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
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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