The Wall St Journal editorial board has pronounced its verdict on Dr. Fauci, now that he‘s announced his retirement. Conclusion: “[H]is legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.” Quite so.
Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will step down from his National Institutes of Health leadership posts in December, and the fact that this is a major news story suggests the problem with his tenure. He became the main symbol of the rule by experts who imposed lockdowns on America and brooked no scientific debate on Covid.
Dr. Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, and his personal research contributions are impressive. He first became known to the public during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and his agency was an early backer of the mRNA technology that became the platforms for two Covid vaccines.
But the main legacy of his 38-year tenure will be as the public face of government during the Covid pandemic, for better and worse. His reassuring authority won acclaim in the early weeks of the pandemic as Americans struggled to make sense of the threat. “Fifteen days to slow the spread,” he famously said in March 2020, and the Trump Administration and America picked up his refrain.
The two weeks would stretch to two years. The uncertainties of the pandemic’s course weren’t his fault, but the certainty of his policy
He and a passel of public-health experts used their authority to lobby for broad economic lockdowns that we now know were far more destructive than they needed to be. He also lobbied for mask and vaccine mandates that were far less protective than his assertions to the public. Dr. Fauci’s influence was all the greater because he had an echo chamber in the press corps and among public elites who disdained and ostracized dissenters.
A flagrant example was Dr. Fauci’s refusal even to consider that the novel coronavirus had originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. This may have been because the NIH had provided grant money to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund “gain of function” virus research at the Wuhan lab. In a semantic battle with Republicans, Dr. Fauci denied that the NIH funded such research. But his refusal even to consider the possibility that the virus started in a Wuhan lab showed that Dr. Fauci was as much a politician as a scientist.
Worse, Dr. Fauci smeared the few brave scientists who opposed blanket lockdowns and endorsed a strategy of “focused protection” on the elderly and those at high risk. This was the message of the Great Barrington Declaration authors, and emails later surfaced showing that Dr. Fauci worked with others in government to deride that alternative so it never got a truly fair public hearing.
“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” NIH Director Francis Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci. Their inability to abide criticism and dissent undermined the U.S. pandemic response.
“It’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous,” Dr. Fauci said last November, in a comment that summarizes the view of the public-health clerisy. The public is supposed to let a few powerful men and women define science and then impose their preferred policies and mandates on the country.
The costs of that mindset have been severe, and not merely economic. We know now that states that locked down fared no better, and sometimes worse, than those that didn’t. We also know that the vaccines, while invaluable against serious disease, don’t prevent the spread of Covid—even after multiple boosters. More honest candor would have been better for America’s trust in public-health authorities.
“Whether you’ve met him personally or not, he has touched all Americans’ lives with his work,” President Biden said Monday about Dr. Fauci’s resignation. That’s true enough. But his legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.
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“The Wall St Journal editorial board has pronounced its verdict on Dr. Fauci…”
…and it is a wishy washy, half -assed, let’s not say too much, ‘Thanks Tony.’
The sort of lame guff that apparently passes for journalism these days.
The preliminary verdicts are coming in on Fauci and his ilk, and they are bad and about to get a lot, lot worse. Good. Let’s hope that where appropriate it leads to criminal proceedings.
But there’s another verdict which needs to come in: that on the stupidity of the vast majority of the public who went along with this garbage, lapped it up unreservedly.
The public who supported this need to be held to account – at least have the mirror held up to their faces so they can see themselves and how they’ve fallen short, woefully short.
Hear, hear.
That’s an argument I’ve made several times and I’m glad you’re making it too, because it’s so important.
Much as I dislike Fauci and the technocrats like him who have sought to govern our lives since March 2020, if we use them now as scapegoats to unburden ourselves of our responsibility for the horrors that have been perpetrated – lockdowns, masks, coerced jabbing, vax passports and censorship – then we make it more likely that it can happen again.
Each and everyone of us has to learn from these terrible mistakes.
(N.B. By we I mean our society. Many of us on here have been fighting all this insanity from day 1.)
It’s not a comparison that I like to make, but I can’t help think of all those Germans who in the 1930s so enthusiastically gave the Nazi salute – and in doing so were collectively doing so much damage to themselves and wider society. For the most part they weren’t evil in themselves, just plain naive and stupid.
For me, wearing a mask was the equivalent of giving the Nazi salute in 1930s Germany. (I never once wore a mask btw.)
See https://brownstone.org/articles/they-thought-they-were-free/
Many thanks for this – started reading earlier and will finish later (long read). Haven’t seen it before – I thought that the Germans had a collective guilt trip after the War, but this says differently.
Until and unless our society faces up to what it has done (up to and including jabbing children with the MNRA poison, FFS), I have this gut feel that we are heading for another disaster, even worse than what we’ve done so far. There absolutely has to be a Reckoning, one way or another.
