

The diary is longer than 1,000 pages. I started it and was examining it so closely that several hours went by and I had only examined 60 pages. I’m still not through the entire record. They are packed with new information that fills out crucial details about the most tragic days of our lives.

 

When I told a friend about the document, he responded that it is likely designed to create an alibi rather than be a confession. My take is that it is best described as notes toward an autobiography, not fully revealing of all but deeply instructive as to his thinking all along.

 

In the big picture, what strikes readers is how focused Fauci was on his media appearances, his status in public opinion, and his relationships with various government officials. This constitutes nearly the entire text. Indeed, half the document consists of reprinting hagiographic profiles that poured out daily in the press. There is precious little in the way of science.

 

“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. Today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable [people] in the world,” he wrote on May 21, 2020. “Countless profiles on me in multiple media.”

 

Also from Dec. 4, 2022: “I was completely swamped with people yelling my name and applauding it as I left the vehicle in front of the Kennedy Center and walked that long red carpet walk to the theater. There must have been hundreds of people lined up behind a rope down area and I was amazed how this recognition of me has reached such a height.”

 

A priest friend of mine once warned me never to believe one’s own good press. Flattery is a mask for duplicity. The critics are the people we should value because they are sharing insights likely felt by many who are otherwise silent. Critics are our benefactors whereas our flatterers, while they feed the ego, are often a source of deception. We believe them only at our peril.

 

It’s a good lesson, one from which Fauci would have benefited. In the coming weeks and months, there will be much discussion of the details of these diaries. The timeline and the trajectory here is intensely interesting for anyone who remains puzzled as to why all of this unfolded as it did, with heavy focus on what Fauci knew and when he knew it.

 

My big picture intuition: the wheel of fortune has turned. The excessively valorized hero of the most traumatic times of our lives now faces the opposite. He will be scapegoated in ways that are probably not entirely justified by the facts. He was never the master and commander, much less the embodiment of “the science.” He was only ever the communicator with a well-practiced and officious personae within the medical and scientific community. At the Senate hearing, Fauci will be well-served by the sudden onset of acute amnesia.

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I would love to hear from you. You can email me at jeffrey.tucker@epochtimes.us