Category: Tony the Fauch

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Biden Pandemic Commentary COVID Politics Reprints from others. Tony the Fauch

Who Best Avoided the COVID Religion?

"Saint" Fauci's COVID religion

One of the greatest contributions that America gave to the world was and is religious freedom. In 2020, that freedom was taken away from all religions in the United States. We’ve not yet come to terms with this awful reality and what it means for the future of faith.

The lockdowns were a major blow to religious institutions and practices. Every major survey shows that attendance at weekly religious services is down from pre-lockdown times.

“The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33 percent to 30 percent) over that span,” writes Pew, “and one in five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.”

 

I’ve had this confirmed by many friends who report that the religious houses of their choice seem to show far less participation. This very likely translates to a decline in financial support too. Once people got out of the habit of participating in a physical church, the ritual was broken and now we see the spreading of indifference. This is surely not a good sign.

But that picture is complicated by a strange feature: the religious congregations that resisted COVID controls and shutdowns have likely earned the trust and loyalty of their members. Indeed, this weekend, I happened to attend the debut of a new opera where attendance was dominated by what are called “traditionalist” Catholics. Talking with people after, I was thrilled to learn just how many of their congregations never closed down.

A priest friend of mine in the Midwest tells the story of Easter 2020, when almost every church in the country was closed. That’s an outrage, by the way. It’s a devastating commentary on the Catholic Bishops that they uttered no protest against this. It’s a black mark against an entire generation of Church leadership.

My priest friend, however, stood up to his own Bishop and said he would sooner resign his post as pastor than lock his own parishioners out of church on Holy Week.

“You are bluffing,” the Bishop said.

“Try me,” the priest answered.

The Bishop could not afford to take the chance of losing this man because his parish had a very large school and was thriving. So the meeting broke up with the Bishop neither given permission nor refusing it. The parish allowed parishioners to come in the back entrance where the media was not on the lookout, and they kept the lights in the building very low so as not to attract government officials.

Services went on. The parishioners have not forgotten this act of bravery and increased their participation and financial support in gratitude. The priest was tested and showed that he took seriously the Gospel message. He was not going to throw away the words of Jesus that wherever two or three gather in his name, there is God.

There is nothing in the Gospels about social distancing, much less mRNA jabs as a moral imperative.

Jesus ate with the lepers but Fauci told us not to get near each other because of a virus circulating with a 99 percent and higher survival rate, even while he was banning therapeutics and killing people with ventilators and toxic pharmaceuticals.

Those who trusted Jesus over Fauci have earned the respect of their congregations. But there is even more to it than that.

There is something about a very strong religious faith that protected people against government propaganda in those times. They could see straight through the lies even as more secular people, in general, went for the government-pushed baloney.

Think back to those times. Who resisted? Certainly, the traditional Catholics did, more than a few of them devoted to the older form of liturgy with Latin and all the smells and bells. They teach a stricter doctrine about sin and salvation than you get from the watered-down version in modern parish life. Those people were certainly among the resistance to government decrees.

It was the same with Jewish congregations. The typical Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox temples and synagogues shut down and went to Zoom. This infuriated people and alienated them from their place of worship. But in many communities called “ultra-Orthodox” or Hasidic, among others, there was indefatigable resistance.

Indeed, both the governor and mayor of New York dared blame these faithful Jews for the spreading of disease. The New York Times agreed completely, despite how this claim revived one of the more grotesque smears of the Jews from the Middle Ages.

The Amish never paid the slightest attention to the disease frenzy that shut down the rest of society. In the Anabaptist tradition, which also includes the Mennonites, there is no real distinction between the community, the way of life, and the functioning of the place of worship. It is all in unity in both belief and practice. And so there simply was never a chance that these people would stop worshiping God in the way their tradition demands.

It was all true of many break-off sects of the so-called Mormons. Outside the confines of the official church that is forever seeking the respectability of the media and secular elites, these communities continued right on with their practices. And why not? Their whole lives are defined by the choice to believe and live in a certain way. Some hysterical screaming from D.C. and the media elites are not going to shake them from something much more fundamental: the relationship of their members to their God.

