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.)
