The Lockdown Dissidents Vindicated - Why is Fauci not in Jail?

Senator Rand Paul says his wife regularly greets him at home with this question, “Why is Tony Fauci not yet in jail?” That peculiar welcome suggests she knows what many folks know but not enough powerful government and media figures who are willing to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.

Several prosecutorial points were included in Jenner Furst’s documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, a late 2024 film focused on the doctor’s decades-long obsession with gain-of-function research, the gene-splicing technique that almost certainly led to the creation of the Wuhan virus and to a pandemic that caused a large number of excess deaths worldwide, perhaps mounting to the millions. A recently released Wall Street Journal documentary written and directed by Michael Pack focuses on the central role played by Fauci in pushing the counterproductive COVID lockdowns and in vilifying health experts who opposed those draconian measures. Its title: The Lockdown Dissidents.

Furst’s film showed Fauci using his influence to squelch prominent scientific voices that saw the new virus as a gain-of-function lab creation, not a bat-mediated wet market disease. The latter documentary fits the same manipulative profile. First, Fauci made himself the lead health official on the pandemic response team, to the amazement of CDC Head Dr. Robert Redfield. Then Fauci pushed a nationwide 15-day lockdown that was soon extended indefinitely, a pandemic response at odds with accepted quarantine protocols. Finally, he prescribed absurd masking and distancing measures designed to scare the public into submission. Inspired by the ruthless Communist Chinese response to the pandemic, Fauci advised the public, “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.”

Fauci continued to push the fear button in a meeting of the pandemic response group to which an outside voice, Dr. Scott Atlas, had been added by President Trump. When Fauci observed that people weren’t sufficiently afraid to listen to the group’s directives, Atlas couldn’t believe his ears and objected that increasing public fear was totally unethical. That reply ended whatever influence Atlas might have had within the group, especially since he favored a traditional public health response to COVID.

Atlas then looked for allies outside the group that was officially led by Fauci-mentored Dr. Deborah Birx. One of those allies was the current head of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya had conducted his own study in Santa Clara, California, and it showed that COVID-19 was already sufficiently widespread to make societal lockdowns meaningless. In addition, his findings revealed a mortality rate of .2% or less with fatalities concentrated in older individuals and virtually nonexistent in school children. Similar studies led most European countries to reopen their schools in the fall of 2020. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attempt to “follow the science,” however, was opposed not only by Fauci’s group guidance but also, with extreme vitriol, by teachers union president Randi Weingarten.

In the face of such opposition unmoored to science, Atlas, Bhattacharya, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff met in Great Barrington, Massachusetts early in October, 2020, and produced The Great Barrington Resolution, a document eventually endorsed by over sixty thousand medical scientists and practitioners plus nearly nine-hundred-thousand concerned citizens. The statement provided clear reasons for rejecting the prevailing lockdown procedures and for employing a “Focused Protection” strategy aimed at vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly. Among its concluding sentences was the following: “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Fauci and his NIH accomplice, Francis Collins, couldn’t let this science stand. Almost immediately, Collins sent an email to Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Resolution by falsely describing its authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” As Atlas and Bhattacharya attest, the “take down” was successful thanks to complicit scientists, intimidation tactics (including death threats), and outlandish media suppression of scientific discourse, a censorship regime put on steroids during the Biden Administration with its “epidemic of the unvaxxed” propaganda.

Consequently, Fauci’s recommended lockdowns that included schools, houses of worship, small businesses, and sporting events largely continued. In Gavin Newsom’s California, the destruction of freedom even extended to a lone surfer. Meanwhile, politicized and cowardly scientists were okay with massive BLM protests after the death of George Floyd.

The film concludes with a post-mortem vindication of the pandemic approach advocated by the Barrington Resolution. Florida was a state that remained largely open during the pandemic while California was among the most locked down. After evaluating total excess deaths, Florida came out better than the once Golden State. In Europe, the same result was obtained for non-lockdown Sweden vis-à-vis Germany. It should also be noted that these comparisons only measured excess deaths, not the economic, psychological, or educational damage of lockdowns.

