Why Did Fauci Exaggerate the Threat From COVID-19?

On the eighth of February 2020, in a private note recounting a telephone call with the former CDC Director Tom Frieden, Anthony Fauci set the fatality rate of the new coronavirus at “more like 0.2 to 0.3% rather than 2.0%”. Thirty-two days later, under oath before Congress, he called that same virus 10 times deadlier than seasonal influenza, roughly 1%; four days after that, the states began ordering their citizens indoors. Those two numbers, and the 32 days that separate them, contain very nearly the whole catastrophe.

Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince, instructs the ruler who would keep power that it is far safer to be feared than to be loved, and that a prince must be a great feigner and dissembler, since men are so credulous and so governed by the need of the moment, that one who practises to deceive will always find another willing to be deceived. Fauci governed by precisely that instrument, which is fear, and he practised precisely that art, which is dissimulation; the peculiar cruelty of his case is that his own Princess, the vessel whose very name mocks the Machiavellian title, held the plain truth that his princely craft obliged him to bury. The document that condemns him is his own, preserved on a federal server in bytes that any subpoena would eventually exhume; the affair therefore carries, beneath the statecraft, the shape of a thriller in which the buried memorandum is certain to surface at the last.

I have followed this man since before the pandemic, through his Zika (mis)adventure, in which a microcephaly panic dissolved upon examination much as this one would, and onward through his own “gain-of-function”, his self-professed “DNA of caring” and the Zika human-challenge trials that an ethics panel, guided by his own wife’s expert opposition to such experiments, had refused to sanction and which he pursued regardless, dangling a $110 million inducement before a Brazil that spurned it before he staged the trials in Baltimore instead. A single pattern recurs across the whole of it: this particular deception, however, stands apart from the others because it was the hinge on which an entire world turned.

Begin where Fauci himself began, with the perfect experiment that he could not have designed and could not stop admiring. When the Diamond Princess sat quarantined off Yokohama in February 2020, he named it precisely: “People on a large ship, all together, at the same time, all the time,” he told the press, “you couldn’t ask for a better incubator for infection.” He was, by his own account, watching the ship closely, so that it stood among the clearest data points he possessed. Here were 3,711 people sealed inside a metal tube of recirculated air, their number skewing heavily old, a natural experiment that no ethics board on earth would have sanctioned; and it returned its verdict almost at once. Eighty-three percent of those aboard never tested positive at all; nearly half of the confirmed cases produced no symptoms whatever; and, the figure that ought to have dissolved the panic, a full month after the ship’s seeding by its index passenger around January 20th, the death toll stood at zero.

That silence matters, because of the manner in which respiratory viruses kill. Influenza’s acute-mortality window runs roughly a fortnight from the onset of symptoms, 32 at the very outside; a genuinely lethal pathogen loosed inside a floating retirement colony ought to have scythed its victims quickly, and this one did not. The first two deaths came on February 20th, both of them passengers in their eighties. By the time America closed in mid-March the toll had reached eight, and it would crest at 14 in April; every one of the dead was elderly, not a single one belonged to the 1,045 crew and none was young. Restrict the count to the genuinely acute window, and the most heavily exposed population on the planet had produced a mortality on the order of two-tenths of 1%, concentrated wholly in the very old.

Confronted with two sources, a man in Fauci’s chair had to choose which to believe, and by the eighth of February he had enjoyed ample time to distinguish the open experiment from the closed one. The Diamond Princess was transparent, its every passenger swabbed, its denominator known to the last soul; the Chinese figures were the opposite, a case count shorn of any denominator, curated by a regime with every reason to inflate it. Put the question plainly: which would you sooner trust, the Princess or the Chinese Communist Party? Nor was the ship the only clean population the American state possessed. Within weeks the very same lesson repeated aboard our own warships, most starkly the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where a crew of some 4,800, young and fit, saw more than a thousand infected and exactly one death, a chief petty officer in his forties; a military that ran its own closed-population experiments had no need of Beijing’s arithmetic. The virus, moreover, did not change in the interval, for nothing observable between the eighth of February and the 11th of March converted a modest, age-stratified illness into the apocalypse that Fauci and Deborah Birx would carry into the Oval Office. What changed was never the data; it was the presentation of the data.