The evangelicals were a bit slow to catch on to the scam that was the lockdowns, but they figured it out too, many by the summer of 2020, and they started holding weddings and funerals. Regular weekly services returned to the howls of the media hounds, but they didn’t care. Once they had shaken off their fears, they were ready to get back to their religious obligations.

Tellingly, it was the more secular areas of the country that stayed closed longer. And the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches proved themselves all too willing to go along with the demands that they shut down services because of Fauci’s diktats.

For most of 2020 and 2021, many of these churches simply kept their doors closed or forcibly masked their parishioners. Horribly, some of them even went along with the vaccine mandate, not only for staff but parishioners, too.

“Nationwide, a number of churches and synagogues are implementing vaccine mandates,” wrote the Deseret News in September 2021. “Some are requiring not just clergy and staff to get vaccinated but even congregants. Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church in San Francisco, California, is enforcing such an all encompassing mandate — complete with ushers who will politely turn away those without proof of vaccination.”

I’m not saying that such churches deserve to go out of business, but … actually, such churches deserve to go out of business.

What have we learned? People who take their faith seriously have proven that they are more immune to the lies of the secular elites than those who barely go through the motions. It’s the hardcore among them who put God ahead of government, their teachings ahead of the media, and their personal convictions ahead of the biomedical elite and their bogus claims.

In other words, it was faith itself that enabled people to follow real science better than those who outsourced their hearts and salvation to pharmaceutical companies and government bureaucrats. In other words, it was the people of firm religious conviction who proved to be better practitioners of both science and human values.

Think what that means in terms of the history of science and faith. For centuries, we’ve been told that only faithless rationalism provides a true guide to truth, while faith is merely a superstitious distraction. There are perhaps some valid historical reasons for this bias—certainly, the union of church and state was not good for religion or civic community—but the truth is more complicated.

The last three years have shown that this claim might be completely inverted. It is faith that allows people clarity to see through government propaganda and inspires people with moral conviction to do what is right regardless of what a totalitarian government happens to be preaching at any one time.

In the end, it was Fauci and the whole COVID regime that was the superstitious distraction, while robust and traditional religion provided the best guide to light and truth.

(This post has been copy-edited to correct grammatical errors. No content was deleted.)

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Biden Pandemic COVID Economy Emotional abuse Links from other news sources. Medicine Science Tony the Fauch WOKE

Getting back at the junk science. In-N-Out Requiring Employees to Show Medical Note to Wear Masks.

Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

Getting back at the junk science. In-N-Out Requiring Employees to Show Medical Note to Wear Masks. Who can forget the COVID days when the loons told you that you bascially needed an exemption from Congress to not wear a mask? Or about 50,000 medical doctors approved by Tony the Fauch to not wear a mask? OK I’m stretching it.

Well In-N-Out Burger has loon employees who still think that they’re gonna die if they don’t wear a mask at work. Crazy I know. So In-N-Out wants those workers to have a doctors excuse saying why they have to mask up.

“It stipulates that no employee may wear a mask unless they provide a medical note that exempts them from the requirement. If they provide the medical note, they must wear a company-provided N-95 mask unless they can produce another note exempting them from that requirement too,” it added

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Biden Pandemic Faked news Reprints from others. Science Tony the Fauch

CDC Altered Minnesota Death Certificates that List a Covid Vaccine as a Cause of Death

Can't have a vaccine listed as a cause of Death!
By   July 3, 2023  
By   July 3, 2023
Someone (who needs to remain anonymous) was able to obtain the death certificates from Minnesota for all deaths that occurred from 2015 to the present, which presented the opportunity to see if the CDC is being entirely honest about the US death data. Unsurprisingly, the CDC is not.

As we shall document, the CDC is concealing references to a covid vaccine on Minnesota death certificates (that are exceedingly rare to begin with because of widespread medical establishment denialism of vaccine adverse side effects). In almost every death certificate that identifies a covid vaccine as a cause of death, the CDC committed data fraud by not assigning the ICD 10 code for vaccine side effects to the causes of death listed on the death certificate.

Background

When someone dies, there is a death certificate that is filled out for official/legal purposes. Death certificates contain a lot of information (some states include more than others), including the causes of death (CoD).

