COVID REALLY WAS ANOTHER CHERNOBYL

After years pursuing answers to what happened during the pandemic and how it came about, US senator Rand Paul and his team have disclosed plenty of troubling documents, mostly to do with the dealings of Dr Anthony Fauci and his shambolic performance. Most amazingly, the first Trump administration is largely to blame for not booting Fauci from his role despite knowing how badly he was performing, and yet many of those most vigorously explaining away the findings and defending Fauci are Democrats and fierce opponents to Donald Trump. That makes this story almost irresistible. Add to it what we already knew about the world’s media dropping the ball, failing to investigate and just ask the most glaring questions while also unwilling or unable to defend free expression and the whole thing becomes what should be one of the biggest stories of our time, looking far more like Chernobyl-style incompetence, mendacity, corruption, and cover-up than the partisan attack or perfect nothingburger that too much of pundit class is presenting it as.

DODGY PEOPLE, DODGY RESEARCH, AND DODGY ACTIONS

Some of what we got were documents showing US border protection intercepted undeclared biological materials connected to a network of American and Chinese coronavirus researchers. Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Zhengli Shi, Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, was coordinating with University of Minnesota's Fang Li, Director of Emerging Viruses, to move live pig coronavirus (PEDV) and SARS. In November of 2018, border protection found three undeclared vials concealed in paper towel and wax paper on a courier. The man was a professor of genetics from the biochemistry department at Zhengzhou University with a degree from Wuhan University and he named China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences as the source of the materials. According to a Department of Homeland Security field report, border protection was so alarmed at the contents of the vials (even still a full year from the pandemic outbreak) that all of it was immediately handed off to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. A DHS/FBI laboratory then determined the vials held antibody genetic material, precursor mRNA, and coronavirus spike-protein material.

For added context, the same Chinese military research network (working on gain-of-function research with bat coronavirus in Wuhan) attempted to smuggle another ten vials out of Canada’s highest-security bio lab in Winnipeg around this same time. Xiangguo Qiu, the Winnipeg scientist found by Canada’s intelligence community to be covertly working for Beijing who organized shipments of Nipah and Ebola viruses to China, also had connections to Zhengli Shi, named above.

If that wasn't enough, still prior to the pandemic, three others were charged with similar activities. One of these folks was a Chinese national and doctoral student who was busted, found with and lying about 21 vials of stolen biological materials he hid in a sock in his luggage. Another was a People’s Liberation Army Lieutenant and member of the Chinese Communist Party who falsely identified herself while lying about her ongoing military service with a top military academy, the National University of Defense Technology. While studying at Boston University’s Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering from 2017 to 2019 she was found to have completed numerous assignments for PLA officers, including conducting research, assessing US military websites, and gathering information about individuals in the US with expertise in robotics and computer science. The other person was Dr Charles Lieber, a nanoscience pioneer and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. He was found to have received more than $15 million in grants from America's National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense while failing to disclose that he was employed by the Chinese government as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (paid $50,000 USD per month) and was given $1.5 million to spend nine months per year there establishing a research lab. Most interestingly, Dr Lieber was found guilty and convicted on six criminal charges related to his failure to disclose, making false statements, concealing his Chinese bank account from investigators, and being in receipt of millions of dollars from China. But Lieber didn't like that. Neither did China. Though he was looking at 26 years in prison and $1.2 million in fines, instead Dr Lieber up and moved to China in December of 2021, taking a position in Shenzhen, China's Silicon Valley, as founding director of the state-funded Institute for Brain Research Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies (i-BRAIN). How cute.

But back to the smuggling. The smuggling didn't stop. It actually got even more bold. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and as Lieber was off to China, the same professor-courier found with coronavirus spike-protein in 2018 was stopped once again at a US airport, his name having pinged the system for his prior smuggling attempt. When taken aside he was asked if he’d had a run-in with border patrol previously. He told them he had not. He was then asked if he was carrying any biological materials on him. He declared that he was not. When they told him he could be committing an illegal act by lying to border officers he did not change his story. Then when his bags were inspected border protection found 132 undeclared vials of biological materials as well as a laptop that was not his own. When questioned, he offered all kinds of conflicting information regarding his current and past work, connections to different people and institutions including coronavirus researchers and People’s Liberation Army institutes.

I find all of this particularly interesting not only because the dodgy dealings with China look to have redoubled in the middle of the pandemic but because every bit of it should have been impossible prior to Wuhan researchers, working with their US counterparts, gifting the world a new globally circulating flu-like virus that would kill untold millions. Back in 2014, the Obama administration’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy coordinated with key groups within the US to pause funding for selected gain-of-function research and shut down key labs. Targeted were projects deemed too dangerous, specifically those projects reasonably anticipated to confer enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility via the respiratory route in mammals to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses. That we know of, this action was not motivated by prior incidents but it was most certainly accelerated when in 2014 there were several significant lab accidents at federal facilities involving avian flu and anthrax as well as the discovery of “forgotten” vials of smallpox. This research pause ended in 2017 after the imposition of new and stricter guidelines requiring, among other things, better risk/benefit analysis and evaluation of scientific merit as well as a multi-level review for any research with the potential to create “enhanced” pandemic pathogens. So there had just been effectively a moratorium on and strengthening of rules around work with coronaviruses and other dangerous pathogens in the US immediately prior to authorities catching these key labs smuggling materials related to coronavirus research in and out of the country and their mule repeatedly being caught lying about who he was, who he worked with, and what he was up to.