Consider, then, what species of pandemic this actually was. Were some cruel arithmetic to force a single naïve pathogen upon a society, one it had never encountered and against which it held no vaccine, one would select this pathogen without hesitation. The great killer of 1918, Spanish influenza, fell hardest upon the young and the strong, its mortality curve a grim “W” that peaked among people in their 20s and 30s; it orphaned children and thinned the productive ranks. SARS-CoV-2 did the converse, taking the very old and sparing the young almost entirely; and a herd, whether of animals or of men, endures precisely by protecting its young. By that measure the coronavirus was the gentlest naïve visitor imaginable and the furthest thing from a civilisation-ending plague; no shepherd and no honest epidemiologist would hesitate to choose the virus that spares the lambs.

Fauci knew all of this in February; he had said so, and he had watched it unfold. In that same month he was, if anything, reassuring, pronouncing the risk to Americans “minuscule”. Somewhere inside the 32-day window, however, the story changed, and on March 11th, before Congress, he delivered the sentence that would close a continent: the coronavirus, he testified, was 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu, a mortality near 1%. The chamber took him at his word, as chambers do.

The offence lies not merely in the width of the gap between the two figures; it lies in the man’s having asserted the smaller number in private and then the larger number in public, and in his practised habit of issuing fresh certainties only to discard them once their utility had lapsed. He proclaimed the six-foot rule as though it were a law of physics, then conceded, long after the schools had emptied, that it had “sort of just appeared” and rested upon no data at all; he pronounced masks useless, then made them a sacrament, then reclassified his own masking as a mere “signal”; he disowned the very gain-of-function funding that his own agency had authorised. The procedure never varied even as the pronouncements reversed: declare a proposition settled science, extract obedience from the declaration and repudiate it the instant its usefulness expired.

His testimony fell on March 11th 2020, the day the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic and the NBA went dark; on March 13th the Federal Government proclaimed a national emergency, and by the Ides of March itself, the 15th, and the days immediately following, California, New York, Illinois and the rest were commanding their populations to shelter in place. This was the most crucial lie; it jettisoned the finest economy in a generation, and probably Trump’s re-election along with it, and liberty across much of the earth. It brought turmoil, poverty, absurdity and the draconian spectacle of governments arrayed against their own citizens; natural law and natural right alike succumbed to a medicine-charged dystopia, and the man who led that apparatus of control knew better than the counsel he gave.

We know that he knew better because he preserved the evidence himself. The February note, later pried loose by Senator Rand Paul, recorded the honest 0.2 to 0.3% even as the public Fauci prepared to swear tenfold; the private ledger and the sworn testimony ran side by side, two irreconcilable accounts of one virus in the same hand and across the same few weeks.

Why a man should broadcast one figure while carefully conserving its contradiction in his own writing, upon a federal machine whose contents any subpoena would eventually pry open, is a question that resists ordinary explanation. A liar who merely wishes to be believed does not retain the receipt; Fauci retained it, as though some portion of him required the truth on the record while his voice supplied the falsehood to the world. Kary Mullis, who earned the Nobel Prize for inventing the very PCR technique that Fauci’s machinery would later ride to global authority, was blunt about the man: Fauci, he observed in a recorded interview, “doesn’t know anything really about anything” – one of the “administrative people” at the summit who mistake command of a budget for command of a science. Whatever one concludes about Mullis’s temper, the distinction he drew is the one that governs here, for at the decisive moment Fauci was not following the evidence; he was managing a narrative. Which compels the last and gravest question: toward what end?

