Republican View: Dr. Fauci’s leave brings the fall of Faucism

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to stop sending whole classrooms home to quarantine because one student tests positive for COVID-19 was topped this week by the news that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and America’s highest-paid bureaucrat (tinyurl.com/2qefupwx), will retire in December.

Fauci — famous for “15 Days to Stop the Spread” in the pandemic’s early days — was the primary architect of the federal government’s failed, destructive COVID-19 management plans. His major legacy will be the destruction of public trust in government “experts” and health policies.

Fauci transitioned from productive scientist to shameless bureaucrat who invokes “science” but violates fundamental principles of scientific practice. This suggests that he survived COVID-19, but fell to Potomac Fever — a malady that afflicts many who spend too much time in Washington. The key symptoms are arrogance and dishonesty, willingness to deny or manipulate bothersome data and energetic ad hominem attacks on opponents who voice other opinions.

La science, c’est moi!

Fauci’s seamless arrogance was notably on display in his 2021 response to CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan (tinyurl.com/2joontym). He said, “There’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this, so if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people can recognize there’s a person there, so it’s easy to criticize. But they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”

This calls to mind Louis XIV, “L’etat, c’est moi,” or, “The state, it is me.” This mode played out in Fauci’s contempt for and willingness to lie to the public he allegedly served. In 2021, he claimed to Batya Ungar-Sargon of Hill TV that “I didn’t recommend locking anything down.”

However, he had already bragged at a 2020 virtual Q&A session (tinyurl.com/2pnuzn5z) hosted by his alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross (Massachusetts), “When it became clear that we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread — this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area — I recommended to [President Trump] that we shut the country down.”

Many will remember that Fauci first said we didn’t need to wear masks and then said that we did and that he had lied earlier to protect mask supplies for health care workers (tinyurl.com/ybkrgp6n).

Fauci also fudged the data to push for vaccine mandates. In 2020, he told The New York Times, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85” (tinyurl.com/2ebzaq6p).

This contempt for the public was on display in Fauci’s refusal to acknowledge what the lockdown policies he supported cost ordinary Americans. On Aug. 23, Neil Cavuto on Fox News asked, “Do you regret that it went too far? Especially for kids who couldn’t go to school except remotely, that it forever damaged them.”

Dr. Fauci answered, “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone” (tinyurl.com/2ol5lpsz).

Families were denied visits to comfort the dying. The incidence of fatal heart attacks rose (tinyurl.com/2enncrdu). Fewer people were screened for cancer. Levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased, including suicides among isolated teenagers (tinyurl.com/2mzzh58m). Language development and social development in kids forced to mask for most of two years especially affected the less privileged and those with special needs.

Dr. Marty Makary, MD, noted,

“Test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading over the pandemic. Meantime, anxiety and depression have hit record highs among young Americans, and the surgeon general has described a youth mental health crisis” (tinyurl.com/2etdgg2k).

New York Post writer John Tierney commented, “Except possibly for the Great Depression, the lockdowns were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America” (tinyurl.com/2gynx35u).

Denying the data

The lockdowns were ineffective, and Fauci had reason to know in advance that basing drastic public policy on computer models was likely to fail.

In 2006, Dr. David Henderson, MD, MPH, who had directed the successful 10-year effort to eliminate smallpox, warned, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures. … If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically. In brief, models can play a contributory role in thinking through possible mitigation measures, but they cannot be more than an ancillary aid in deciding policy” (tinyurl.com/yyocu9nd).

Henderson’s work on control of pandemic influenza had been the core of U.S. policy but was thrown overboard by Fauci and colleagues in dealing with COVID-19. According to Henderson, “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”

Data? What data?

“For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following ‘the science,’ these leaders ignored decades of research — as well as fresh data from the pandemic — when they set strict COVID regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure,” Tierney wrote (tinyurl.com/2enncrdu).

The result is economic and social devastation in exchange for reducing COVID-19 mortality by 0.2%, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. They note, “While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument” (tinyurl.com/yc4a4ega).

In August 2022, Fauci commented that the alleged “Fauci Effect” inspiring students to go to medical school is because “it’s what I symbolize. People are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth and for people caring about people,” he said (tinyurl.com/2z46hogp).

Given the chance to act on those principles, Fauci whiffed. He is currently the highest-paid federal government employee, at over $400,000/year. After retirement, he will collect a retirement package of over $350,000 per year.

The Republican View appears in the last edition of each month in Tompkins Weekly. Send questions, comments and story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.