Tag Archive for: FauciLockdowns

Trust “The Science”? No.

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Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Here is Chapter Two of Gone Viral by Justin Hart

Thanksgiving weekend came and went in 2021. The soothsayers of Team Apocalypse were wrong again—the sky didn’t fall. Whole populations of families who dared to get together to celebrate were not wiped out. But that didn’t stop NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Covid fatality rate doesn’t hold a candle to the risk of standing between Dr. Fauci and a camera. After a few softball questions the television host of CBS’s Face the Nation asked Dr. Fauci about recent criticism of him from various corners. He replied:

So, it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that’s what I worry about.

It is indeed dangerous to claim to represent science. Science doesn’t need sales reps, since it is the conceptualization of physical reality itself as determined by experiment and data. What Fauci truly represented is the authoritarian State with a capital “S.”

Emails released through the Freedom of Information Act show Fauci to be a manipulative man of politics, deftly brushing off lengthy diatribes against him or mustering forces to push back on Team Reality. It really is quite the position to be in as the highest paid federal employee in history to call upon the systematic enterprise of knowledge known as “science” to shield you from criticism.

The damage wrought upon our science as an actual institution is incalculable. As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya noted: “The current generation of top public health leaders will need to step down before trust is restored.”

The science is not what they say it is and you are not required to acquiesce to anyone’s determinations but your own. Indeed, when someone declares themselves to be the voice of authority in all things—run.

Science and the Application of Science Are Not the Same Thing

One keen realization our society must grapple with is separating the science from the application of that science. The science may indeed dictate that we experienced the spread of a highly transmissible deadly viral aerosolized respiratory pathogen, but it does not follow that you need to lose your job after that. Or that we ought to destroy the economy of a country. Or deprive a generation of children of proper learning.

Dr. Scott Atlas was lambasted by Team Apocalypse again and again for not being a virologist, but he was not sent to the White House to fix “the science”—he was there to fix the policy. Indeed, Dr. Atlas had keen and deep expertise in the application of science to public policy, something Dr. Fauci has failed at again and again in his career.

Our Constitution affords US citizens many enumerated rights and protections in our pursuit of happiness. Many of these endowed freedoms are couched in language specifically protecting us from the government writ large. While courts might attest to some extreme event placing some of these rights into dormancy, it did not give Dr. Fauci the right to put our rights, indeed our whole Constitution, into a coma.

The Institutions Lie. And Lie. And Lie.

Myriad once-trusted institutions have suffered greatly under the boom which Dr. Fauci and company lowered onto the American people and, frankly, the world.

The CDC has lost immense trust on all sides. From Dr. Redfield’s declaration that masks are better than vaccines to Dr. Walensky selling you a non-sterilizing sterilizing vaccine—this institution has wreaked the greatest havoc over the entire pandemic. They manipulated data, hid data, ignored data, invented data, deleted data, dismissed data, and all around succumbed to political pressure.  Whether it was from teachers’ unions or a meddling White House, the CDC failed to provide any real leadership. With a budget of billions and over twenty thousand employees the amount of work they produced was puny and questionable at every step.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is another behemoth that needs a thorough cleaning. Their (now) former director, Francis Collins, penned the infamous email calling out the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Collins ends the email: “Is it underway?”

If it wasn’t, the establishment institutional heads got in gear and made sure to jumpstart the process of attempting to destroy the reputations of the signers, all manifestly qualified and fantastically credentialled scientists and doctors.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Fauci is one of the key culprits stalling any real progress on trust and communication around these vital topics. Fauci and Collins are keenly involved with all areas of research in this federal healthcare monstrosity and influence millions of dollars in grants given every year. No wonder the spectrum of literature produced here did little to further any alternate views on lockdowns, masking, vaccines, and other COVID-19 implementations. The folks setting the policy also hold the purse strings.

It was obvious from the get-go that the structure of our county-centric administration of health policy was going to be problematic. These local health directors and advisors have little if any accountability. They are unelected bureaucrats and were given immense powers over the lives of citizens in their areas. The replete inconsistency with how federal health policy and information was conveyed to the public is an embarrassment. These county entities were given massive outlays of taxpayer dollars for the fruitless effort of contact tracing. The impact was not just on our wallets. As Jay Bhattacharya noted: “Hospital staffing shortages are at least in part due to rigidly enforced vaccine mandates and to mass asymptomatic testing and contact tracing. How many more people must suffer because of the monomaniacal focus on COVID at the expense of public health?” Contact tracing at the county level became a de facto quarantine machine, especially for students.

Most did it, many of us knowing it was pointless. But the pointlessness became the point. Comply, or you are a bad person. Comply or it’s no more school for you.

And comply many people did, thinking they would weather the madness, counting the cost on their hearts and spirits as worth the sacrifice for their children’s education. One more stricture, and the schools will open. Follow one more edict and the playground tape will come off. And so it went for two plus years. So it still goes in many places. We were duped, but we also duped ourselves.

Public Trust Was Destroyed

The impact on the public trust is massive. Curiously, after the 2009 H1N1 debacle, an article was published on the NIH website entitled: “’Listen to the People:’ Public Deliberation About Social Distancing Measures in a Pandemic” The article notes the vital need for good and honest communication to the public about measures being taken the protect the citizenry. It notes: “Public engagement in ethically laden pandemic planning decisions may be important for transparency, creating public trust, improving compliance with public health orders, and ultimately, contributing to just outcomes.”