The deeper history supplies the beginning of an answer. This was not the world’s first encounter with the family, since SARS-CoV-1 had erupted from China in 2003, after which Beijing kept the pathogen in its laboratories and laboured over it for the better part of two decades. What China feared from that first SARS was never chiefly the virus; it was the single thing a one-party dynasty always fears – the unrest of the crowd in the square, the memory of Tiananmen – and lockdown was Beijing’s instrument against that restlessness, a means of freezing a population and riding the danger out. For Fauci, I have long suspected, the true virus was never SARS-CoV-2 at all but Donald Trump, or the affront that Trump posed to the institutions Fauci personified; and on that solitary point the interest of a Chinese regime that despised the American President converged with that of a Washington establishment that despised him no less. A terrified nation, its economy halted and its president blamed, served the purposes of both.

Here the motive darkens further. In my original account, the Brownstone editor Jeffrey Tucker advanced a supposition I have never been able to dismiss: that Fauci and his circle worked a species of mental bait-and-switch upon the President. Trump, who had waved the virus away as a bad influenza, was suddenly told that it might be a Chinese bioweapon, and with that one word the matter migrated out of medicine – where he was sceptical and unsure of himself – into the register of war and national security, where he fancied himself formidable and yearned to be a hero. Flip the frame and one flips the man; within weeks his tone reversed and the lockdowns followed.

My own theory begins from the man’s predicament once the virus was loose. His fingerprints already lay upon the Wuhan gain-of-function laboratory whose leak the world would, in time, trace back toward him; and to have authored a global catastrophe is unendurable to an ego of his proportions, whereas to be also its rescuer is another matter altogether. Homer Simpson famously toasts alcohol as the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems, and Fauci stood in precisely that posture toward the pandemic – at once its probable progenitor and its self-appointed saviour. The rescue bore a name, Operation Warp Speed, and a vehicle: the messenger-RNA vaccine, an untried modality that he had willed toward existence for years. A Gates Foundation wager on an mRNA Zika vaccine, rumoured at as high as a hundred million dollars, had ridden on the same modality as early as 2017 – a product that, like the panic later invoked to justify its successors, never actually reached the market. Cover the fingerprints and become the father of the cure; whether the injection ultimately worked or not, the declared emergency alone would sweep aside the obstacles of Phase II and Phase III testing and usher his cherished modality into a hundred million arms.

That end required the nation’s confinement, and confinement it duly received. Like the cone of silence in Get Smart, the emergency lowered a bell jar over the whole country, holding its citizens caged and, more consequentially, naïve – denied the ordinary recourse to competing therapies so that the population might serve as the perfect experimental substrate for the coming vaccine. The wave, not by accident, crested only after the election; a triumphant vaccine in October would have handed Trump his victory, and so it waited. Biden arrived at the head of a cohort far more congenial to Dr Fauci, who reigned thereafter as a species of king for several further years. We, in the meantime, suffered.

The messenger-RNA platform may yet earn its keep in the individualised medicine of the future, tailored like a fingerprint to a single patient’s cancer, multiple sclerosis or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – a bespoke gene therapy modelled upon one person’s disease alone. That eventual promise, however, licensed nothing of the premature stampede of 2020, and it discloses the final term of Fauci’s calculus: the wager that history would absolve him, that a grateful posterity – its malignancies and its palsies one day undone by the modality he had midwifed – would look back and allow that the whole affair had not, in the end, been so very bad. It was so very bad, and it remains so.

If even a portion of this is what occurred – a public-health mandarin (pun intended) knowingly inflating a threat by a factor of five or more, borrowing a Mandarin-speaking adversary’s playbook and stampeding a sitting president into the arrest of his own country – then one is obliged to ask whether the honest word for the thing is merely deception, or something nearer treason; a Manchurian candidate. The clock has since run out, as the clocks in these stories always do, and the notes are public now, as is the ship’s manifest. Both documents testify, and both of them testify against him.

Randall Bock, MD trained at Yale University (BSc, Chemistry and Physics) and the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He is a practising primary care physician and public health critic. His autism analysis, ‘Unraveling Autism’s Surge’, was republished by Robert W. Malone MD as “essential reading… a treatise on the enigma scientists have labelled autism”. His works include ‘Investigating Zika-Microcephaly’s “Crash”‘ (American Journal of Medicine, July 2022) and Overturning Zika. Find him on Substack and X.