From Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone Institute:
Early during lockdowns in 2020, when the whole of the media marched in lockstep with the most appalling reach of public policy in our lifetimes, two doctors from Bakersfield, California went out on a limb and objected. Their names: Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care. They held a press conference in which they claimed that lockdowns would only delay but not finally control the virus. Moreover, they predicted, at the end of this, we would also be sicker than ever because of our lack of exposure to endemic pathogens. You could say they were brave but why should it require bravery simply to share conventional wisdom that is part of every medical background? Indeed, the idea that reducing exposure to pathogens creates more vulnerability to disease is a point every generation in the last hundred years has learned in school.
How well I can recall the outrage! They were treated like seditious cranks and new media blasted their comments as somehow radically heterodox, even though they said nothing I had not learned in 9th-grade biology class. It was utterly bizarre how quickly lockdowns became an orthodoxy, enforced, as we are now learning, by media and tech platforms working closely with government agencies to warp public perceptions of science. Among those warpings was an incredible blackout concerning the basics of natural immunity. My goodness, why did this happen? It’s not conspiracy to draw an obvious reason: they wanted to sell a vaccine. And they wanted to push the idea that Covid was universally deadly for everyone so that they could justify their “whole-of-society” approach to lockdowns.
Here we are three years later and the headlines are all over the place.
- It Seems Like Everyone Is Getting Sick This Winter ~ CNN
- Everyone Is Sick Right Now ~ Yahoo
- Why Does It Seem Like Everyone’s Sick Right Now? ~ MSNBC
- Why Is Everyone Sick? ~ Wired
And so on.
Isn’t it time to give these doctors some credit and perhaps regret their vicious treatment at the hands of the press? (Read more.)
From Human Flourishing:
Fauci was ready for his moment in the sun. A consummate DC insider, he had cultivated a power base in Washington and the media for decades. He served in several administrations, under both parties, and craftily used the AIDS epidemic to increase funding for NAIAD and gain enormous control over biomedical research in the United States. He also cultivated media allies, who were eager for access to Fauci’s insider scoop when the pandemic broke.
Fauci’s influence on the recent US pandemic response extends back decades. In 1989, Fauci organized a conference in Washington to introduce a novel concept: a biosecurity threat. People had worried about biological weapons prior to 1989, of course, but Fauci’s conference introduced a consequential reframing: The potential threat was no longer a novel pathogen, such as a virus or bacteria, whether of natural origin or developed as a bioweapon. Rather, the new paradigm focused instead on humanity as a microbial population vector. The challenge, in other words, was that people functioned as a conveyance apparatus for viruses or bacteria.
Grasping this point goes a long way toward helping us understand our disastrous Covid response. In Fauci’s frame, the human population itself becomes a dangerous problem to be solved by experts—by a new caste of technocrats who must be granted unprecedented powers to control their fellow human beings. This biosecurity model became America’s infectious-disease-response policy following the Anthrax attacks shortly after 9/11. That’s when we began to hear the language of pandemic “countermeasures”—which isn’t a medical term, but the jargon of spycraft and soldiering.
As Ashley Rindsberg has documented, contrary to popular opinion, far from being a public health expert, since 2003 Fauci has sat atop America’s bio-defense infrastructure—wielding the enormous post-9/11 powers and budget this brought to his previously obscure NAIAD, one of 27 divisions at the NIH.
In Fauci’s reconfigured agency, with no oversight structure above him, the distinction between biodefense and scientific research collapsed. As Rindsberg explains: “Biodefense projects that formerly would have fallen under the authority of military or intelligence agencies were now under his direct supervision.” This also explains why Fauci is the highest paid federal employee, earning more than the US president, our four-star generals, senators, and Supreme Court justices, and why he makes roughly double the salary of his nominal superior, the NIH director—a fact that indicates who really holds sway over biomedical research funding in the United States.
It took more than 20 years, but the biosecurity approach became the default strategy during the Covid pandemic. Over the last three years, the biomedical-security paradigm has been rolled out on a global scale, shaping what I dubbed our New Abnormal. Recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the initial weeks of the pandemic, and how many ordinary social norms and expectations were rebranded as dangerous. In the first month of Covid, Fauci even suggested that perhaps we would never again go back to shaking hands.
