WASHINGTON, D.C. – Outgoing White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci struck a defiant tone during a recent interview, suggesting he can defend “everything” he has done while failing to refer to any of the numerous inconsistencies in his public statements.
In apiece published November 15, STAT News reports that the longtime National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director, who is retiring in December, expressed confidence about his chances in response to a likely investigation of his decisions by the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I’d be more than happy to discuss anything that we’ve done over the last several years with this outbreak, since I have nothing to hide and I can defend everything we’ve done,” Fauci told the annual STAT Summit.
“Because others choose to drive me into the political arena, does not mean I am in the political arena in what I do, what I think, what I say, what I advise,” Fauci claimed, denying any of his own choices are to blame for perceptions that he has “turned political.”
Fauci claimed that “preserv[ing] my own scientific and personal integrity and to fulfill my obligation […] to the American public” required him to publicly contradict former President Donald Trump on “when he says this drug is a wonder drug, and it isn’t, or this virus is going to disappear like magic when it’s not.”
“That triggered such a pushback on the part of the extremists that I became public enemy No. 1,” he said. “I didn’t decide and wake up one day, ‘I think I’m going to be public enemy No. 1.’ But I had a choice, I could either go with the flow of misinformation or push back. I pushed back, and now I’m in the position I’m in where I have to have federal agents guarding me because people want to kill me.”
While the NIAID chief blames others for his divisive reputation, his record paints a different picture.
In February 2020, Faucisaid there was “absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask” in the United States; by July, he was arguing that Americans wear not only masks, but goggles and face shields. Critics also faulted Fauci for suggesting that handshaking should be abolished yet sexual activity with strangers remains alright if “you’re willing to take a risk,” and championing COVID vaccine mandates despitebeing unwilling or unable to give a “firm answer” on why the vaccines are necessary for those with immunity from prior infection.
Evidence has since shown that Fauci would have been correct to stick to his February 2020 position on masking.
Among that evidence is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s (CDC’s) September 2020admission that masks cannot be counted on to keep out COVID when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone, and a May 2020 study published by the peer-reviewed CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseasesthat “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”
Last May, another studyfound that, though mandates effectively increased mask use, that usage did not yield the expected benefits. “Mask mandates and use (were) not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among U.S. states” from March 2020 to March 2021. In fact, the researchers found the results to be a net negative, with masks increasing “dehydration … headaches and sweating and decreas[ing] cognitive precision,” and interfering with communication, as well as impairing social learning among children. Dozens of studieshave found the same.
Lockdowns, which Fauci wasinstrumentalin starting, were even more devastating according to research.
Last March, the left-wing Associated Pressadmittedthat “California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates,” despite the former imposing some of the most draconian lockdown measures in the country and the latter remaining mostly open, and that the mortality gulf between Connecticut and South Dakota was similarly small despite the wide gulf in their responses to the virus.
In April 2021, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allenpublisheda study concluding that while lockdowns saved 22,333 years’ worth of lost life worldwide, they also caused 6.3 million years of lost life, making the policies’ net long-term harm 282 times worse than their benefits, thanks to the combined toll of canceled or delayed care for other medical issues, and the psychological harm of lost jobs and social isolation, among other factors.
In February 2022, a meta-analysis published in Johns Hopkins University’sStudies in Applied Economics foundthat “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality,” but have “imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”
In April, the fiscally conservative Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP)rankedall 50 states on the equally weighted metrics of health, economic, and educational outcomes. They gave 18 states an A or B grade. Of those, 16 were led by Republican governors, including the top six performers: Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota, and Florida. By contrast, the six states and jurisdictions to receive an F grade are all led by Democrats: Illinois, California, New Mexico, New York, the District of Columbia, and New Jersey.
But arguably the most serious charge against him – and likely the top subject of GOP investigations – relates to his alleged role in unleashing the novel coronavirus in the first place.
Last May, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee released areport finding “significant circumstantial evidence” that COVID spread from a leak at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Under Fauci, NIAID approvedfunding for medical non-government organization EcoHealth Alliance to explore gain-of-function (GOF) research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects, on coronaviruses, at several sites, including WIV.
Fauci and his defenders insisted that the work NIAID approved was not gain-of-function research and could not have lead to COVID, but in January the conservative investigators of Project Veritasreleased documentsthey obtained showing that, before going to NIAID, EcoHealth previously pitched its funding request to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA), which rejected it on the grounds that the project would violate a preexisting moratorium on GOF research and failed to account for its potential risks.
In September, Andrew Huff, an ex-EcoHealth vice president who also served as an Army infantryman in Iraq and as a research fellow in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,saidin a sworn statement that the “process of developing SARS-COV2 was also described in detail in the proposal submitted to, and ultimately funded by, the National Institutes of Health (HHS NIH), The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), by EcoHealth Alliance with the WIV and [University of North Carolina] listed as collaborators.”