Posted on 02/04/2022 10:58:05 AM PST by Heartlander
With millions of Americans getting infected and over 800,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, most people now realize that Washington’s pandemic policies failed. Lockdowns just postponed the inevitable while causing enormous collateral damage on cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, mental health, education and much else.
So, the blame game is in full swing. At a recent Senate hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci did not even attempt to defend his policies. Instead, he insisted that: “Everything that I have said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.”
Dr. Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has worked closely with the two CDC directors, Drs. Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky, throughout the pandemic, but he is now laying the responsibility on them. He did the same with his former boss, shortly after Dr. Francis Collins resigned as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dr. Collins fiercely defended Fauci throughout the pandemic. In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration criticized Fauci’s lockdown strategy, calling for focused protection of high-risk older people while letting children go to school and young adults live near-normal lives. A few days later, Collins—a geneticist with little public health experience—wrote an email to Fauci suggesting a “take down” of the declaration, and characterizing its Harvard, Oxford and Stanford authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci agreed with his boss, but when asked about the incident at the recent Senate hearing, he responded that it “was an email from Dr. Collins to me.”
In other words, Fauci himself was just following orders.
As public health scientists and coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, we have been critical of the pandemic strategy championed by Drs. Collins, Redfield and Walensky. As human beings, we can only feel sympathy for the trio as Dr. Fauci seeks to deflect blame onto them. At the Senate hearing, Dr. Fauci did not engage in a substantive public health discussion to defend the pandemic strategy—as one might have expected from its principal architect and salesman. Understandably, politicians, journalists, academics and the public trusted Dr. Fauci. Why should they now shoulder the blame?
Dr. Fauci also defended himself by saying he has received death threats from “crazies.” It is tragic that scientists have to deal with such threats, a testament to the lack of civil scientific discourse during the pandemic. But Fauci is not alone in that respect. The organized “take down” that he and Collins orchestrated, with their grave mischaracterization of focused protection as a let-it-rip strategy, resulted in death threats and racist attacks against the Great Barrington Declaration authors. As Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco pointed out, the NIH director’s “job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, [Collins] attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.”
Strangely, the Senate is the only venue where Dr. Fauci has faced scientific scrutiny. That important role fell on Dr. Rand Paul, one of the few senators with medical training. America would have been better served if Dr. Fauci had engaged public health scientists with divergent views in civilized debates outside the political environment of the Senate chamber. If Dr. Fauci had embraced open and civil discussion, the public may have benefited from better pandemic policies, such as:
Unfortunately, sitting atop the world’s largest stash of infectious disease research money, with an annual NIAID budget of over $6 billion, Dr. Fauci was able to command the nation’s pandemic strategy with little opposition from other infectious disease scientists.
As the pandemic ends, as all pandemics do, the scientific community has much work to do to regain public trust. The collateral damage arising from the failures of pandemic management includes a broader distrust by the public of the academic community. While only a few scientists are responsible for the misguided pandemic strategy, all scientists—whether we are chemists, biologists, physicists, geologists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, public health historians, clinicians, epidemiologists or in some other field—now share a responsibility to restore trust in science and academia. The first step is to acknowledge the mistakes made.
Well duh.
It’s all his
All I read was FAUCI BEAR!!!!! I like TRUMP, but I DESPISE the TRUMPY BEAR commercial!!
The usual bureaucratic excuse. “ We followed the guidelines/policy.” Never mind that they set up those guidelines themselves. Bureaucrats get away with literal murder regularly.
Fauci says a lot of things which often contradict themselves.
That worm has been squirming out of responsibility his entire life 🤪
I read it that way too at first glance...LOL
The evil self-aggrandizing bastard has earned a good hanging.
He’s right. He is completely irresponsible.
Fauci as a certified US official has made the United States as well as China liable for the damages incurred by this pandemic. He and Collins at NIH, both US officials, authorized the US funding of gain of function research on coronaviruses at a Chines Biological weapons lab.
Just following orders.
That’s what Goering said at Nuremberg.
Him and Gates will stand trial for Crimes Against Humanity after Brandon is gone...
Mookabooker could use a good tar and feathering.
Fauci Bear - pull the string and it lies it’s ass off to you.
The dude has millions of dollars in his pocket and the support of mindless minions. Might as well ask Hitler to take responsibility for running Germany into the ground. Saddam Hussein had a similar outlook.
Trump made a critical mistake putting Pence in charge of the Covid task force. It looked like a great idea on paper but Pence NEVER (to my knowledge) questioned the brick wall narrative coming from our health bureaucracies.
This is DESPITE THE FACT that Dr. Scott Atlas was picked by Trump as a different voice and he showed up to the meetings with lots of legitimate studies that called into question what was being delivered by the “three wise men” (Fauci, Collins, Birx).
Trump has a great bullchit detector. Why would he not attend these meetings and demand answers to the data presented that was contrary to what the “CDC” was saying?
I cannot think of anything more consequential in his Presidency. I cheered most of what he did but for overall impact on the nation and its citizens this was the most consequential mistake of his administration.
It is not even subject to debate. We are still living with the disaster that these people promoted. Many now do not live or are seriously injured by the illness.
Why did Trump not push for HCQ and IVM? Why? I believe he took them so why not push for people to have the “right to try”? He was so proud of that legislation yet every day we read horrible stories of loved ones suing hospitals to give it to their loved one(s).
These “people” are so powerful they got Trump to deny his instincts on the most consequential decision of his Presidency.
They killed people on his watch. Why can he not recognize it and talk openly about it? He was rightly proud of “warp speed” but its time for everyone (including him) to admit that the product delivered fell far short of expectations given the path of the virus.
You do nt even have to pull his STRING! He just LIES!
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