A society that has degenerated as far as we have is absolutely, sure as night follows day, headed for the rocks.
Of course there will be another disaster,, chemical and biological was always going to be a nightmare this century unfortunately.
It was talk of a medication that people could receive by breathing in the exhalations of other people who have had it so you can’t avoid it unless possibly by keeping well away from anyone who has had it). Who knows what horrors await us?
A really powerful article. Thanks for posting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZeELwaE7Xk
Absolutely. Very much in line with my view of it. I guess we could interpret it in a charitable fashion, in as much as understanding why so many citizens tolerated what they were persuaded to believe in and do in the 1930s over there. And don’t forget how quite a few people in East Germany behaved until the wall came down; ‘mitarbeiter’ with the Stasi and so on.
Not that long ago, I went to a museum on that topic in Leipzig. Educational, and quite chilling.
I wonder if the German socialist regime of the 1930s would have happened without widespread fear among many of the other socialists in Russia.
I wore a scarf instead maybe 3 or 4 times to go to church and a funeral, never an actual mask though. Luckily enough I found an anti-lockdown church that actively encouraged us to consider if we might be exempt (it turned out most of us were). However it is an utter disgrace how people were forced into impossible and heart-rending (and often very damaging) “choices” and how places like, for example, Durham cathedral collaborated in “vaxports”. Never again.
The vast majority of people will always be somewhat indifferent followers of whoever happens to lead who are primarily concerned with living their own lives despite of it as good as they can, this being due to both a lack of talent for leadership and a lack of time to empoy on leading others. This doesn’t excuse the leaders from their responsibility for the course they had chosen. Fauci is the guy who could have made a difference and didn’t (and profited handsomely from this). The traumatized girl with the chirugical mask behind a drug store counter I basically fled about an hour ago because I couldn’t stand her sad, faceless half-existence at that moment is a victim of the likes of him.
I think deliberate instigators of evil and folly are morally more culpable than those who go along with it or fall victim to it through their own lack of awareness.
That said, in a so-called democracy there’s an obligation on those participating to be vigilant especially when flagrant breaches are evident, and the majority failed the test and were often quite happy to see the minority victimised or bullied. Countries work better if the populace is a bit more awake when they need to be.
During the second world war, it was an open secret that the democratic British government was basically waging an extermination campaign[*] against German civilians based on the misguided notion that this would, if not outright win, at least shorten the war against German soldiers and a majority of the people of the UK were opposed to that. This didn’t make one bit of a difference and the extermination campaign basically ran on until the German capitulation.
The theoretical souvereign of a so-called representative democracy is (intentionally) a pretty powerless entity.
[*] Would-be extermination campaign, to be precise. While indiscriminate mass-killing of non-combatants all over Germany was intended and achieved, the actual number of casualties fell far short of the politically desired number of them.
Well of course the populace needs to escalate the reaction if the government doesn’t take any notice – mass civil disobedience and upwards, depending on how flagrant the breach is. Easier for the government to get away with under the pretext of an emergency (war, fake pandemic).
In reality the extent to which the government is kept in check isn’t perhaps what it would ideally be. The fact remains that our leaders are less bad than those in North Korea, and that life in most reasonably functioning democracies is on average better for most than life in dictatorships or whatever. Of course, covid has put a big dent in that.
I do try and favour the maskless girls at checkouts. Fortunately that is most of them now though you do still get a few shoppers wearing them. One wonders why.
I never fail to ask when the screens are coming down too. When faced with “Oh, I don’t know” I reply with “They have been removed in Marks and Spencers” (which they have – at least my M&S).
Agreed.
I believe we should always keep this in our thoughts:
Never Forgive. Never Forget.
The sight or sound of one of the perps – bozo, Truss, Sino, Fauci, Ferguson, Whitty, Raine, fond of Lying, Turdeau, Ding Don Dan, Billy, Klaus, Soros, Charlie and his bunch of whingeing kids, and the thousands of others – should propel
Never Forgive. Never Forget.
to the front of our brains.
Many people would say we should always leave a space for forgiveness and indeed that is the way I was brought up, but when the evil that is being pushed threatens everyone on this planet I owe it to myself and all those around me to keep my anger and hatred at least at a vigorous simmer.
I will never forgive. I will never forget.
I recall noting in my lockdown diary in April or May 2020 that there was news of people protesting this shambles “at last”. On day 1, many of us didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. I hope that that at least will be different in the future.
And initially I was really wondering what I was missing. It just did not make sense.
But they never wil see it. You only have to look at the Guardian and listen to Benjamin Butterworth on GB News to know that. The question then arises – is this country worth saving, given that half its population are stupid and a large proportion of the rest don’t speak English?