Causes of death refer to the medical conditions that ultimately played some role in the demise of the decedent. To qualify as a CoD, a condition only needs to contribute to the medical decline of the decedent in some way, but doesn’t have to be directly responsible for whatever ultimately killed the person. If someone had high blood pressure, and subsequently suffered a heart attack that led to cardiac arrest which killed them, all three conditions qualify as CoD. On the other hand, this unfortunate fellow’s ingrown toenail is not a cause of death, because it in no way contributed to their demise.

This is from the CDC’s own guidance explaining how to properly fill out CoD’s on a death certificate (you don’t need to understand the difference between Cause A, B, etc, for this article):

The critical thing to keep in mind is that the person filling out the death certificate writes a text description of the CoD’s, but doesn’t assign the ICD 10 codes for the CoD’s.

That’s the CDC’s job.

ICD 10 Coding System for CoD’s

There is a fancy coding system that is used to classify the many thousands of medical conditions that can play a role in death known as the International Classification of Diseases. Every few years, it is updated/revised to keep up with new medical (or bureaucratic) developments as new conditions are discovered, and old conditions are reorganized or reclassified.

The current iteration of the ICD used for the deaths we’re looking at is the ICD 10 (the 10th version). It is basically a hierarchical classification system:

 

There are codes for practically every random weird thing you can think of:

There are codes for practically every random weird thing you can think of:

These are categories themselves – a code can go as 7 characters long:

SOURCE — from the CDC

ICD 10 Codes for Covid Vaccine Side Effects

There are two ICD 10 codes for vaccine side effects that can be broadly used for the covid vaccines – T88.1 and Y59.0:

T88.1 – Other complications following immunization, not elsewhere classified.

Y59.0 – Viral vaccines

(There are other ICD 10 codes for various specific complications or side effects of vaccines, but the point remains that an ICD 10 code for vaccine side effects exists.)

CDC – Centers for Data Concealment

The CDC receives the death certificates from the various states and applies ICD 10 codes. This is primarily done with a secret algorithm, with a tiny percentage of cases adjudicated by CDC staff when the algorithm is unable to confidently assign an ICD code to the text description written on the actual death certificate (such as confounding spelling or a text description that does not make much sense). I confirmed this with a biostatistician who works for a DoH in a US state (I’m leaving out which one because I want to preserve my persona grata status). The individual who obtained the MN death certificates likewise confirmed with state officials that the ICD codes in their data were assigned by the CDC.

What a death certificate identifying a covid vaccine as a CoD *should* look like

There are three death certificates in the MN tranche that contain either T88.1 or Y59.0. One is for a flu vaccine reaction, and – surprisingly – the other two are for a covid vaccine.

Note – when used below: 

UCoD (Underlying Cause of Death) refers to “the disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury.”

MCoD (Multiple Causes of Death) refers to “the immediate cause of death and all other intermediate and contributory conditions listed on the death certificate.” (everything else)

The first death certificate contains a covid vaccine ICD (below), and it looks like the CDC was trapped and could not avoid putting it on without fundamentally rewriting the death certificate, because the vaccine complication is unambiguously listed as the UCoD (this death certificate is saying the person was killed by a heart attack caused by the covid vaccine within minutes of injection):

The second death certificate the CDC deigned to assign a vaccine ICD (and not only one but *BOTH* vaccine ICD codes(!!)) feels like perhaps a rogue CDC employee was working that day and snuck it in:

In any event, as we can clearly see, both T88.1 and Y59.0 are indeed appropriate for when a covid vaccine is listed as a CoD. Thus the CDC cannot claim that there was no official ICD 10 code that could be used to designate covid vaccines (or any other excuse).

The FRAUD:

With that introduction, below are 7 death certificates from Minnesota that identify a covid vaccine as a cause of death where the CDC omitted the corresponding ICD 10 code identifying a vaccine side effect when the CDC assigned ICD codes to the death certificates.

The first fraudulently filled out death certificate offers a crucial detail highlighting not only the fraud but the naked double standards for assigning CoD’s.

