For millions of Americans, he was the public face of the government’s Covid-19 lockdowns and the masking and vaccine mandates. But last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, one of the nation’s most powerful public health agencies and the president’s chief medical advisor, announced he will step down in December.
His departure coincides with recently launched GOP investigations into the government’s botched Covid response, and the origins of the coronavirus that wreaked havoc on the world.
“Fauci became a symbol of the authoritarian approach of the Biden administration toward Covid,” wrote the NY Post. “His quitting removes a major political distraction before the midterm elections and comes as the Biden administration seeks to revamp the harshly-criticized CDC.
“Retirement can’t shield Dr. Fauci from congressional oversight,” asserted U.S. Rep. James Comer, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, who would likely lead any investigations next year.
“Fauci’s resignation will not prevent a full-throttle investigation into the origins of the pandemic. He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, who has repeatedly accused Fauci of funding dangerous gain-of-function research and called for his firing.
Whether or not he was instrumental in causing the pandemic — by funding dangerous research in the Chinese lab that may have created the coronavirus and allowed it to escape — Fauci promoted a series of policies in America and the rest of the world that arguably did even more damage than the virus.
The lockdowns were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America, critics say. The world’s leading epidemiologists had warned that lockdowns would be futile and cause terrible collateral damage, which is why they were never before attempted on a grand scale, but Fauci ignored that advice.
Scott Atlas, a health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution and a member of former President Trump’s task-force on dealing with the coronavirus, tried getting his colleagues to consider the evidence that lockdowns and mask mandates were not working, as he recounts in his Washington memoir, “A Plague Upon Our House.”
But Fauci and fellow bureaucrats Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield had no interest in debating it — or bothering to read the studies. They refused to even discuss the vast social and economic collateral damage, Atlas writes.
When prominent researchers from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford issued the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a traditional public-health policy focused on protecting the vulnerable instead of shutting down society, Fauci dismissed it as “total nonsense” and the mainstream media parroted his disdain.
Legacy of Fear-mongering
As evidence mounted of the policies’ failure, Fauci and his allies countered the opposition by deploying media manipulation and fear-mongering.
“Fauci owed much of his success to decades of cultivating the right journalists — always available for a TV appearance, always happy to provide an authoritative quotation when he had no idea what he was talking about,” writes the NY Post. “Above all, he was always ready to satisfy journalists’ need for scary news and doomsday predictions.”
Fear-mongering sold papers, drew listeners and scored higher ratings for journalists, while enshrining Fauci as the exclusive voice of Covid authority for an entire nation.
This was “an unprecedented and deeply flawed approach to a complex pandemic that should have seen the collaboration of the best scientific and medical minds in the country,” noted cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough.
As a result of Fauci’s benighted policies, a third of elementary school children are going to need remedial education, studies show. In addition, rates of alcoholism and drug addiction among young people skyrocketed. Physical child abuse and suicides of minors more than tripled during the pandemic lockdowns, according to US News.
Instead of treating people in the hospital diagnosed with Covid, they sent them back home without treatment, where they spread more disease to family members.
Authorities closed the beaches, gave $1,000 tickets for surfing, and covered outdoor skate parks in sand. Parks departments padlocked inner-city basketball courts and took down the rims, one of the few recreational outlets available to inner city youth.
People were forced to spend less time outdoors and more time inside, where viral load was heaviest and Covid infection spread the fastest.
Gain of Function and Lab Leak
Early in the pandemic, prominent virologists expressed concerns that the virus had been created in the Wuhan laboratory. Then they publicly disavowed that possibility after a teleconference with Fauci and other officials who had been funding research at the lab.
“Fauci didn’t simply downplay and obfuscate the origins of the pandemic, apparently in conjunction with the Chinese government,” said Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “He covered up evidence that he, Tony Fauci, likely helped create that virus in the first place, by funding gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function is a laboratory technique that genetically manipulates a virus and can increase its transmissibility and toxicity. The technique is risky because it can be used to alter a virus into a bioweapon.
Fauci, has been adamant the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at Wuhan, a Chinese government lab. Carlson cited Fauci’s testimony to Congress under oath in July 2021.
SEN. PAUL: Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?
FAUCI: Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.
SEN. PAUL: You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?
FAUCI: Yeah, that is correct and Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.
Dangerous Fraud
Supporting the charge that the research described by Sen. Rand in fact constitutes gain-of-function, the “left-leaning Intercept spoke to several virologists,” reported Carlson. The authors found that “seven of the experts said the research appears to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research.”
Dr. Richard Ebright, lab director for the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, went further, telling senators at an August 3, 2022, Senate hearing that Fauci was lying to them.
The hearing, “Revisiting Gain-of-Function Research: What the Pandemic Taught Us and Where Do We Go From Here,” was held by the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight.
“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press, and to policymakers by Dr. Fauci have been untruthful,” Ebright said. “I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false.”