People were regularly encouraged by Jewish leaders to “never forget” the Holocaust, a plea that’s becoming a faint echo nowadays. In similar fashion, we should resist the desire to forget the price paid for Dr. Fauci’s dream of creating novel vaccines for yet-to-appear superviruses -- a toll that includes not only millions of deaths but also the enduring aftereffects of the fear he stoked and the tyrannical lockdowns he promoted. Those disastrous results are why Rand Paul’s wife and many others believe Anthony Fauci deserves a “lockdown” of his own.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Related Topics: COVID, Great Barrington Declaration, Anthony Fauci

"Thank You, Dr. Fauci" Film Should Doom the Doc, But Likely Won’t

If a large number of the right people view Jenner Furst’s documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, it should at the very least invert Anthony Fauci’s public reputation from the courageous voice of science to that of a mendacious bureaucrat whose reckless obsession with genetically altered vaccines paved the way for a pandemic that cost at least twenty million lives.  The likelihood of that reversal of fortune is, at the moment, slim, since the same tech, pharma, and political powers that successfully squashed the truth about the Covid lab leak and the Covid vaccines continue to exert outsized control of the means of communication throughout the U.S. government and the media world.      

That last sentence summarizes Furst’s depressing conclusion based on a mountain of evidence from documents and expert testimony.  The most prominent of those experts is Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the CDC at the time of the pandemic’s outbreak in 2019 and 2020. Redfield occupied the highest public health position in the Trump Administration but was curiously “iced out” of the small behind-the-scene meetings conducted by the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Tony Fauci.  Redfield explains this odd omission by noting that he possessed a trait not shared by Fauci and his collegial entourage, “I’m honest.”  Combine honesty with Redfield’s belief (echoed by his Chinese CDC counterpart, George Gao) that the 2019 coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was the result of a lab leak and Redfield became in Fauci’s eyes as dangerous as the genetically altered virus itself.

As Furst shows, convincing evidence exists that Fauci was funding Wuhan’s dangerous gain-of-function research, research so hazardous it was officially banned in the U.S. from October, 2014 through 2017.  But this technique was an integral part of Fauci’s lifelong medical goal -- namely, the creation of a vaccine through genetic manipulation to treat potentially devastating viruses (like HIV and Ebola) that might emerge from nature.  To achieve this Nobel-winning breakthrough one must first create in the lab the dangerous virus itself.  It might seem absurd to create a virulent virus that can be easily transmitted between humans based on the fear that a similar virus might emerge from nature.  But according to Dr. Fauci and his colleagues, Drs. Peter Daszak and Jeremy Farrar, that’s a risk worth taking -- an assertion made even after one such virus (Ebola) likely escaped in 2014 from a Sierra Leone lab in West Africa and after the H1N1 virus in 1977 admittedly escaped from a lab (Dr. Michael Osterholm).    

It’s also amazing that Redfield’s point of view has been as effectively iced out by the media as it was from the Fauci-constituted group that early in 2020 began dumping articles around the science world that confidently asserted the natural origin, via bats, of the Wuhan virus.  Concerning one influential publication that appeared in The Lancet and denounced other views as “conspiracies,” Redfield observed, “. . . it’s not even a scientific paper.  I call it a wedding announcement.”  And of the March 17 “Proximal Origin” paper that went viral Redfield judged it “very sloppy science.”  Coincidentally, two members of Fauci’s inner circle who were associated with the 2014 Sierra Leone lab (Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry) had a grant proposal worth $8.9 million on Fauci’s desk as they began pushing the natural-origin coronavirus explanation.  Furst also notes that “bat” explanations were put forward by Peter Daszak et al. to explain the Ebola outbreak in 2014

