Brownstone Institute
Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week
From the Brownstone Institute
It’s not been Anthony Fauci’s best week.
Forever intent on managing his image and public opinion on the pandemic response, he accepted a seemingly safe interview on CNN. The reporter was someone he trusted, Michael Smerconish, who tossed in what he believed to be a softball question.
He asked Fauci about the Cochrane study on masks by Tom Jefferson, and, in particular the author’s comments to Brownstone fellow Maryanne Demasi. Jefferson flat out said that masks don’t work to control viruses. Smerconish simply wanted Fauci’s response.
Fauci, who might have been expected to perform better, stumbled very badly. He said that while on a population level mask evidence is weak, the evidence is stronger on an individual level. That of course is a bit of a head-scratcher, especially since he cited none of the supposed studies.
Actually, it makes no sense at all. The whole point of the Jefferson paper was to examine the best-possible evidence. The results were exactly the “science” that Fauci has touted for years. The big difference is that the results completely contradict Fauci himself. Is this guy a pathological liar?
You can watch the snippet:
CNN's @smerconish confronts Dr. Fauci with the latest evidence that masks, even N95s, made "no difference" in the pandemic. Fauci responds by basically conceding that point while adding the nonsensical claim that masks work on an "individual basis," or something.
Smerconish ends… pic.twitter.com/tZB62saxOL
— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) September 3, 2023
After the exchange, Smerconish reported that he texted Fauci an apology for the way the interview went, assuring him that it was not intended as a “gotcha” interview. He reported that Fauci texted him back but didn’t want to share the contents because he didn’t have permission. Interesting. I’m pretty sure that a reporter under normal circumstances would certainly share that information. But as we know, Fauci is in a league of his own.
In addition, some very interesting email correspondence came out, thanks to a FOIA request by US Right to Know. The communication to Fauci was courtesy of Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers and on behalf of Fauci’s frequent co-author David Morens. The date was January 27, 2020, about the time that China’s experience with SARS-CoV-2 was making the news all over the US. (I wrote my first article against lockdowns for Covid the next day.)
“EcoHealth group (Peter Daszak et al), has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others,” wrote Folkers. In the past 5 years, and working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they had discovered hundreds of coronaviruses circulating in China. Further, the memo said, “clinical signs of bat SARS-CoVs in mice were not prevented with a vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV, and were not treatable with most monoclonal therapies being developed.”
Here is the full memo:
The timing here checks out against Jeremy Farrar’s own memoir:
“By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening. I was also getting the uncomfortable feeling that some of the information needed by scientists all around the world to detect and fight this new disease was not being disclosed as fast as it could be. I did not know it then, but a fraught few weeks lay ahead. In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism. ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’”
Wow, these guys believed they would be off’d! That’s some crazy stuff there.
These weeks were the critical turning point. China had already locked down. Farrar reports that “the world had all the information it needed by 24 January: a potentially fatal novel respiratory disease that could spread between people without symptoms, with no vaccines or treatments, that had already ravaged a huge, highly connected Chinese city.”
Then the possibility of a lab leak became very obvious in these days. “In the last week of January 2020,” he writes, “I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release.”
This fits exactly with the above memo to Fauci. It was at this point that the cool-and-collected Fauci organized the authors of what became the “Proximal Origin” paper that denied it was a lab leak, the first draft of which was circulated on February 4. Among the authors was a virologist who had worked with EcoHealth.
You can look through the entire timeline and see that this all checks out. It seems ever clearer what was going on here. Fauci and his cohorts were alerted to NIH funding of the Wuhan lab. They became convinced of the very strong likelihood that this was a lab leak, accidental or deliberate. This began to make some sense of other reports from many months earlier of sick soldiers returning from the Military World Games. They panicked and they worked on a cover-up.
Why did they panic? Was it for fear of the public health consequences of a rapidly spreading virus? More likely, they panicked that they would rightly be blamed for it because the lab was funded through a third party by US taxpayers. They must also have known that they were doing gain-of-function research: the idea that labs create viruses and then also manufacture the antidote in the form of a vaccine. But according to the report on Fauci’s desk, no vaccine works for this one or others in this class of virus.
Fauci defaulted to the only action he could think of at the time: use lockdowns to minimize the spread. His staff had already taken a junket to Wuhan and returned with a report dated February 24, 2020 that said that lockdowns worked to suppress viral spread.
Lacking any better ideas, Fauci decided to push lockdowns as a way of minimizing the damage and keeping his reputation out of harm’s way by 1) denying the lab leak with a seemingly credible paper, and 2) causing a hugely distracting amount of chaos with a lockdown that they convinced Donald Trump himself to back.
This would of course wreck the Trump presidency, which was a bonus from the point of view of the military intelligence that was already working to implement protocols from their recently concluded “germ games.”
Next in line came the necessity to involve the New York Times, which on February 28 ran an article calling for the US to “go medieval” on the virus in addition to an article by Peter Dazsak himself on the op-ed page!
Four days later, Fauci told Michael Gerson of the Washington Post on March 2, 2020, that no vaccine would be needed to get over the pandemic. “Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine,” wrote Fauci. “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
Why would he say this? Again, Fauci had been told that no vaccine in China seemed to work. Plus, he is not a stupid man – coronaviruses mutate too quickly – and had years of attempts to vaccinate against AIDS without success. So his thinking was that using force to stop the spread was the only real option for a man who was seeking to “cover his ass,” as the expression goes.
The big problem with the plan, of course, was that there was no exit strategy. As soon as you open up, the virus is going to spread anyway. This was why Fauci welcomed all attempts at creating a vaccine anyway. At least the vaccine would provide an excuse to end the lockdowns.
But just in case it did not, he worked with his co-author David Morens on a big think piece that came out in Cell in August 2020. This was the paper that said lockdowns should really be permanent.
“Living in greater harmony with nature,” they wrote, “will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
Despite Fauci’s wishes, the most extreme aspects of lockdowns gradually faded away in time, most anointed experts can pretend as if the vaccine ended the worst aspects of the pandemic (that’s why the mandates became necessary, if only to maximize uptake and confound the science), and Fauci keeps going on national television, despite his age and wealth, to dial back his responsibility for any aspect of it, including the lockdowns he is on record backing from February 26, 2020, onward.
In any case, this is a summary of current knowledge. There are of course many other layers to this onion, including the early involvement of the pharmaceutical companies and the extensive intervention by the Department of Defense. Sadly, much of the necessary information to sort through that thicket is wholly classified.
Thus ends Fauci’s not-so-good week. We’ll get to the bottom of this eventually.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
The Most Devastating Report So Far
COP 29 leaders demand over a $1 trillion a year in climate reparations from ‘wealthy’ nations. They don’t deserve a nickel.
Another Mass Grave?
Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!
-
Brownstone Institute24 hours ago
The Most Devastating Report So Far
-
Economy1 day ago
COP 29 leaders demand over a $1 trillion a year in climate reparations from ‘wealthy’ nations. They don’t deserve a nickel.
-
Censorship Industrial Complex1 day ago
Another Mass Grave?
-
ESG11 hours ago
Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!
-
Alberta1 day agoMAiD In Alberta: Province surveying Albertans about assisted suicide policies
-
Energy1 day agoOttawa’s proposed emission cap lacks any solid scientific or economic rationale
-
Alberta1 day agoOn gender, Alberta is following the science
-
International12 hours agoElon Musk praises families on X: ‘We should teach fear of childlessness,’ not pregnancy