Ebright told the Senate that Dr. Fauci “lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public.”
He told the Senate he stands by those remarks and explained in his written testimony why he believed EcoHealth Alliance, an NIH-funded agency and longtime collaborator with the Chinese government lab, had indeed conducted gain-of-function research while receiving U.S. taxpayer funding through Fauci.
Ebright was among the 16 scientists who authored a letter published last September in the prestigious British science journal The Lancet calling for another look at the evidence that the pandemic began with a lab leak.
In his testimony, Ebright argued that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by the NIH to increase the lethality of bat coronaviruses fits the definition of gain-of-function research.
Another witness at the Aug 2022 hearing, Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, testified about the strong likelihood of a “lab escape,” as the pandemic’s origin.
“I am reasonably confident that this type of research represents a greater near-term threat to national security than anything else in the life sciences,” Esvelt told the Senate, adding that [gain-of-function research] generally should not be done because “it is far more likely to kill humans than save them.”
Sen. Paul accused Dr. Fauci of misleading the public by falsely claiming that this research was reviewed and found to be safe by experts. “That is clearly a lie,” said Paul in an interview on Rising, an affiliate of The Hill, following the hearing.
“Tony Fauci is a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries would be understood to be very serious crimes,” Carlson said. “So, it’s possible he might want to resign before he has to explain all of that to a new Congress.”
Tools of Mass Death
Another witness at the Senate hearing was Dr. Steven Quay, chief executive officer at Atossa Therapeutics Inc. He co-wrote a Wall Street Journal column last December citing four studies that provide strong evidence for the lab-leak theory.
One study, published by Nature Medicine, concluded the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection, which is strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.
Quay was asked at the August hearing by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., if he was concerned about the expansion of Chinese gain-of-function research. In response, Quay pointed out that in December 2019, Chinese researchers were “doing synthetic biology on a cloning vector of the Nipah virus, which is 60% lethal.”
“We just experienced a 1% lethal virus,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-2. Noting the Black Plague was a 20% lethal event that set the world back 250 years, a pandemic of the Nipah virus, in his estimation, would “set us back a millennium.”
The Nipah virus is associated with encephalitis, a severe swelling of the brain, experts say.
Kevin M. Esvelt, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT Media Lab, testified that U.S. funding of gain-of-function – which he described as “asymmetric tools of mass death” – is creating sinister incentives for China.
Esvelt, in a Washington Post op-ed titled “Manipulating Viruses Risking Pandemics is Too Dangerous,” countered a disturbing 2011 Washington Post op-ed by Anthony Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins that gain-of-function research is “A Risk Worth Taking.”
The ‘Noble’ Lie
Blatant falsehoods appear, when it served a supposedly noble purpose such as convincing the public to follow the government’s vaccine mandates, seems to have been a staple not only of Fauci’s modus operandi but that of his fellow health agency bureaucrats.
“Fauci admitted to the New York Times that he lied about herd immunity in order to sell more vaccines, which also didn’t work, which weren’t even actually vaccines, but they did hurt a lot of people, tens of thousands,” charged Fox News host Carlson.
This slipperiness with the facts was on display last week in a Fox News appearance by former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who casually admitted that she “knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines …”
One almost loses sight of the fact that not long ago, the news media boasted that Covid-19 vaccines were 99.99% effective, quoting FDA officials. Dr. Fauci himself made the claim that whoever gets the vaccine is safe from Covid-19.
“Vaccinated people do not get or spread Covid-19,” he insisted. “The data are right in front of you and you know exactly what you need to do.” He made this claim on June 22, 2021. Fast forward one month and Fauci was forced to reverse himself or be proven a liar.
In a July 31, 2021, video appearance, Fauci admitted how little the vaccines actually accomplish. He acknowledged that based on the data he had seen, vaccinated people were getting sick with the Delta strain with as much frequency as the unvaccinated. Fauci also admitted that vaccination didn’t even lower one’s likelihood of spreading the illness.
‘I Represent Science’
Fauci views himself as the embodiment of science. To challenge him is to challenge ‘absolute truth.’
On one occasion, he proclaimed: “If they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about, but if they get up and aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.”
On another occasion he addressed his detractors in a similar vein. “So if you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci. You’re attacking science.”
And finally, we get to know Fauci as the personification of truth. “I’m the bad guy to an entire subset of people because I represent something that is uncomfortable for them,” he said on an NPR show. “It’s called the truth.”
These pronouncements drew ridicule from many. “Whoa, settle down, megalomania man,” exclaimed Fox News host Carlson. “No one talks about themselves that way in first person except Fidel Castro and mental patients. This is nuts and yet it’s not Fauci who’s been damaged by this kind of behavior over the years. It’s anyone who criticized him.”