Authoritarian lockdowns, school closures, vaccine and mask mandates, vaccine passports, and other assorted biosecurity measures proved ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus, and thus failed to achieve their intended goals. Instead, these previously untested policies inflicted enormous collateral damage. The full measure of these harms—the medical, psychological, and spiritual carnage—will take decades to unpack, though there is already plenty of available evidence to sift through.
The Missouri v. Biden case, in which I’m one of the plaintiffs, is a First Amendment free-speech lawsuit alleging that government officials across at least 17 different federal agencies leaned on social-media companies to suppress free speech, especially when it involves the government’s pandemic response. During his recent deposition in our case, Fauci confirmed what many suspected regarding the origins of lockdowns—namely, that the decision to lock down wasn’t based on empirical data, but on the word of the Chinese authorities as conveyed by Fauci’s deputy at NAIAD, Clifford Lane. Indeed, in February 2020 there was no empirical data for this previously untested intervention, only flawed and now-disproved predictive computer models, like that of the Imperial College London, which were off by several orders of magnitude.
Tocqueville warned that democracy contains built-in vulnerabilities that can lead democratic nations into despotism. In our case, that vulnerability had a name and a representative figure: Anthony Fauci, an official who looked to a totalitarian state as the exemplar for managing a pandemic. The first state-ordered lockdown occurred in Wuhan and nearby Chinese cities. In mid-February 2020, the World Health Organization sent a delegation to China to investigate Covid. As the US delegate, Fauci dispatched Lane, his deputy.
Immediately upon returning, Lane convinced Fauci the United States should emulate China’s response. Given his adoption of the biosecurity model more than 20 years earlier, Fauci probably didn’t take much convincing. Chinese authorities told the WHO delegation that they had contained the virus through draconian lockdowns—a claim now clearly demonstrated to have been false. Had lockdowns worked in China as advertised in February 2020, we wouldn’t be seeing today record numbers of cases in China, notwithstanding the Communist Party’s increasingly terrifying and dystopian measures.
Given China’s historical pattern of falsified information, Lane and Fauci should have approached this intel with skepticism. After all, lockdowns were wholly untested and unprecedented. But as one of our lawyers in the case, Jenin Younes of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, put it, Fauci “was apparently willing to base his lockdown advocacy on the observations of a single guy relying on reports from a dictator.” Not exactly a double-blind randomized trial level of evidence for a man who identifies himself with The Science.
Days after Lane returned, the WHO published its report praising China’s strategy. Uncritically echoing Chinese propaganda, the report claimed: “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response. This rather unique and unprecedented public health response in China reversed the escalating cases.”
Lockdowns were first imposed in the West in Italy, then adopted at the recommendation of Fauci and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx in the United States. Within weeks, the whole world was locked down. From the outset, the evidential basis for this global policy catastrophe was paper-thin. Fauci knew this—or at least, he should have. But what China had done was aligned with his own reframing of public health as management of biosecurity threats through the control of entire populations. Indeed, to this day, he is prepared to support the ongoing Chinese lockdowns if they function as a useful fulcrum to coerce compliance with other public-health mandates.
After bringing China’s unprecedented authoritarian measures to the United States, Fauci next resolved that the entire population must be vaccinated. To this end, the psychological strain of prolonged lockdowns and school closures offered useful leverage: If you wanted to avoid further forced isolation, it was up to you to get the jabs. Pressing this logic to its logical conclusion, as recently as last month Fauci told CNN that the continued lockdowns in China could be justified, at least for a period of time, if the goal was to force vaccine compliance: “If the purpose is, ‘Let’s get all the people vaccinated, particularly the elderly,’ then OK.”
Fauci’s promotion of mass vaccination was ideologically of a piece with his support for lockdowns. Rather than targeting the response at those most vulnerable to the virus, both policies sought a one-size-fits-all approach to control the behavior of the entire population. However, he likely had other reasons for aggressively pushing the vaccines. Most people are still unaware that NAIAD, Fauci’s division of the NIH, co-owns the patent on the Moderna vaccine, among thousands of other pharma patents.
Rather than providing grants to university-based investigators to run the clinical trials on their own Moderna vaccine, the NIH conducted this research internally, a clear conflict of interest. NIAID will earn millions from this vaccine’s revenue, with several NIH employees (and their heirs) personally receiving up to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales. Indeed, the NIH went to bat in a lawsuit with the company to fight for its share of the patent. Big money is at stake: The Government Accountability Office estimated recently that the NIH has earned $2 billion in royalties since 1991 from its patents for FDA-approved drugs. (Read more.)
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