Anthony Fauci and Ashish Jha Disqualify Themselves

It’s no longer hard to believe how far The Experts™ have fallen. 

From lies to misrepresentations to purposeful distortions of reality to engaging in desperate defenses of their past advocacy.

Recently, Peter Hotez, one of CNN’s preferred “expert” guests, lied yet again about his role in advocating for nearly endless school closures.

But that pales in comparison to what White House COVID advisor Ashish Jha and the Biden Administration’s Chief Medical Advisor have said publicly.

During a September 6th “COVID response” briefing, Jha said (with a straight face!) he really believed God gave us two arms to receive multiple vaccines at the same time:

The good news is you can get both your flu shot and COVID shot at the same time.  It’s actually a good idea. 

I really believe this is why God gave us two arms — one for the flu shot and the other one for the COVID shot.

Has there been any study suggesting that this is a “good idea?” Of course not. But Jha made that claim anyway.

Meanwhile, Fauci had to have heard those remarks and thought to himself that he couldn’t possibly let Jha upstage him for the most nonsensical comment in recent memory.

Fauci, in his favorite position; in front of a camera for an interview on the Canadian network CBC News, claimed that while the newly updated Omicron-specific boosters hadn’t been thoroughly “proven,” they were an immediate necessity for most Americans.

He then stunningly claimed that it wasn’t necessary to put them through the usual extensive clinical trials because there simply wasn’t enough time to complete them.

“We need to get the vaccine out now,” he claims, because there are 400 deaths per day in the United States. 

Beyond the alarming assertion that clinical trials aren’t necessary and admitting that he and the regulators are essentially hoping that the updated booster will be more effective, Fauci’s claim that 400 people per day are dying is verifiably inaccurate.

Imagine if the media still existed; it certainly seems like it’d be a major story for one of the nation’s most important medical advisors getting data wrong and justifying the abandonment of clinical trials for vaccination.

By raw numbers, according to the CDC, the 7-day average of newly reported deaths is 10% lower than Fauci’s remarks:

While on its own that’s not a terribly substantial difference, it’s still meaningful and buries the lede — deaths are as consistently low as they’ve ever been.

If your justification for continued boosters, more masks and restrictions is that there are under 400 deaths per day, when will it ever end? 

Not to mention perhaps the most important inaccuracy here; the attribution of deaths to COVID that are not from COVID.

Just a few months ago, a doctor at USC Medical Center said that only 10% of their COVID positive admissions are there “due to COVID,” and that “virtually none of them go to the ICU:”

If only 10% of hospital admissions with COVID at a major hospital system in the country’s second largest city are actually treated for the disease, what percentage of the 360 nationally reported deaths per day are actually caused by COVID?

It’s reasonable to assume that a significant percentage of those reported numbers are entirely incidental.

As population-level protection against the virus has increased over the past year, COVID-caused severe illness has decreased in turn.

The milder Omicron variant has also helped, creating a substantial increase in immunity without the same level of severe illness.

With lower hospitalization rates and increasingly fewer patients sent to the ICU, the raw numbers are almost assuredly misleading.

Even if reports suggest that the states are reporting 360 new deaths per day with COVID, Fauci is aware that the implication that they all died from COVID is purposefully inaccurate.

Using those numbers as a justification for abandoning the scientific process and rushing through a new, updated booster without human testing is beyond misleading, it’s disqualifying.

Claiming we “don’t have time” to do a clinical trial due to the continued severity of COVID is utterly ridiculous and a further example of the abandonment of science by someone who portends to be the human representation of it.

The Competition

Jha’s remarks suggest that the “experts” consider vaccination their only strategy, regardless of the evidence or actual success rate.

The flu vaccine efficacy estimates, for example, are woefully inadequate. In fact they’re so poor that in most years they wouldn’t even meet the 50% standard for emergency use authorization:

Yet this is what Jha believes God gave us an arm for, to receive a vaccine so ineffective it likely wouldn’t be authorized if it wasn’t already on the market.

The other arm, of course, was designed to receive the new bivalent booster, targeted to the Omicron variant.

Except, as already covered, there’s been no human testing of the new booster. The 2-month waiting period after receiving vaccination or another booster was seemingly created out of thin air, and what little efficacy data exists is shockingly poor.

Further examination of that data is necessary, but just as one example, there were actually higher rates of COVID infection amongst those receiving the new booster without prior infection than there were among those who received the old vaccination dose.

Instead of measuring outcomes, the “experts” are once again choosing to focus on measuring antibodies and imputing efficacy. They’re making the same mistakes all over again.

How should the public respond to experts such as these? 

The obvious answer is to stop taking their recommendations seriously, because they aren’t making any serious recommendations.

Evidence-free advocacy as opposed to scientific rationality should not be tolerated. 

But the current administration’s continued abandonment of science at the behest of their incompetent advisors is going to lead to permanent, rolling, untested boosters targeted to variants that will inevitably be outdated by the time they’re released.

Even now, there are fears that another new variant “exhibits extensive escape from neutralizing antibodies.”

The same antibodies used to justify the release of the bivalent boosters.

That’s the illusion of control that these people have deluded themselves into. Their unshakable belief in their infallibility has led to incalculable damage throughout the pandemic. 

Whatever they say is true, because they say it.

The new booster is just the latest opportunity for them to make bewildering statements and express certainty where there should be none.

Reposted from the author’s Substack