The Duplicitous Dr. Fauci and His Backpedaling

On October 26, 2022 Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down with Peter Staley of the Harvard Institute of Politics, for a conversation about “Covid and Career in Public Health.”

In an environment of being adored, Fauci made his biggest backpedal so far, while still defending his disastrous Covid policies.  

Fauci is in complete denial of the inefficacy of masking the population at large to prevent disease spread. Fauci answers a question from Staley about face masks with a question “Should we have been wearing masks from the very first weeks when we had ten people infected and one person died?” He answers his own question, “Knowing what we know now, if we had known it then the answer would have been absolutely yes.” This despite thorough studies both before, and during the pandemic, that masks had no significant impact on the spread of airborne diseases such as influenza and Covid.

But it gets better (or worse, depending on your viewpoint). Fauci is also in almost complete denial about the tremendous harms to the health and well-being of millions of children and adults due to the lockdowns he promoted, and he states that we should have locked down sooner:

“Let’s turn back the clock in January of 2020 where we had very few cases,” Fauci told Staley, “They were just cropping up – the Washington case, and then some cases in New York. We weren’t exploding yet. If I had said we’d better shut down right now because this is an insidious virus that’s spreading widely without our knowing about it, do you think that would have been accepted by society? They would have laughed at us for that, but quite frankly, that was the right thing to do back then.”

In an interview with Fox News, Neal Cavuto asked Dr. Fauci, “In retrospect doctor, do you regret that it went too far?…Particularly for kids who couldn’t go to school except remotely, that it’s forever damaged them.”

Fauci replied, “Well, I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.” He’s been too busy doing interviews to read the literature, because preschoolers are behind in all measures of progress; reading scores are lower than they’ve been since 1990, and math scores saw their first decline ever in 50 years according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ Long-Term Trends test; mental health issues have exploded, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, or had to close their businesses, and families, friendships, and congregations were divided because of the pandemic measures promoted by Fauci.

Cavuto then asks, “If the same ideas were bandied about – shutdown, do things remotely – would you consider that again?”

Fauci did not answer the question. Instead he shifted to laying blame on others and replied to Cauvto, “Maybe people can learn that if they would encourage people to get vaccinated we may not have had so many deaths. So I think the people who criticize me should talk about their own reluctance to promote vaccination.”

Face masks, lockdowns, leaky (but profitable for Fauci and Big Pharma) vaccines. This is what Fauci learned from the pandemic, which is to say: He apparently learned nothing that will contribute to the health and well-being of the American people in the future.

In the Harvard interview with Staley, Fauci said, “You make a decision at a time “x” based on the data that you have. If the data change…you have an obligation as a scientist to change what you’re saying about something, based on the data, and that’s what we did.” Not so much.

At the time the CDC issued their April 3, 2020 recommendation that the general population wear cloth face coverings when in public, Michael Osterholm, a prominent infectious disease expert and former interim CDC director said, “Never before in my 45-year career have I seen such a far-reaching public recommendation issued by a governmental agency without a single source of data or information to support it. This is an extremely worrisome precedent of implementing policies not based on science-based data.”

Fauci continued in his comments to Staley, “I am, I believe, honest and humble enough to say…that perhaps what we didn’t do well enough was, back then, was say [wait for it], ‘You know, we really don’t have any idea whether or not something does or does not work, and therefore, maybe people should make up their own mind about wearing a mask.’”

And there you have it, folks. Feel better now about the Fauci-promoted mask mandates that swept the country and the world? How about for the children who were forced into masks eight hours a day in school and at summer camps? And the two-year-olds wearing them in Head Start and developing speech problems because they can’t see others’ faces? I wonder what we can do to make things right for the people who were prevented from boarding airplanes, kicked out of stores, and banned from public events, and even some who were arrested, because they weren’t masked? Isn’t it nice that Dr. Fauci now thinks maybe people should have informed consent and be able to decide for themselves in matters of medical interventions? What a guy.

Facui said to Cavuto in the Fox News interview, “I didn’t shut down anything.” Fauci denies that he had anything to do with school closures, but the record is clear that he advocated against schools opening in areas where the coronavirus was spreading (which was everywhere), and if they did open, there needed to be face masks, and social distancing, and test-to-stay, and quarantining of healthy people who sat too close to someone who tested positive, and onerous sanitizing, and on and on. The Covid measures for children in school, and college students, were expensive, miserable, and unnecessary, as their age groups are at almost zero risk for serious Covid infection.

In the Harvard interview, Peter Staley said he was going to do a “little test run, because they’re going to throw some of these conspiracy theories at you. One that I love following is the Lab Leak theory…Can you tell us what we did benefit from with that research of looking at those bat viruses? And what exactly did you do. Did you create something scary?”

Fauci laughed and stated, “I didn’t do anything! And that’s the really interesting part about it.”

Indeed.

Then Dr. Fauci explained,

“If you look at what happened with SARS-CoV-2, there are two theories, one that it was a natural occurrence and there is scholarly papers published in journals like Science, and Cell, and others, that clearly show overwhelming evidence that this is most likely a natural occurrence. And then there’s the lab leak, which you have to keep an open mind that the Chinese were doing something nefarious where they were playing around with a virus; they created a virus; and it leaked out into the community. We all in science keep an open mind that that is a possibility. But the evidence for that is about 10,000 Tweets that talk about it, and no evidence that it really happened, whereas the evidence for a natural occurrence is scientific scholarly studies of examining the market, getting viruses from the place where the animals were, doing epidemiological analysis of modeling.”