This death certificate identifies both a covid vaccine and covid itself as contributory CoD’s (in the last row highlighted in yellow, vaccine underlined in green, covid in blue):

  • “covid vaccine second dose 10 hrs prior to death”
  • “history of covid infection in May 2020” (about 7-8 months prior to death)

Any remotely objective person would presume that if a condition that occurred 7 months prior without any clear link to the actual death still nevertheless meets the standard for being identified as a CoD, then surely a condition or event that occurred a mere TEN HOURS before death identified by the doctor filling out the death certificate merits inclusion as a CoD.

Yet, the CDC assigned U70.1 – “COVID-19, virus identified” – for covid, but neglected to assign T88.1 or Y59.0 for the covid vaccine.

A second point to highlight is that we see that anything mentioned as a CoD, even in the context of “history of” that had (presumably) been long resolved, is a legitimate CoD insofar as assigning an ICD 10 code and epidemiological data are concerned.

This decedent suffered a cardiac arrest that ultimately led to her death *ONE DAY* after being vaccinated.

(For the record, I am not bothered by the “though it’s not clear as to any mechanism for how the vaccine could have led to the cardiac arrest” line. This death occurred February 24, 2021 – well before there was any sort of public awareness about the multiple plausible mechanisms by which the vaccine could cause heart damage. So to me, whoever filled out the death certificate was a gutsy fellow willing to identify a covid vaccine on a death certificate that had his name on it.)

Fraudulent Death Certificate #3

This death certificate doesn’t merely identify a covid vaccine, it explains that the decedent “felt sick after the vaccine” and died 4 days later from a heart attack. Yet, no T88.1 or Y59.0.

This death certificate provides that the decedent received her second dose of Pfizer 18 days prior to her death.

Here we have a 65-year-old male who was killed by a heart attack 12 days after getting vaccinated.

This case is especially noteworthy. Someone involved with this death informed me that the family had to pressure the coroner to put the recent covid booster on the death certificate. A family member also filed a VAERS report themselves, after the patient’s doctors declined to do so.

Furthermore, the CDC applied W34 as the UCoD. What is W34 for?

 

‘accidental discharge and malfunction from other and unspecified firearms and guns.’

There is no mention of any firearms mishaps on the death certificate.

One would have to wonder how such an errant code came to be, especially on a death certificate that contains other ICD 10 shenanigans. It is unlikely that ‘Y590’ or ‘T881’ would be ‘misspelled’ or algorithmically mixed up with ‘W34.’

Perhaps if there were no other instances of fraudulent omittance of vaccine ICD codes on other death certificates, and the CDC wasn’t in the habit of routinely assigning U07.1 for a covid infection that resolved a year ago, the failure to include T88.1 or Y59.0 here could be excused.

At minimum, this death certificate should contain T88.0 – ‘Infection following immunization’ – to document the breakthrough infection (which is a subject for a separate article as this seems to be fairly widespread).

Additional Observations

The following table shows the date of death and age for all 9 death certificates shown above that identified a covid vaccine as a CoD:

It is striking that 7/9 died before May 2021. This is odd – if anything, the deaths should skew later, not earlier. Vaccine adverse events were denied – with maximum prejudice and then some – for many months before the medical mainstream has finally (begrudgingly) started to acknowledge that the covid vaccines can trigger potentially lethal pathologies (in exceedingly rare instances to be sure).

The clustering of death certificates mentioning a covid vaccine at the beginning of the rollout suggests that ‘administrative’ interference likely played a role in discouraging coroners from mentioning a covid vaccine on death certificates.

Another noteworthy tidbit here is the age of the decedents: every single one is a senior citizen, and the average age of the decedents is 80. This is important to highlight because whereas young people “dying suddenly” stands out, there has been much less attention or acknowledgement of the covid vaccine’s devastating toll upon the old and frail, where deaths – even those that occur in close proximity to vaccination – are readily attributed to prior health conditions.

Finally, the actions of the CDC call into question whether the CDC is altogether qualified or trustworthy enough to be the steward of the nation’s epidemiological data. The CDC manages many of the datasets that underpin whole fields of study. If the CDC is willing to fraudulently alter data (or even if the CDC is just too incompetent to avoid corrupting data), all data under the aegis of the CDC is potentially suspect, especially if it relates to a controversial political or social issue. The implications of this are disturbing, to say the least.