Beyond Redfield’s comments, Furst’s film provides a clear explanation of the gene sequence within the Wuhan virus -- a biological fingerprint that provides clear evidence of genetic manipulation.  Not only does the virus possess a so-called “furin cleavage site” that promotes transmission to humans (a characteristic one prominent scientist said “stands out like a sore thumb”) it also contains, incredibly, genetic elements related to the HIV virus.  A scientific paper announcing these findings (Pradhan, et al.) appeared early in 2020 but was quickly withdrawn from publication “under intense pressure” according to Furst.  That study was also deleted from the internet and soon buried under the aforementioned Fauci-instigated “propaganda” blizzard.   

Among other points of interest exposed in Furst’s film is that the Wuhan virus began its spread in August or September of 2019 and that the city’s October military athletic games (with participants from Italy, France, Iran, and the U.S.) served as the original “super-spreader” event ---an opinion again shared by the effectively muted Dr. Redfield.  Importantly, though more indirectly, the documentary  probes links between Dick Cheney, U.S. Intelligence, bio-terrorism, the anthrax “hoax,” and Tony Fauci.  The bottom line of that inquiry implicates Fauci as a powerful insider with “billions of dollars to fund the riskiest research in the world with no oversight.”  This bio-weapon “defense” research was an enterprise in which Peter Daszak, a Fauci associate with major Wuhan (and likely intelligence) connections, was also involved.  Indeed, Furst’s documentary notes that Daszak’s DEFUSE proposal for the DOD (which was officially rejected) sought to create a virus just like Covid’s a year before the pandemic’s outbreak.  Put succinctly, and inverting a Vietnam oxymoron, Fauci, Daszak et al. hoped to create deadly bio-weapons in order to destroy them.

Furst’s documentary also reveals that Fauci’s net worth of seven million dollars at the beginning of the pandemic ballooned to twelve million a few years later, a Pelosi-level windfall not entirely explained by the career bureaucrat’s $434,000 annual salary.  Beyond whatever advance Fauci received for his self-congratulatory memoir, On Call, it’s possible that the 690-million royalty dollars pharmaceutical companies like Moderna sent to Fauci’s NIAID Institute provided some financial uptick. Coincidentally, the founder of Openthebooks.com, Adam Andrzejewski, an otherwise healthy 55-year-old man and marathon runner who uncovered information about those huge payments died in his sleep of a “sudden illness” soon afterward.   

If Dr. Redfield’s observation that the COVID virus was “an act of scientific arrogance” seems harsh, it pales in comparison with the comments of other prominent individuals.  Dr. Richard Ebright: “We had willful, deliberate misfeasance that likely caused a pandemic, killed 20 million, and cost 25 trillion dollars. Against that context it is unsurprising that individuals would prefer a lie.“  Prof. Jeffrey Sachs:  “Fauci knew and lied repeatedly.”  Dr. Marty Makary (President Trump’s nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration): “Dr. Fauci claims that they’re creating more dangerous viruses in the lab to predict a pandemic or to prevent one.  It has never happened.  It’s a fantasy.”  Dr. Andrew Huff (A former associate of Peter Daszak):  “I think the only way forward is a military tribunal to hold the long list of bad actors accountable.”

I should note in closing that Furst is a lifelong leftist, thus his film’s short references to Republicans (outside of Senator Rand Paul) are uniformly negative (Reagan vis-à-vis AIDS, Trump on Covid, and perhaps more deservedly Dick Cheney).  He gives no credit to conservative media that seriously questioned the mainstream media’s Fauci idolatry.  However, Furst’s research for the film opened his eyes so that he now says, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that he’s become non-political.  I would liken his ideological awakening to that of Christopher Hitchens who compared his feeling about losing his devotion to Soviet-styled leftism to that of losing a limb.  But anyone who, like Furst, can seriously assert that both Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid are intelligent and well meaning is clearly still under sedation for removal of that limb.