Remember that time Tony Fauci told the truth about vaccines and the scientific method?

I know, I'm as shocked as you are. But it was a long time ago and he needed the research money!

Once upon a time, Dr. Anthony Fauci wanted Americans to know vaccines had risks and scientists couldn’t always give people the answers they wanted.

Yes.

This actually happened. And I have the proof.

It was 2002, after the anthrax and Sept. 11 attacks. Fauci was pushing for a big rise in federal bioterrorism spending for his institute.

By 2007, after Saddam Hussein’s laboratories turned out to be empty shells, researchers had repurposed the threat to “emerging infectious diseases” - bird flu and coronaviruses, found in Chinese caves rather than Middle Eastern labs. (Chinese labs too, but that’s another story.)

But at the time, the money was in the War on Terror. Fauci - then as now - knew how to follow the money.

So, in April 2002, as the United States was beginning to gear up to invade Iraq, Fauci gave an interview called “Expanded Biodefense Role for the National Institutes of Health.”

SOURCE

Weirdly, the link on this page no longer connects to the interview. It has vanished, except on the Internet Archive, the non-profit site that permanently saves pages upon request. It disappeared between 2009 and 2013, according to the archive’s records.

Nonetheless, the interview was captured twice, in 2008 and again in 2009, so Dr. Fauci’s words have not been lost to (unclassified) history.

What he says is very telling.

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Fauci had just convinced President George W. Bush to propose a 60 percent annual increase in the budget for his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, from $2.5 billion to $4 billion. The increase was particularly striking HIV, NIAID’s main concern during the 1980s and 1990s, was receding as a threat.

But Fauci had found a new problem to solve. The extra money was entirely to fund bioterror research, and in the context of the post-9/11 War on Terror, an extra couple of billion dollars hardly mattered.

Still, Fauci wasn’t satisfied. He was already thinking ahead. As he told the interviewer:

We need the next step, to make sure the Congress approves it … And then [we need to know about] the out-years. Because we right now are putting a lot of energy into some long-term investments. So when we make them it would be terrible to find out two years from now that the funding will end.

Terrible, terrible, I tell ya!

Fauci’s main pitch was a program that rapidly would match novel genetically engineered pathogens to the best possible treatments, a program he called “bug to drug in 24 hours.”

If this idea sounds like a multi-billion-dollar solution in search of a problem to you, you are not alone. (If any significant research has come out of this program in the last two decades, I’m not aware of it; feel free to enlighten me.)

Separately, he suggested what he called “pre-clinical detection,” which the article defined as “diagnostics before infection takes place.” This bit sounds legitimately three-letter agency, as in C-I-A. Fauci didn’t say much about it, at least publicly. Presumably it includes equipment like the sensors in big New York City subway stations that check the air for anthrax and other nasties (skunkweed not included).

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Then Fauci turned to the issue of vaccines, specifically the smallpox vaccine. Smallpox had been eliminated globally in the wild by the late 1970s, and routine vaccinations had ended.

But the discovery that the Soviet Union had continued to brew smallpox had highlighted its risks to unvaccinated people. Smallpox is highly contagious and which has a 30 percent death rate - approximately 100 times the death rate from Covid.

Even so, routine smallpox vaccinations wouldn’t necessarily make sense, Fauci said:

[People need to understand] the pros and the cons of preemptive versus reactive vaccination.… What I’m going to recommend is that we have some sort of an open public forum or dialogue, like a town meeting.

“We really have to make the public aware of relative risk, real risk, and perceived risk,” he said… “We need to cultivate that type of thinking on the part of the American people… We’re going to have to live with risks.”

Live with risks? Instead of shutting society in a futile attempt to stop them?

Tony, Tony, Tony!

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Fauci wrapped the interview with one final thought. I’ll let him speak for himself:

The medical community must be prepared to admit that it doesn’t know or have the answer, and that saying otherwise can lead to even more problems. “The medical community and the public health officials need to be able to say, ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time that they say what they do know,” and to give the calculated level of risk, he said. “If you act like you do know and something [unexpected] happens, then you lose all of your credibility…”

“When the general public think of science, they think of absolutes,” as if there were a mathematical formula. “What they don’t experience, or are not privy to, is the completely iterative nature of science.”

Science, he said, consists of “starts and stops, until you get the right answer.” When there isn’t an absolute answer, the scientific community and the public health community still “want to give to the public what they demand.” The public needs to realize that science may not be able to give you the answer right away, he said.

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One wonders what 2002 science may not be able to give you the answer right away Tony Fauci would have made of 2020 let’s make everyone take mRNA “vaccines” based on completely novel biotechnology Tony Fauci.

Alas, barring a time machine or a dose of truth serum, we may never know.