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Biden Pandemic COVID Links from other news sources. Medicine Reprints from others. Tony the Fauch

Top Fauci Adviser Admits to Using Private Email to Avoid FOIA Requests.

This is what they do. GP Photo.

Top Fauci Adviser Admits to Using Private Email to Avoid FOIA Requests. “I Will Delete Anything I Don’t Want to See in the New York Times” So how does he get away with this?

Federal records obtained by the House Oversight Committee reveal one of Dr. Fauci’s top advisers said he used his personal email account in order to avoid any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and even went as far to imply he has deleted emails during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The House Oversight Committee released possibly incriminating emails from Dr. David Morens who has served as an adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 25 years.

In one of his emails that was uncovered by Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, Dr. Morens wrote to his colleagues, “As you know, I try to always communicate on Gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.” In the conclusion of his email, Morens wrote, “I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

https://twitter.com/COVIDSelect/status/1674501986857676806?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1674501986857676806%7Ctwgr%5E6dc1bb708d9f43346c15fce0baa49592c467d2c7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2023%2F06%2Fmore-lawlessness-top-fauci-adviser-admits-using-private%2F

The whole article is here.

 

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Child Abuse COVID Crime Drugs How sick is this? Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. Tony the Fauch

OUTRAGEOUS! Pfizer, FDA & CDC Knew It Harmed Babies: Dr. Walensky Urged Vaccination for Pregnant Women Anyway

The Big lie.

“They knew. They knew. Absolutely criminal.”

By The Vigalant Fox

Originally Published on DailyClout

“Of all the 69 reports we now have, this is the most disturbing,” expressed DailyClout CEO Dr. Naomi Wolf in a live stream on Sunday. “Because the bottom line is, according to a new tranche of Pfizer documents released just this month, this past month, April of 2023. And these are documents that go back to April of 2021 — exactly two years ago. Both Pfizer and the FDA knew that the mRNA COVID vaccine caused dire fetal and infant harms, including death.”

Dr. Wolf’s commentary comes at the heels of Pfizer Report 69 titled, Pfizer and FDA Knew in Early 2021 That Pfizer mRNA COVID “Vaccine” Caused Dire Fetal and Infant Risks, Including Death. They Began an Aggressive Campaign to Vaccinate Pregnant Women Anyway.

Pfizer Documents Analysis Project Director Amy Kelly wrote:

The batch of Pfizer clinical trial documents released in April 2023 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under court order contains a shocking, eight-page document titled, “Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review” …

This document is among the most horrifying yet to emerge into public view. It reveals that both Pfizer and the FDA knew by early 2021 that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine, BNT162b2, resulted in horrible damage to fetuses and babies.

Amy Kelly detailed the “horrible damage to fetuses and babies,” as sourced from Pfizer’s Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review:

• Adverse events in over 54% of cases of “maternal exposure” to the vaccine (248 out of 458). The language “maternal exposure” implies that Pfizer acknowledged intercourse, inhalation, and skin contact as methods of exposure to its mRNA injection, as also evidenced by Protocol Amendment 14.

• “53 reports [or 21% – 53/248] of spontaneous abortion (51)/ abortion (1)/ abortion missed (1) following BNT162b2 (Pfizer mRNA) vaccination.”

• Six premature labor and delivery cases resulting in two newborn deaths.

• 19% (41/215) of babies in Pfizer’s records exposed to the company’s COVID mRNA vaccine via their mothers’ breast milk were recorded as suffering from 48 different categories of adverse events.

The damage and suffering feel even more real when you narrow it down to individual stories.

The following reports are from Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review in Pfizer’s own writing:

• “A 15-month-old infant with medical history of vomiting experienced skin exfoliation and infant irritability while being breastfed (latency <7 days). The outcome of the event’ skin exfoliation’ was not recovered and outcome of event’ infant irritability’ was unknown.”

• “A 9-month-old infant with a medical history of meningococcal vaccine and no history of allergies, asthma, eczema or anaphylaxis experienced rash and urticaria a day after exposure via lactation.”