It appears Fauci had something to do with those “scholarly papers” he referred to, which would be a conflict of interest. As to there only being “about 10,000 Tweets” that talk about the lab leak, and “no evidence that it really happened,” those statements are incorrect.

It must have slipped Dr. Fauci’s mind, because it was so long ago in February 2020, that he huddled in closed meetings with several scientists who said the SARS-CoV-2 virus bore definite marks of having been “engineered,” rather than naturally occurring. The result of that meeting was a letter released to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, signed by Peter Daszak among others, stating, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting the COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Dr. Fauci forgot that then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in May 2020 that there was “enormous evidence” that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a lab.

Dr. Fauci has a lot on his mind. He did acknowledge on August 23, 2022, after months of denying the NIH ever funded any research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that “NIH gave a very small amount of money to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, $120k per year, to do surveillance studies in China” between 2014 to 2019. NIH’s principle deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak said the EcoHealth study  in Wuhan was a “limited experiment” that didn’t fit the definition of “research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential.” But Tabak also said that Daszak violated the terms of the contract when EcoHealth failed to report findings that likely would have triggered additional biosafety measures.

Maybe Fauci forgot that this same Peter Daszak was sent by the World Health Organization in February 2021 to the lab he helped fund, to investigate the origins of the virus. Daszak’s team was not allowed inside the lab, but they took the word of the Chinese scientists that the lab databases did not contain relevant information on the pandemic’s origins, and concluded that everything was A-okay.

Dr. Fauci forgot that the Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t transparent about what they did with the EcoHealth Alliance grant money, and never turned over the notebooks of their research on bat coronaviruses, even though the NIH twice requested them. Dr. Fauci must have also forgotten that the Chinese Communist Party ordered the Wuhan lab to destroy the coronavirus samples they had been working on, before anyone else could analyze them, and also was slow to provide the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to the rest of the world. Bottom line: Because the Wuhan lab did not provide the requested information, NIH doesn’t know for sure what type of experiments went on there.

Fauci apparently has forgotten Daszak’s shady connections with Wuhan, and his failure to comply with previous grant terms, as Fauci just awarded a $3 million NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study [wait for it] bat coronaviruses in Nyanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Isn’t anyone else qualified?

And with all he has to think about, Dr. Fauci forgot the op-ed by Stephen Quay, the founder of Atossa Therapeutics, and Richard Muller, a top scientist who now teaches physics at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. Muller and Quay wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak.”

Quay and Muller explained that in gain-of-function research (research that involves increasing the lethality and infectiousness of viruses in humans), “the insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it.” The pair noted that the double CGG sequence has never been found naturally among the entire group of coronaviruses; and the CGG sequence is in SARS-CoV-2.

Shortly before Fauci’s Harvard appearance, an article was released by three scientists who conducted research that found the SARS-CoV-2 virus “bears signs of genetic engineering.” Dr. Fauci seems unaware of the body of evidence pointing to the Lab Leak hypothesis. Maybe Dr. Fauci has just been reading his Tweets so he didn’t see the work of these other credible sources.

In the Harvard discussion, Dr. Fauci says the Covid pandemic was his “worst nightmare:” “an outbreak of a respiratory illness, that’s brand new, that’s easily spread, and has a high degree of morbidity and mortality, that jumps from the animal reservoir to a human.”

Covid-19 is a respiratory illness, and is aerosol borne (so face masks had no impact on preventing spread) which we knew early in the pandemic. It wasn’t brand new – we had SARS-CoV-1, and other coronaviruses to inform us of much of the virus’ features and how coronaviruses behave in general. It was easily spread, thanks to the unusual furin-clevage site (not found in a naturally occurring coronavirus) that makes it easily transmissible. Covid-19 did not cause high rates of mortality; it targets the elderly and those with comorbidities, and has a survival rate of 99.98%. No animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, and those he hopes to continue mentoring, still think mandating face masks, quarantining healthy people, social distancing, obsessive testing and contact tracing, crushing lockdowns, and ineffective vaccines are the way to handle this pandemic, and the next one, which they seem to be pretty certain will happen sooner than later. Maybe they know something we don’t. After all, they ran a table top simulation of a pandemic in September 2019, called Event 201, that eerily foreshadowed the Covid-19 pandemic. In May 2021, they ran a table top simulation of a Monkeypox outbreak that was also strangely similar to what they tried to get people panicked about in May 2022.

From Robert F Kennedy, Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, we have a very interesting “bracket” that Anthony Fauci put together and signed. It’s the battle of which virus will finally be “The Pandemic,” and as you can see, COVID-19 won. The NIH, CDC, and WHO have been able to get us pretty stirred up about some of the other viruses, but I guess, like Monkeypox, they didn’t take.

Peter Staley asked Fauci how he feels about Sen Rand Paul (R-KY) planning to hold hearings on Dr. Fauci’s handling of the pandemic, Fauci replied, “I think the thing that’s important is that what he and others are doing is politicizing a very serious situation that the American public is facing – a historic pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in 100 years – and to politicize it is really unacceptable.” Dr. Fauci also referred to being attacked every night on Fox News by “crazy people.”

Well, call me crazy, but it’s entirely appropriate, and absolutely necessary, that Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the other architects of the debacle that was the pandemic response, be held accountable for the harms they have caused humanity. Accountability is essential to prevent a repeat of the horrible assaults on our lives, livelihoods, and personal autonomy, which were inflicted on all of us in the name of public health and safety.

Reposted from the author’s Substack