Civics: The Fauci Diaries & The Legacy Media
It’s not exactly news to Free Press readers that Anthony Fauci got a lot wrong during the pandemic.
The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and the government’s leading authority during the Covid crisis—Fauci led the call for lockdowns and school closures. Wrong. He said that it was “extremely unlikely” that people who had been vaccinated could transmit the virus to others. Wrong. He said that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Wrong. He argued that the virus had emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, jumping from an animal to a human—and shut down any suggestion that it could have resulted from a leak in a laboratory that was engaged in “gain of function” research.
As for those who disagreed, Fauci had an astonishingly arrogant response: “They are really criticizing science because I represent science.”
Back when both the public health establishment and the mainstream media hung on Fauci’s every word, Republican Senator Rand Paul was one of the few in a position of power willing to criticize him—going so far as to say that Fauci should “go to prison” for “his dishonesty” in dismissing the lab leak theory. Paul has long been convinced that the virus did indeed result from a lab leak, a position that is no longer viewed as heresy but is taken seriously by a number of officials in the intelligence community. And he has never stopped trying to get to the bottom of it. Paul has subpoenaed Fauci to testify at a hearing his committee is holding on Wednesday. Fireworks are guaranteed.
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It also paints a portrait of Dr. Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows, from the actress Julia Roberts to the singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand. It shows, as well, the pressure he was under, as he became the public face of the government’s response while at the same time countering what he called “slanderous lies” about him spread by “extreme right elements in society.”
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Wall Street Journal Summary:
Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.
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One of the main guilty acts of Fauci is not the claim that he got the COVID origin wrong at first. It’s that he and his Lancet crew fabricated a certainty about COVID’s origins they plainly did not possess — due to entirely self-interested reasons (namely, their careers and reputations would be endangered if COVID had been caused by gain-of-function and other Wuhan research they funded and participated it).
They then weaponized that fake, deceitful certainty to label anyone who suggested a lab leak as a racist (which never made sense, since the “wet market” theory was always the more racist one), and then also used that non-existent certainty to bully and coerce media outlets and Big Tech to aggressively censor anyone questioning or dissenting from their proclamation.
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The Fauci emails released long ago left no doubt that this was true. I still think the Lancet letter is one of the worst scientific scandal in years.
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There was a lot of gamesmanship at the Fauci but he is a classic example of why we don’t want to be ruled by “experts.” He’s a great illustration of why we are in a populist moment.
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