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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment