Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?

“Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.
In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who’d used a grant from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future diseases, he argued. “The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect, prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical risks,” he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding.

This wasn’t a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency’s chief scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”

Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1 (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to transmit between mammals, a “gain of function” for a virus that had heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen they’d created was “very, very bad news” and “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” Fauci was more sanguine, telling The New York Times that “there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks.””

“In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs, highlighting this risk.

Dozens of CDC employees were potentially exposed to live anthrax samples shipped by mistake to labs not equipped to handle them. At another CDC lab, a less dangerous version of bird flu was accidentally contaminated with deadly H5N1. Vials of smallpox capable of infecting people were stashed in a cabinet at an NIH lab, where they’d apparently been sitting for decades. None of these incidents were direct results of gain-of-function research. But they heightened the concern that researchers working to enhance deadly pathogens might do so in unsafe settings.”

“In 2021, Fauci said the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” That wasn’t true. What EcoHealth was doing in Wuhan clearly met the widely understood definition of gain-of-function research.

In his June 2024 testimony, Fauci dodged accusations that he lied by saying that while EcoHealth’s work might have met a generic definition of gain-of-function research, it didn’t meet the precise definition established in the P3CO framework.

Fauci said that every time he mentioned gain-of-function research, “the definition that I use is not my personal definition; it is a codified, regulatory and operative definition.” That definition, he said, “had nothing to do with me.”

On the contrary, regulatory definitions had quite a bit to do with Fauci. They were designed with the expectation that he and his fellow public health bureaucrats would use discretion and good judgment when making decisions. The relevant regulatory language included lots of “likelys and highlys and reasonably anticipated,” says Gerald Epstein, a former director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who wrote the P3CO policy. “These words are inherently subjective. You can’t not be. You’ve got to be making judgment calls on something that does not yet exist.” Those subjective definitions gave Fauci and his NIAID underlings considerable room to decide what research required additional review.”

“We probably won’t ever definitively discover the origins of COVID-19.”

“Chinese officials obstructed any investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In September 2019, the Associated Press reported, the institute took its database of viruses offline. It also hasn’t made public lab notebooks and other materials that might shed light on exactly what kinds of work it was doing in the lead-up to the pandemic. In late 2019, the Chinese government also exterminated animals and disinfected the Wuhan wet market. If COVID did leap from animal to human in the Wuhan market, as many natural origin proponents argue, that evidence is gone.

What we’re left with is studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself and whatever information can be gleaned from the U.S.-funded research that went on at Wuhan leading up to the pandemic.

On both fronts, Fauci, his underlings at the NIAID, and NIAID-funded scientists involved with work at Wuhan have worked to conceal information and discredit notions that COVID might have leaked from a lab.

In late January 2020, Fauci’s aides flagged the NIAID’s support of EcoHealth’s Wuhan research in emails to their boss. A few weeks later, Fauci and Daszak would go on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to dismiss the idea that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab, calling such arguments “conspiracy theories.”

Both men also worked to shape the discourse behind the scenes away from any focus on a lab leak. Daszak organized a group letter of scientists in The Lancet, the U.K.’s top medical journal, declaring that they “stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Daszak did not disclose his relationship to the Wuhan lab when organizing this letter; The Lancet’s editor would eventually concede that this was improper.

In testimony to the House coronavirus subcommittee in May 2024, Daszak would claim the “conspiracy theories” mentioned in the Lancet letter referred only to such wild early pandemic notions that COVID had pieces of HIV or snake DNA inserted into it. He said a word limit prevented him from being more precise.

Fauci, meanwhile, would help corral virologists into publishing the widely cited “proximal origin” paper in early 2020. In the paper, the authors flatly declared that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-leak scenario is plausible.”

Yet troves of private messages and emails released by the House subcommittee’s investigation show that the authors privately expressed far more openness to a lab leak theory.

One of the paper’s authors, Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, privately rated a lab leak as “highly likely.” But Andersen had a pending $8.9 million grant application with the NIAID as the paper was drafted. That grant was later approved. In an email, one of the paper’s authors, Edward Holmes, references “pressure from on high” during the drafting process.

The authors of the proximal origin paper say they merely had their minds changed while drafting the paper. They were just following the scientific method.”

“Fauci’s best defense is that he ran a sprawling agency that doled out billions of dollars in grants. Even the most detail-obsessed administrator couldn’t possibly keep track of every single program and project. And U.S. officials had limited control over what happened in the distant, opaque Wuhan lab.