How much more reckless and incompetent, then, does this combined picture make top researchers and institutions as well as key authorities appear? Still, somehow, even now the press seems mostly uninterested in this story. To me, it looks like the movie version of the pandemic would pretty closely approximate the HBO series Chernobyl. And it looks only more so as we learn more.

LEADERSHIP TROUBLES

I would normally be turned off by a story about Dr Anthony Fauci, except that his actions during the pandemic as well as his dealings with the public and press so closely matches his analog here in British Columbia. That frames this whole thing as far less idiosyncratic and far more cultural and systemic.

Sure, many were happy to grant that there was a certain amount of universal ignorance at the start of the pandemic (which turns out to have never really been the case [see above]). Too, most seemed happy to accept that there could very well be reasons for authorities to deliver noble lies to the public, said to help prevent panic, reduce harms, combat the shortage of essential equipment, or to buy time, which to me is totally indefensible, both disregarding history and psychology (elite panic is real and really gets people killed) while also being unethical.

Along with that, here in British Columbia, just as in the US, the public, press, and major institutions were all inordinately keen to celebrate our top public health and medical “experts” [sic] for doing their astonishingly well-compensated jobs — and, it became clear, even more eager to do so after they demonstrated they were continually failing to do their job, which would be plenty bad, and also endlessly going on record proving they lacked basic knowledge of their own area of expertise while contradicting themselves with almost every new public appearance. As these newly released emails and journal entries of Dr Fauci's now show beyond question, while failing to make sense even to laypersons, the most trusted and critical voices were too often just lying through their teeth and making stuff up. I wonder how the pandemic response would look if we had the same insights into our provincial authorities?

https://youtu.be/-CefaYs_pFs?si=aLVWQ3bSQy5ViPo-

Well, what do we know? It was certainly curious to watch Dr Bonnie Henry, like Dr Fauci, preoccupied with things other than the job at hand. Dr Henry was writing books, revising previous publications, and authoring scientific papers, for instance. None of that is inherently problematic, of course, except that what was offered there often conflicted with her actual history and actions, her current messaging and public health recommendations and requirements, and even the established science. I mean, her book about tackling Ebola in Uganda, polio in Pakistan, SARS in Toronto, and then the COVID-19 pandemic is even titled Soap and Water & Common Sense and strongly recommends hand washing as a key preventive measure against airborne, respiratory coronaviruses such as SARS, MERS, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the pandemic. Yes, despite more than a decade of contrary research in her stated areas of focus.

To be clear, 15 years prior to the pandemic the literature on SARS told us “Airborne spread of the virus appears to explain this large community outbreak of SARS, and future efforts at prevention and control must take into consideration the potential for airborne spread of this virus.” And not only was there no reason to suspect transmission was different with SARS-CoV-2 but by February of 2020, prior to the declaration of a pandemic, all reports and publications out of China were warning that: person-to-person transmission was efficient; people with no connection Wuhan, to markets or to hospitals were getting infected; that superspreader events had already led to major outbreaks; and that “transmission of 2019-nCoV probably occurs through spreading airborne and contact.” Of course they were also highlighting the necessity of “airborne precautions, such as a fit-tested N95 respirator, and other personal protective equipment...” There wasn't other information. By March 17th of 2020, the day a public health emergency was declared in BC, lab experiments had already been conducted and published and more real-world anecdote from China told us that air quality and quality masks were essential. But because none of that was being relayed to the public, by the time of the second wave, in July of 2020, still just the opening months of the pandemic, experts from 32 countries were formally warning the public that the “6 feet” distancing recommendation being pushed by public health officials was nonsense.

And if you recall or go looking, you’ll find all this transpired while Dr Henry, like Dr Fauci, was receiving countless accolades of every form from everyone capable of dispensing them. Her name, likeness, and words were celebrated on countless t-shirts, mugs, jewelry, a limited edition shoe, and other merchandise from every major and minor brand (almost anyone who could press them out). As if that wasn't enough, folks threw up online fan clubs, wrote songs, and even painted murals of her, sometimes several, in cities all over the province. Just to top it all off, in addition to all that she was on the receiving end of honorary doctorates from nearly every education institution in the province as well as a continual stream of major awards and recognitions from all across the country and even getting a profile in the New York Times. For what? As far as I can tell, for showing up to work.