• “A day after the mother received vaccination, a baby developed a rash after breastfeeding. At the time of the report, the event was ‘not recovered.”

• “An 8-month-old infant experienced angioedema [an area of swelling of the lower layer of skin and tissue just under the skin or mucous membranes] one day after his mother received vaccination.”

• “There were 2 cases reporting ‘illness’ after exposure via breast milk’. In the first case, a 6-month-old infant developed an unspecified sickness 2 days post-mother’s vaccination. The outcome of the event sickness was recovered, and no causality assessment was provided. The second case, a 3-month-old infant developed an unspecified illness and required hospitalization for 6 days post-exposure via breast milk (>7 days latency).”

Pfizer employee, Robert T. Maroko, approved the Review with these horrific findings on April 20, 2021.

“This is a real person working at Pfizer, Mr. Robert T. Maroko, who looked at this damage to babies, these dead babies, these dead fetuses, these miserably-injured babies — approved it and sent it on to the FDA. The FDA approved it and gave it to Rochelle Walensky and the CDC,” shared Dr. Wolf.

And three days later, on April 23, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky held a press conference, which kicked off an aggressive campaign to get pregnant women vaccinated.

Here’s what she said:

“No safety concerns were observed for people vaccinated in the third trimester or safety concerns for their babies. As such, CDC recommends that pregnant people receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”

“Words fail me,” grieved Dr. Naomi Wolf.

“The FDA signed off on this document showing dead babies, sick babies, dead from the injection, sick from nursing, the spontaneous abortions, or dead subsequent to the injection, the spontaneous abortions, the respiratory distress, babies hospitalized … These monsters looked at whether the babies would get sick and die or whether the fetuses would spontaneously abort, and they did. And they saw that they did, and they kept going.”

“This was just [four] months into the rollout,” Dr. Wolf mentioned. “And I want to remind you that breastfeeding has gone from 34% of moms and babies at the start of the pandemic to only 15% now, meaning that babies are having a terrible time with their mother’s breast milk. Pfizer knew they would!” she exclaimed. “Pfizer knew they would! The FDA knew they would, and they told pregnant women and lactating women to get vaccinated anyway.”

“At the end of this horrific, demonic analysis of all these sick and dying babies, all these aborted fetuses, all these babies getting sick from poisoned breast milk. Seriously sick. Damaged. They held a press conference. And Dr. Walensky, who has this report in hand, who has this report in hand,” Dr. Wolf said twice with emphasis, “told the women of America and anyone else who is listening in the world that these vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women and for their babies. And that to protect their babies, they had to get vaccinated. They knew. They knew. Absolutely criminal.”

All the harrowing details of Pfizer Report 69 are available on DailyClout.io.

And there are 68 other damning reports — just like this one — using primary source Pfizer documents released under court order by the U.S. FDA.

These important summaries, which detail astonishing ranges of deaths, disabilities, and other systematic harms to subjects — damage that both Pfizer and the FDA sought to keep hidden from the public for 75 years — contain vastly important headlines: twenty forms of menstrual damage to women — how Pfizer covered up a flood of adverse events — PEG in breast milk — within a month of rollout, Pfizer knew the mRNA vaccines did not work.

Now, the information Pfizer and the FDA wanted to keep hidden for 75 years is available in paperback form. Funds and proceeds raised go to the research project, which helps makes more Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports possible. So, please, show your support and get your hands on this critical information in one place — by ordering your copy today.

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COVID Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. Tony the Fauch Uncategorized

Tony the Fauch retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview. The doctor, once again, proved himself a master of illusion and obfuscation. Edited.

Tony the Fauch. (Getty)

Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview.
The doctor, once again, proved himself a master of illusion and obfuscation. Article was found here.

The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse. To his credit, Times reporter David Wallace-Wells did not let Fauci off easily — there was no Joe Biden treatment in this one. 

Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose. Germany, Luxembourg and Austria are at 78 percent, and progressives’ favorite Scandinavian country, Sweden, sits at 76 percent. Even if you assume he meant “fully vaccinated” with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.

He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.” Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on. 