Mining his powerful position for almost five decades, “Fauci became the highest-paid federal employee, earning more than $400,000 per year, and stands to collect a pension estimated at $350,000 a year,” noted the NY Post op-ed. “That’s an appalling sum, considering the lasting harm he has done to children and adults in America…But it’s a small price to be rid of him.”
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Fauci: ‘I never Shut Down Anything’
As the data about the futility of lockdowns began pouring in, Fauci took refuge in simply denying he had ever advocated for such a measure.
In an August 22 interview with Fox News host Neal Cavuto, the NIAID director said with straight face: “Your listeners need to know something. I have never shut down anything.” He then went on to say, I don’t think [the lockdowns] irreparably damaged anyone.”
The Fox News host left these stunning assertions unchallenged. Yet a quick online search exposes the truth, turning up multiple televised clips of Fauci urging or affirming lockdown and closure decisions, even gloating over these “accomplishments.”
In October 2020, he told students at his alma mater, when asked about “the most crucial decision” he had made during his tenure as NIAID director, “When it became clear that we had community spread in the country, I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.”
In March 2020, Fauci publicly supported school closures as a form of disease “mitigation.” “The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And when you close the schools, [that] is mitigation,” Fauci said outside the White House.
In August of that year, Fauci sounded the alarm about Florida’s governor Ron Desantis considering reopening schools, warning that “if you allow children to be together, they will likely get infected,” according to an article in Politico.
On December 7, 2020, Fauci explained on CNN that he had been in discussion with health authorities from the state of California. “They called me and asked about shutting down,” he related. “They said ‘We feel we need to do this — what do you think?’ and I said, ‘You really don’t have any choice.’”
Were those children in Florida and California at any risk of being hurt by Covid? Statistically, the answer to that question is no; experts agree the risk of them becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid was zero percent. So why were Fauci and his colleagues muzzling and isolating kids?
Why are these health officials urging all children —when they are in next to no danger at all—to get jabbed with experimental genetic therapies even now, when the shots themselves are increasingly known to carry grave risks? And all the more so, when the data shows that the shots tend to weaken the immune system, to have less and less efficacy, and to be targeting older variants that are already extinct?
Will we ever get an answer to these questions?
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Breakthrough: CDC Abandons Its Covid Guidelines
In a startling breakthrough, the truth of natural immunity and the reality of vaccines failing to prevent transmission have been bolstered by the CDC’s quiet reversal last month of all of its pandemic guidelines.
This constitutes a major departure from some of the most diehard positions embraced by Dr. Fauci and other health officials.
The new rules essentially acknowledge that the vaccinated are not protected from Covid infection and therefore everyone should be treated the same. Former Covid guidelines that create “barriers to social, educational and economic activity” can thus be ditched. The vaccinated and unvaccinated are to be treated no differently from one another.
The CDC actually deleted the requirements for unvaccinated people to comply with rigorous masking, testing, social distancing and quarantining.
Considering how hard health officials have fought to segregate, bully and even demonize people who refused vaccination and other Covid measures, the CDC’s new position, which invokes “personal responsibility” as opposed to one-size-fits-all mandates, shocked a great many people.
Under the subhead, “Protecting Persons Most at Risk for Severe Illness,” the CDC now takes a page straight out of The Great Barrington Declaration and recommends “focused protection,” meaning protecting those “at particularly high risk … because of older age, disability, immune-compromise, or other underlying medical conditions.”
Need anyone be reminded that doctors and scientists have been dragged through the mud for proposing this approach to the pandemic? And that Dr. Fauci and his former boss, Dr. Francis Collins, orchestrated the effort to discredit and malign the authors of the Barrington Declaration?
Attorneys who have filed lawsuits on behalf of military members, students, health-care workers and others are now prepared to argue there is no longer a case for mandates.
Millions have lost their livelihoods and faced exclusion “from everyday life activities and basic medical care” because of “a differentiation that the CDC now admits does not make sense,” wrote Michael Senger, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance. The firm has filed many cases arguing for the efficacy of natural immunity from infection.
Notably, the new CDC guidance was not signed by the agency’s political head, Rochelle Walensky. She did however, make an abrupt announcement that the CDC had made a great many mistakes during the pandemic, and will be commencing a thorough reorganization effective immediately.
A scathing editorial in the Washington Examiner, titled “The CDC Needs New Leadership, Not Reorganization, slammed Walensky for missing the boat in her mea culpa.
“CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky admitted this week that her agency made “some pretty dramatic public mistakes” handling the coronavirus, promising to ‘pivot’ the organization so that it can better provide information to ordinary people,” the editorial began.
“But communication was never the CDC’s real problem,” the editors continued. “That was its arrogant and politicized leadership, which was unable to tell the truth. That is why no one trusts the CDC anymore or cares much for its guidance, whatever it happens to be. The cure begins with Walensky’s resignation.”
