The real tragedy isn't that Tony Fauci is an egomaniac. It's that he's a bad scientist.
Think Robert Oppenheimer, if Robert Oppenheimer had built a bomb that didn't work.
Throughout the Covid epidemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Worse, he didn’t care.
Fauci’s Covid “diary” — his musings about his Covid experience — have revealed his epic self-love to the world. But it’s what the diary doesn’t say that’s the real problem.
Fauci effectively ran the response to Covid. He gave advice to Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and governors from both parties almost daily. He was the equivalent of a commanding general during a war, offering not just options but opinions. His media connections made him more influential than even the most powerful general. He could directly tell the public what he thought, giving him immense power.
His diary shows that for three years he happily used that power to push the United States towards the policies he preferred — restrictive Covid rules and aggressive use of mRNA jabs.
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Too bad he had no idea if those policies actually worked.
Fauci’s diary reveals his focus on his rising global fame and the opportunities it provided. Alas, he seems to have had far less interest in the science around Covid.
Fauci had just turned 79 when the news of a potential outbreak emerged from China at the start of 2020. For a generation, he had worked mainly as an federal administrator, not a bench scientist or physician. Now he faced a novel coronavirus with a “furin cleavage site,” an unusual and frightening feature.
For anyone, much less an aged bureaucrat, the threat ahead should have been daunting. It called for deep scientific dives on a mass of complex questions.
To name just a few:
How might the cleavage site affect the virulence and transmissibility of SARS-Cov-2?
Did the virus’s structure hold evidence it had leaked from a lab?
Who was most likely to face serious danger from the virus?
Specifically, were children and young people at risk?
Were any potential treatments, whether old repurposed drugs or novel ones, likely to be quickly available? How fast could they be tested?
What was the “R naught,” the figure that represented how quickly the virus might spread? What natural factors, such as climate or population density, might change it?
Could countermeasures like lockdowns or masks or school closures reduce the spread? And what might the cost of those countermeasures be?
What about vaccines, which are notoriously ineffective against respiratory viruses?
What was the real risk of hospital or medical system overrun?
How quickly was the virus mutating? Might future strains be more or less virulent?
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Tough questions.
But answers to them began to emerge quickly, thanks to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of scientists and physicians around the world.
Fauci could have helped direct those efforts.
He could have insisted on a national seroprevalence trials, like the ones the British government conducted, to track the spread of Covid infections over time. He could have pushed for fast relatively cheap studies of different medicines tested alone and in combination. (Again, the British ran such a study; it found dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, cut the risk of death in people with severe Covid.)
He didn’t do those things, or much else that was forward-looking. He didn’t push for head-to-head trials of Covid vaccines, either. Later, in 2021, he would prove to be stupidly overconfident in the mRNAs, failing to realize how quickly their protection would wane.
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(America’s top Covid scientist, hard at work in 2020, as the pandemic takes off.)
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But Fauci’s lack of leadership did not end there. He didn’t keep up with the discoveries that were happening all over the world even without his help or direction.
At a minimum, given his role guiding the Covid response and helping set policies that affected hundreds of millions of Americans, he had an absolute responsibility to understand them and stay as up-to-date as possible on their answers.
He didn’t.
As the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said this morning, Fauci’s own words reveal:
that his ego weighs twice as much as the man himself… At the time, I marveled at how a man who was supposed to be overseeing our response to a global emergency had so much time to go on TV.
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The answer is that Fauci was not daunted by the need to keep up with the flood of information about Covid. Quite the opposite. His diary shows a profound lack of interest in nearly all the topics mentioned above. No wonder he had so much time for television appearances.
“I represent science,” Fauci famously proclaimed in 2021. “I am science.”
In fact, Fauci committed the greatest sin for any scientific leader. He was incurious, arrogant, and overconfident in his own abilities and knowledge. He failed to keep up with basic discoveries and advances on Covid.
Over time, particularly after the mRNA jabs were introduced, the cost of his unwillingness of inability to keep up with the science around Covid became greater and greater.
Lockdowns and masks and school closures would have ended far earlier if he had spoken out against them. The mRNA shots might have been offered only to the people most at risk for Covid if Fauci had acknowledged the deep flaws in their clinical trials and the need to collect more evidence of their long-term effectiveness before pushing them on younger people. And their failure would have surprised far fewer people.
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(One more chance to subscribe! Do it for Tony!)
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But because Fauci was telling the legacy media and the Biden White House what they wanted to hear, no one questioned whether he was doing his job properly. He remained a hero as American schools stayed closed despite evidence from all over the rest of the world that opening schools didn’t endanger kids or teachers, even after the vaccines failed and he began pushing a fourth shot barely a year after their rollout.
Now, thanks to the diary, even Fauci’s defenders must admit his narcissism verges on the pathological.
But will they ever admit the flip side, his failures as a scientist?
If you passed 8th grade science you knew he was a bad scientist when he refused to acknowledge natural immunity. Turns out natural immunity is a Thing. Now explain why 1/2 this country lost their minds if this was mentioned in social discourse.
The experience of finding my brother-in-law dead on his kitchen floor a day after receiving the 2nd jab is a sight that I will never forget.
To me, things didn't seem right from the beginning so I chose to pass on the jab and almost lost my 20 year job as a result.
Bitter times.