Ya’ think? This is something at which Fauci and company dramatically failed. At one point, early in the pandemic, Fauci advised against face masks but later admitted he was telling this “noble lie” to slow the impact on material needs and hospital settings. Honesty was a not a key feature of this pandemic.

The report continues: “We conducted focus groups with members of the public to characterize public perceptions about social distancing measures likely to be implemented during a pandemic. Participants expressed concerns about job security and economic strain on families if businesses or school closures are prolonged. They shared opposition to closure of religious organizations, citing the need for shared support and worship during times of crises.”

It was all right there. It is on the website of the National Institute of Health.

They ignored all of it.

The report concludes: “Social distancing measures may be challenging to implement and sustain due to strains on family resources and lack of trust in government.”

What a stark and terrible reminder that the institutions which prized themselves on public health damaged the public more than anything else. Your trust should be in the bedrock of our Constitution, not in some self-endowed title of “Science.”

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This article was published by Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Goodbye, Anthony Fauci

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

When Anthony Fauci announced his retirement, a deluge of fawning coverage about his career immediately appeared in mainstream media outlets. This praise was both expected and deeply disturbing. Yasmeen Abutaleb of the Washington Post described him as the “nation’s preeminent infectious-disease expert who achieved unprecedented fame while enduring withering political attacks.” President Biden joined the chorus, commenting that “His commitment to the work is unwavering, and he does it with an unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity”.

On the surface, Fauci’s career looks impressive. He is one of the most cited scientists of all time, serving seven Presidents in various roles while working at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Health. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Dr. Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

His career, while lengthy, hardly deserves the unmitigated praise it’s currently getting. Instead, it exemplifies the problems that quickly emerge under technocratic rule. Dr. Fauci receives one of the highest salaries ever paid by the Federal Government (reportedly $434,312 in 2020), and commands more authority than any other career bureaucrat in recent memory. We can now purchase everything from Fauci bobbleheads to Fauci prayer candles. Some have even decorated their bodies with Fauci Tattoos. And why not? “I represent science,” he famously said. He believed it, and the US bought it.

That a career bureaucrat would become a phenomenon is one of the most interesting outcomes of the last two years. Since the start of the pandemic, few names are as recognizable to the general public as his.

The Bureaucrat’s Bureaucrat

Dr. Fauci’s career has been one of maximizing budgets and influence for his agencies and himself, all the while handling multiple public health crises with less than stellar outcomes. Economist Gordon Tullock in his book The Politics of Bureaucracy observed that the primary characteristic of a successful bureaucrat is “a desire to rise” and only secondarily does intelligence or competence impact the success of a bureaucrat. This understanding of success within bureaucratic systems is further illustrated by Friedrich Hayek in Chapter 10 of Road to Serfdom,  “Why the Worst Get on Top.” While Hayek’s work focuses on tyrannical politicians, the logic clearly applies to government bureaucrats. Indeed Dr. Fauci’s career demonstrates both these realities simultaneously. Far from the neutral expert concerned only with the best outcomes, Dr.  Fauci’s career is one of ambition and even “failing upwards.”

Dr. Fauci first rose to public attention in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis. In a 1983 Journal of the American Medical Association article, he speculated that AIDS could be spread through household contact. This resulted in widespread coverage from media outlets, who, citing Fauci’s work, stoked widespread alarm about AIDS transmission while raising his profile significantly. Two months later, Dr. Fauci avoided culpability for promoting the egregious claim by entirely reversing his stance, stating in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, “It is absolutely preposterous to suggest that AIDS can be contracted through normal social contact like being in the same room with someone or sitting on a bus with them. The poor gays have received a very raw deal on this.”

Unfortunately, the social harm from his irresponsible speculation was already done, and his reversed stance only advantaged his own career. His actions during the AIDS epidemic read like a masterclass in ambition and self-preservation.

From the beginning of his career, Dr. Fauci has embodied Tullock’s “successful bureaucrat,” gradually rising through the federal bureaucracy while expanding his own influence and that of the agencies he worked for. By the time he became the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his star was formed. Over the rest of his career, despite contributing to a number of public health failures, Dr. Fauci grew into a powerful figure in Washington. Prior to his retirement, he commanded influence over a budget in the tens of billions.

His career came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic and response. When it was to his and his agency’s advantage, he publicly called for nationwide school closures, lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates, only to later deflect when concerns were raised by the public and elected officials, stating at a Senate hearing, “everything that I have said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, his contradictions and changing narratives have resulted in confusion and an erosion of confidence in public health. Still, through it all, he has remained at the top of not just his agency but also in influence and public adoration. 

Maintaining that influence and adoration led Fauci to declare that he is the embodiment of science itself when questions were raised about his handling of the pandemic. In June 2021, he stated, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” in November he doubled down:

But if they get up and aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people can recognize there’s a person there. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.

And, just when you thought he could go no further, recently, at an award ceremony at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Fauci added that a whole generation of aspiring researchers follow his footsteps, because of “‘the Fauci effect’…people go to medical school and go into science…because I symbolize, integrity, and truth”

If only all of that were true.

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This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.