The question of which government official has caused the most socio-economic destruction in history appears to be resolved: Anthony Fauci, the disgraced former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a US congressional hearing on Wednesday.
Fauci, who became the most influential health bureaucrat in the world during the Covid pandemic, wouldn’t even answer what day it was in Washington.
His silence suggested he doubted the autopen pardon delivered by Joe Biden’s staffers in the former president’s final days – for anything Fauci did since 2014 – would protect him from perjury charges given the vast gulf that’s emerged between his public and private statements.
The 1000 pages of his private diaries, released this week by Republican senator Rand Paul, have only added to the mountain of evidence that his carefully curated reputation as the selfless voice of “science” was always a joke.
He has emerged as a vain, manipulative apparent liar who whipped up global hysteria about a new coronavirus that prompted governments to unleash the most socio-economically destructive peacetime mandates in history.
The volume of references to favourable media portrayals in his diaries is genuinely shocking. The word “press” appears a staggering 641 times, “award” 80 times and “hero” 49 times, while “peer review”, “meta-analysis”, “risk-benefit”, “learning loss” or “mental health” never got a mention at all, according to Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott’s analysis.
“It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous … person in the country,” Fauci beamed in May 2020. Yet far more incriminating was his February 2020 diary entry that he and a former CDC director both agreed the new virus was “acting like a bad influenza” and “had a case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 per cent rather than 2.0 per cent”.
Yet only a few weeks later in March 2020 he told the House Oversight Committee under oath the mortality rate was “about 3 per cent”, which would have been far worse than the early 20th century Spanish flu, which killed millions. Mass global panic ensued.
This was the same month Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, whom Donald Trump appointed head of the National Institute of Health last year, showed the actual mortality rate was indeed around 0.2 per cent. It was the same month John Ioannidis, arguably then the world’s top epidemiologist, said he’d reached the same conclusion from the Diamond Princess ship.
Even President Trump publicly said in March 2020 the rate was “well under 1 per cent” once those cases not presenting at hospital were factored in, according to his own conversations with experts. None of that mattered to Fauci, who recorded how he personally “convinced” New York mayor Bill de Blasio and California health officials on March 15, 2020, to shut down schools, bars and restaurants before claiming on TV in July 2022 that he “had nothing to do” with any school and business closures.
Almost all nations took Fauci’s lead, causing unprecedented disruption and destroying the lives of a whole generation who weren’t even remotely at risk of dying.
Fauci was also a powerful advocate for Covid vaccine mandates too. Yet a diary entry from July 2021 suggests he suffered some sort of vaccine injury but “kept it buried while aggressively pushing mRNA mandates on millions of people”, according to American epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher.
We already knew that Fauci aggressively played down the Wuhan lab-leak theory, which was always the most likely and reasonable explanation. He sought to destroy the reputation of doctors and scientists who dared criticise a totalitarian health response that was never part of standard public health practice even for far more deadly viruses.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry at prestigious Rutgers University, repeated on social media this week that Fauci had been indirectly responsible for 20 million deaths globally because he allowed and funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China, which ultimately led to a likely accidental leak of SARS-Cov2.
Fauci deserves condemnation and humiliation but not prison. That his shoddy analysis and obviously ridiculous mandates were so enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of supposedly educated voting publics and other so-called experts illustrates how primal humans can remain when scared.
At least the US has had a debate. It’s highly unlikely as many US states would imitate their previous response should a similar virus emerge again. In Australia I’m not so sure. Our health officials and political leaders parroted the same nonsense yet sailed off into retirement with national honours and even state governorships!
The new Premier of Victoria, Ben Carroll, is being rightly praised for calling a royal commission into the state’s corrupt construction sector. But whatever damage the CFMEU has done, it’s minuscule in comparison to the damage wrought by the nation’s wannabe Faucis who all remain comfortably in their sinecures.