But even if that’s true, it’s an admission of administrative negligence, since the oversight protocols weren’t followed. It also implies a dramatic failure of the risky research that Fauci championed for pandemic prevention. As Ridley says, the pandemic “occurred with the very viruses that there was the most attention paid to, in the very area where there was the most research going on, where there was the biggest program looking for potential pandemic pathogens, and yet they failed to see this one coming.” At a minimum, gain-of-function research didn’t protect the public from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the more direct case against Fauci is strong: Not only was he an ardent supporter of research widely believed to be risky, but he manipulated bureaucratic protocols in order to avoid scrutiny of that research, then responded evasively when called to account for his actions. At least one of the programs born out of Fauci’s risky research crusade was pursuing exactly the type of viral enhancements that were present in COVID-19, and that research was conducted at the Wuhan virology lab in the very same city where the virus originated. Lab leak proponents cite the virus’s transmissibility as evidence for a Wuhan leak: After all, EcoHealth was trying to create pathogens primed to spread rapidly in humans.

The evidence is not fully conclusive. But it seems reasonably likely that Fauci pushed for what his peers repeatedly said was dangerous research, that some of that dangerous research produced a deadly viral pathogen that escaped the lab, and that Fauci helped cover up evidence and arguments for its origins.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/14/faucis-pandemic/

Anthony Fauci Gives Misleading, Evasive Answers About NIH-Funded Research at Wuhan Lab

Anthony Fauci Gives Misleading, Evasive Answers About NIH-Funded Research at Wuhan Lab

https://reason.com/2024/06/04/anthony-fauci-gives-misleading-evasive-answers-about-nih-funded-research-at-wuhan-lab/

Against Faucism

“Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.
“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.

“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.

When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

This is Faucism distilled down to its very essence. For the government health bureaucrats who have given themselves sole authority over vast sectors of American life—from travel to education to entertainment to housing—it doesn’t matter what the CEOs of these companies think. It doesn’t matter what their customers want. It doesn’t matter if maskless air travel is, for the most part, quite safe (especially for the vaccinated). It doesn’t matter if the mask mandate makes air travel impossible for families with young children. All that matters is the calculus of the most risk-averse people: unelected public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Like Fauci, NIH Director Frances Collins said this past weekend that air passengers should be masked—and should think twice about large gatherings, and even about going anywhere at all.”

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx detail how Trump’s coronavirus response was even worse than we thought

“It didn’t take long for the two scientific faces of former President Donald Trump’s failed coronavirus response to speak out about how dysfunctional efforts to curb the pandemic really were under the 45th president.

On the first weekend following Trump’s departure from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both members of the Trump White House coronavirus task force coordinated by Birx — did interviews with national media outlets in which they described a culture in the Trump White House that discounted scientific expertise and put a premium on the type of denialism that resulted in Trump continuing to hold packed political rallies even as coronavirus deaths and cases soared in the fall.

“We would say things like: ‘This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.’ And then he would get up and start talking about, ‘It’s going to go away, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear,’” Fauci told the New York Times.

Birx made similar comments to CBS during an interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, saying, “there were people [in the White House] who definitely believed that this was a hoax,” and adding that Trump had a penchant for listening to people who told him what he wanted to hear, even if that information had no scientific basis.

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” she said. “So I know that someone — someone out there, or someone inside — was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president. I don’t know to this day who, but I know what I sent up, and I know what was in his hands was different than that.”

Fauci corroborated that point, telling the Times that in the early days of the pandemic, he was “really concerned” to observe that Trump “was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, ‘Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?’ or, ‘Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.’”

“He would take just as seriously their opinion — based on no data, just anecdote — that something might really be important,” added Fauci. “It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type approaches. It was always, ‘A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.’ That’s when my anxiety started to escalate.””

“What Birx and Fauci said during their interviews isn’t necessarily surprising. We’ve long understood that the Trump White House’s coronavirus response was a disaster, especially when compared with countries like Australia and Japan that have done a much better job limiting infections and deaths. We’ve known that Trump has a tendency to engage in wishful thinking and has an aversion to scientific reasoning.

But what Birx’s and Fauci’s willingness to speak out in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s departure from office does illustrate is just how bad things were under the previous administration. It now falls upon the Biden administration to try to clean up the mess left behind after a year of politically motivated short-term thinking, in which public health experts like Fauci and Birx had to struggle on a daily basis with questions about whether it was worth it for them to keep showing up at work.”

Dr. Fauci Has Been Dreading A Pandemic Like COVID-19 For Years

“At the time, I didn’t find this quote particularly earth-shattering. It seemed like a reasonable concern, but not newsworthy. After all, Americans have lived through multiple pandemic scares — SARS, MERS, swine flu — and we largely dodged each bullet. This part of the interview was off-topic for the series I was making, and I left it on the cutting room floor.
Reading the transcript almost a year later, I am struck by how clearly Fauci described this current pandemic. Our nation’s top public health officials have known that this outbreak, or something like it, was a serious possibility, and they haven’t been keeping this information to themselves. But it’s hard to find the collective will to prepare for — and stop — a theoretical threat. COVID-19 may be unprecedented, but it wasn’t unpredictable.”