Anthony Fauci’s Darkest Hours

“Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” said Lady Macbeth as she paced in a hallucinatory state, reliving in her subconscious the murders she helped plan. She rubbed her hands as if washing them, to wash away the sin, following up the promise to her son that “a little water clears us of this deed.”

The line comes to mind from the latest dump of entries from the diaries of Anthony Fauci that cover the months December 2021 to May 2022. These were the darkest months of the Covid era. 

Confidence that the virus was a lab creation was growing. That points directly to Fauci. The lockdowns had given rise to growing population-wide fury. And the shot was not working, not stopping infection or spread while groups reporting deep injury from injection could not be censored fast enough to make them vanish completely, though tech companies certainly tried. 

Fauci still held his position at NIAID with certainty that he would keep it under President Biden, whose confidence he enjoyed. He was daily in touch with the people who were actually running the government – aides Ron Klain and Jeff Zients – and coordinated his decisions with them. They trusted him to continue the Covid operation, which they all knew to be a national security issue beyond the control of any political player. Fauci was the front man but an effective one, until he became a liability. 

We know from previous entries that Fauci at first hoped the new virus would get lost in the mix of a bad flu season. This was mid-January 2020. The CDC called him out on that. His first scheme failed because a savvy businessman in China spilled the beans by posting the sequence on a pay-to-play website in mid-January. 

After pressing a friend and former colleague to use his personal credit card to download the sequence, Fauci launched plan B, which was to deny the lab leak and prepare a nationwide inoculation to make it all go away. 

The audacious scheme was to keep population immunity at the lowest levels possible through lockdowns while the shot went through clinical trials and was ready for distribution. Fauci knew for certain that this was the type of virus that would mutate rapidly. His hope was to take the energy out of the pace of mutation by reducing the infection rate as low as possible. 

Sadly for him, the new and most powerful variant had appeared just as his shots hit general distribution. Delta disabled their protection that had been formulated for wild type and Alpha. The race was on, as mutations appeared faster than repeated boosters could catch. 

The spot would not go away no matter what he did. 

The darkest hours open with the appearance of Omicron in December of 2021, the fastest spreading but least virulent strain. He now had a new problem. With Omicron operating as a form of inoculation itself, there was less reason for vaccination than ever, especially given the risk of injury. And yet his goal of 90 percent coverage was nowhere in view, while population opposition to the entire Covidian regime was rising. 

Fauci might as well have thrown up his hands, admitted defeat, apologized for putting the country through the biggest trauma of our lifetimes, and ruining the lives of students everywhere, in addition to crushing the dreams of millions of small business owners. 

But that is not who he is. He would not and could not accept responsibility for doing this. He ended up demonizing the opposition, scrambling for cover, wrapping himself in ever more layers of fame for protection, and clinging to the lies he told himself as self-justification as his career and legacy were permanently tarnished beyond repair, even as he developed a severe and strange case of germaphobia in a Macbeth-like way. 

Two weeks before this tranche begins, Biden had gone on TV to declare the following: “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.”

It was an intense claim even as the weakest of all variants had just appeared, even as evidence poured in that these injections provided no protection whatsoever. Regardless, the Biden administration was dedicated to ruining a second holiday season with terrifying warnings all in the hope of maximum shot coverage. 

Fauci begins his diary close to Christmas in a dispute with the CDC, which was starting to open up a bit and lighten up on its diktats. It wanted to permit people to choose whether to get tested yet again after recovering from Covid. Fauci smelled a rat – that dread thing called freedom – and tried to strangle the baby in the crib.

Meanwhile the opposition campaign gained new steam from the release of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s masterpiece, The Real Anthony Fauci, and he had headlined a rally on Capitol Hill that galvanized a movement. Fauci was aware of the growing opposition but was mostly dismissive. 

By February 2022, pressure was rising to open up the economy and society and Fauci was on the backfoot. He was still defending China-style lockdowns before he later claimed never to support them at all.

Fauci began collecting international endorsements to assure himself of the good job he had done.

The White House, meanwhile, was increasingly concerned about the sheer number of military men and women who had quit rather than submit to vaccination. What kind of militia might they form if it came to that? Fauci claimed not to be worried about that at all, observing that they must not have liked their jobs very much. This is a man entering into deep denial.

Meanwhile, he was being more honest with himself about the lack of efficacy of the shots themselves.

His fame and stardom became his only solace, the warm blanket in which he wrapped himself for comfort from the storms outside.

Another strange feature of this period is how Fauci became absolutely obsessed with avoiding any possibility of catching Covid. He started panicking in crowds, taking his own advice ever more seriously. He started cancelling dinners and meetings. 

Thinking through why, consider that he knew that this virus was created in a lab and he knew that the shots would not protect against it. He now had fully two years to turn over these facts in his brain. They began to eat at him more and more. No matter how many times he boosted himself, his paranoia only grew worse.

By the spring, even Fauci started admitting that both he and the CDC were completely making things up. There was no science to anything they were saying and he knew it. Even he had lost faith in the system he created, playing a scientist only on TV.

By late April, Fauci was starting to clamor for other ways to understand all that had unfolded. Maybe the Great Barrington Declaration had been correct all along? He could never admit it to himself. But his egregious failures to control the virus through any means finally led him there through a side door.

That said, Fauci’s own personal germaphobia only intensified to the point that it was debilitating. 

This tranche ends with Fauci’s paranoias growing, his fears of the opposition intensifying, and finally mollifying his psychological breakdown by reflecting on his own global fame, which he regarded as his only real hope to avoid the consequences of all that he had done. 

Fauci was finally pushed out of his job later in the year, mostly because of growing concerns that the more he talked, the more the resistance to vaccination grew. There are even indications in this drop that it was industry itself that pushed him out for doing such a bad job in selling their product. He found safe haven at Georgetown University in a high-paid post. 

And where are we today? Fauci will talk with no one, no reporters, not even on background. His last public appearance consisted of 110 invocations of his right to remain silent under the 5th Amendment. 

The spot never went away, no matter how much sanitizer he rubbed on his hands. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,” he might be saying to himself, “that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”