And that’s not all! Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed:

 

[A]ll of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence. 

Let’s unpack that marvelous trickery. There is some limited truth that intelligence agencies agree that the virus was not “genetically engineered,” as the DNI reported in 2021 that “most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered”. The first wrinkle, obviously, is that this assessment is from “most agencies” and is “low confidence.” The second wrinkle is that “two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.” Not exactly a resounding renunciation of an engineered virus. It is not clear to Cockburn how the agencies have shifted their opinions, if at all, on the topic since 2021, though we may know soon once the intelligence is declassified.

Further, his definition of a lab leak is comically oversimplified. For Fauci, the way it could be a “lab leak” is if the scientist caught the virus from some natural source and then infected his or her colleagues. Admittedly, Fauci gets points for creativity: he effectively coopts the lab leak theory to confirm his own belief that that virus spread from a natural origin point. 

Now on to the pandemic response. Fauci complained that “I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations [lockdowns],” that he only “gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” If he did not want to be the “personification” of pandemic policy, then maybe he should not have played into the panegyrics — like going on the cover of InStyle magazine. And anyway, Fauci can’t claim to have been a mere bystander — he knew very well that his and the CDC’s recommendations were taken and used to enact a very particular set of policies. 

Fauci would like to think that public health institutions can look “at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health.” The problem here is that public health institutions are, by their very nature, inseparable from the “broader assessments.” Public health must deal with the public — shocking, but it’s true — and that means there is an interface with policy. That is what makes public health a messy, difficult thing to wrangle with, because you cannot simply make the calculations and run; you have to make the calculations and then mold them into recommendations that are workable for the society to which they will be applied. That did not happen, not because of maliciousness, but because of human error. That is all people want Fauci to admit — actually admit, not massaging an admission with obfuscation and deflection. 

By far the most irritating for Cockburn, though, is the moralizing and grumbling about the public’s skepticism of the public health establishment and its recommendations. At the beginning of the condensed interview, Fauci mentions the “smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.” The irony is that Fauci is at the epicenter of the crisis that caused that very “smoldering anti-science feeling.” 

Take the mask debacle. At the beginning, in March 2020, Fauci argued that masking was unnecessary, that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” The argument — which, it turns out, was correct — was that masks were not effective enough to wear. Underlying that contention, though, was what those in government felt was a noble lie: the masks were not recommended not because they did not work, but because they wanted to make sure healthcare workers had access to them, primarily the N95. Then, all of a sudden, the guidance did a 180 and masks were not only protective, but mandated. Even when evidence began to pour in that cloth and surgical masks were not effective enough to warrant mandating them, nothing changed. This is why there is a crisis of trust, a “smoldering anti-science feeling”; it is not so much anti-science as it is skepticism of government claims to science.

And then there was the lockdown policy. The doctor said in the interview that “somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there.” Why was that the case? It happened because the public health establishment failed to communicate. Fauci would likely disagree: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes.” Fair enough, but the public health institutions paired those warnings with policy recommendations that said the contrary. Why was he suggesting that students still be masked mid-2021? Why were the teachers’ unions so involved in crafting school reopening processes? Where was Fauci when a voice of reason was needed in the school reopening process? He can point to a few meek comments, but where was the pandemic warrior he likes to portray himself as? It was this kind of behavior that helped produce an “anti-science feeling” in the country; it was a lack of honesty, a lack of consistency and the appearance of foul play. 

Does Fauci deserve all the blame? Of course not — but nor does he get to exonerate himself either.

Apparently, though, he does not feel he has anything worth exonerating himself of. When Wallace-Wells asked Fauci if the idea that gain-of-function research may (however unlikely and improbable it may be) have had some relation to Covid-19’s origins, weighed on him, the doctor was both defensive and dismissive. “Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that NIH-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins.”

“Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine”, he added, before defending the research as “not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world.” Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who “don’t like to be told what to do,” or the “independent scientists” — and rarely his own. 

Cockburn, more than anything else, would just like to see Fauci show — even if it’s feigned — some understanding of the concerns his critics bring to the table, some recognition of his own faults. That would require introspection, though, and despite all of his skills, that one is conspicuously lacking.