Well I live in it and I want to enjoy the rest of my days in some kind of peace so yes selfishly I would like to save it for myself and my kids
Perhaps it will just about see us out, but it’s too late for your kids. Has anyone ever expressed it better than Enoch Powell, sixty years ago when he said:
“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
But who is responsible for this stupidity? My vote would go the educational blob, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have dumbed down scientific education for the past generations in pursuit of what we now call ‘woke’ ideas’. The propaganda didn’t work for everybody.
Fauci is the perfect exemplar of the career bureaucrat. A total mediocrity who has filled his pockets with vast sums whilst providing no useful good or service.
Someone kindly posted this yesterday, sorry don’t remember who, but for anyone that missed it here’s a monologue from the stalwart Tucker Carlson of Fox News in the US, laying into Fauci and the covid cult, no holds barred. Well worth watching all the way through, including a wonderful grilling of Fauci but another stalwart Senator Rand Paul.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6311272948112#sp=show-clips
Sadly the people in UK broadcast media likely to feature such a comprehensive and forthright demolition of the covid narrative don’t have anything like the high profile that Carlson and Fox have in the US, which reflects the better resistance that libertarians and conservatives and nationalists are putting up there as compared to the UK.
“[The crook Fauci] should be prosecuted” (Senator Ted Cruz).
Interestingly, back in 2016 I hoped that Ted Cruz would become “president” of the so-called United States. Oh well, maybe next time. Or maybe De Santis. Or maybe the election will be stolen, perish the thought.
The little folk here (and many of the not so little folk) can hold our heads up high and say,
“WE SAW YOU COMING, FAUCI! YOU AND YOUR KIND! RIGHT FROM THE START! AND THE TRUTH WILL OUT. THEY GRIND SLOW, BUT EXCEEDING FINE!“
I hope this guy gains a new function of being behind bars for the rest of his life.
Although, the chance of this is infinitesimally small. The best we can hope for is that the thought of causing death and destruction will haunt him regardless of what he says in public. He knows he’s culpable.
I reckon the chances of criminal proceedings are higher than many people now think.
Why has Fauci resigned now? I have no doubt that it’s to do with the looming mid-terms, the inevitable ascendancy of the Republican Party, and thus a Congress-led investigation into Fauci and his ilk. (Tucker C. was alluding to this yesterday – see link in transmissionofflame post above.)
I don’t know the details, but I’m guessing that as a Federal. employee Fauci may be more vulnerable to a Congress investigation than he would be as a private person – as such he will doubtless be able to call in the lawyers, delay and obfuscate, probably for years.
So I reckon Fauci is indeed clear in his own mind that he needs to start preparing to defend himself against, or at least delay, some very, very serious charges.
Incidentally, with Fauci gone, and thus his rule of terror (as described by Robert Kennedy, The Real Dr Fauci) over, one wonders if others will be more willing to break ranks and start spilling the beans.
The crook should indeed be behind bars. I may forgive, but I won’t forget, and want some form of justice.
Not just Americans …… I’m British and I don’t believe a word our Public Health Bureaucrats or Government Ministers say.
I’ve never had much interaction with my GP or the NHS in general, having looked after my own health all my life, but my policy going forward is to stay well away. I have no faith that they will “first do no harm.”
Those of us who have had a lot of experience as patients probably learn a fair bit about the internal structure, and how it seems to operate. It is not really monolithic, and competence varies quite a bit geographically, even within the same building. Sometimes you’re lucky about who you come across, sometimes they just do their best without complete understanding of a problem at hand. Been there, done that, etc.
More evidence of one of Fauci’s finest legacies. The grievous bodily harm of millions of children.
https://www.hartgroup.org/yet-more-worrying-data-on-myocarditis-in-children/
I’ve pronounced my verdict on the Wall St Journal editorial board – and it isn’t pretty. Conclusion: “Their legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust the mainstream media in the same way again.”
The creed or whatever the mainstream press follows isn’t working and is the SINGLE biggest problem of our time. They’re still at in the UK – the BBC now even has FOUR doom & gloom fear inducing headings on its website: War in Ukraine, Cost of Living, Cornovirus & Climate. Rewind two years and none of this existed.
Experts
The shyster should have been put out to grass years ago – preferably a minimum of 6 feet under it. He’s one of the most evil men in the annals of history.
And that’s a position that’s not up for
debate.
AIDS – Fauci was at fault way back there !!… He is responsible for untold suffering in plain sight !!…
Happily killing black people in the US and Africa with his poisonous, so called, ‘vaccines’
He’s stepping down ahead of the mid term elections because he fears that once the GOP has control of the House and the Senate, which it will, his collar is going to be felt.
Good riddance to a very bad actor!