The adulation may have made sense to some. Why not cheer on an embattled public servant? But most of these formal recognitions — awards from the Board of Trade, Public Relations Society and women’s groups to the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and on — were either seriously premature, arriving at the start of the pandemic, and/or strongly conflicted with her actual performance. (Not unlike Obama receiving a pre-emptive Nobel Peace Prize and then turning around and dropping 26,000 bombs on seven countries just in his first year in office, and all without approval from congress, while also taking out US citizens in drone strikes...) If you don’t know, British Columbia became an international laughingstock on several occasions, for the province’s poor data collection, poor policies, and poor performance. Henry was specifically called out by experts around the world for continually failing to comprehend or explain airborne transmission or how and why certain masks work (and regularly changing her mind on these despite decades of experience with SARS, flu, and the like); for not understanding or being able to explain what the vaccines she was mandating were capable of or their public health consequences; for telling the public that schools were not a key site of infection and transmission while privately knowing they were a major source of spread and all as she failed to adequately do her part in mitigating infection there. She was even found publishing academic papers about this specifically, acknowledging the threat posed by the school setting and children as the most infected population and a key community transmission vector while telling the public the exact opposite.

• What Dr Henry told the public: “The data shows us that we are not seeing schools being a place where transmission spreads widely.”

• What Dr Henry knew: Little testing or tracing in schools meant there was no data while insufficient mitigations meant infection was inevitable and abundant.

• What Dr Henry asked her colleagues: “We need to be able to give some data that supports what we keep saying transmission in schools is low.”

• What Dr Henry wrote in her paper: Levels of infection in schools are nearly 100X what was being claimed, that 70-80% of kids had been infected while only 40% of those over age 60. In this way, the pandemic was being sustained and spread by asymptomatic and little-effected children.

Things were so upside down and backwards that Dr Henry and the BC CDC were allowing 50 people to sit on a bus for three hours (without any shots) or go for dinner in a restaurant (so long as they had one shot) but prohibiting a lone individual (with any number of shots or masks or distancing) from drinking a latte outside a cafe or going to the beach. And, of course, the police go in the habit of not just handing out fines for people who were out in the sun and open air but even tasing, cuffing, and dragging them away. The situation was so stupid that, while being prevented from going to a park or patio, public health was telling the people they should find creative ways to have intimate time while still avoiding face-to-face contact — by, of all things, they recommended the use of glory holes.

And yet most folks continued cheering these people on and still claim, without evidence, that they obviously did their best under difficult circumstances. Even after three years of transparent nonsense, with mountains of textual and video evidence of pure incompetence and disinformation delivery, I was pilloried online by friends and strangers alike for wondering why this person still had a job and, if firing her was not possible, why there was no ability to hold her (or anyone else) to account for such regular and flagrant foul play. It wasn't enough, apparently, that we rendered all vaccine developers immune while gifting them with taxpayer dollars whatever profits the wished, even those who'd never once brought a product to market, but those issuing mandates and reorganizing all of society (lying while deranging and devastating lives) also needed lifetime immunity as well... apparently. In fact, as I spelled out previously, we are so allergic to all this we won't even allow anyone to discuss what, if any, lessons were learned.

Weirder still, in hindsight, given all the counterevidence, all of the adoration and recognitions could not have been due to the Public Health Officer's success at helping steer us through this wacky time. It was just not possible as these rewards and celebrations arrived at the start and we, particularly those in hospital and in long-term care, simply did not do very well. Instead, all of the adulation looks to have arrived because the province’s top public health expert was brought to tears before the cameras around the outset of the pandemic when the severity of the harms being delivered to the public — due to our lack of needed tools and materials, widespread understaffing and ill-preparedness, and a shocking absence of expertise — became apparent to all. In this way, COVID-19 would perfectly mirror SARS 2003 except, this time, not isolated to just one city. So, it begs asking, how is it possible that all this so closely mirrors the situation at the federal level in the US?

A DOCTOR’S DIARIES

Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s leading expert on infectious disease (and key scientific adviser to no less than seven presidents), was the face of and in many ways leading America’s COVID-19 response — where a truly astonishing number of people died. Just like Dr Henry in BC, despite being brought in for many formal government hearings and regularly landing on every news program as well as every daytime and late night show in America throughout the pandemic (sometimes every network all on the same day), the nation’s top doctor and science communicator managed to leave the public with many questions about nearly everything pandemic related. And none of the confusions or misleadings were peripheral or surrounded unanswered philosophical debates within medicine but pertained to nearly all key fundamentals of everything everyone experienced, such as:

• What gain-of-function research is and the ethics and scientific justification for it; when, how, and where this work is done, as well as America’s role in enabling gain-of-function research around the world

• The origin of the pandemic virus (or merely its plausible origins and the precursory events leading to it and its spread)

• The infectiousness and lethality of the virus

• The efficacy of mitigations such as isolation, distancing, and barriers to different types of masks and air purifiers

• The value of prior infection and of COVID vaccines and boosters

• The scientific rationale for everything from closing beaches, parks, and playgrounds to shuttering places of worship, schools, eateries, and businesses to preventing people from being able to be with their dying loved ones, and so much more…

As I see it, the confusion arrived and persisted, driving distrust, firstly because this one man, who was on just about every network and cited in effectively all publications, wasn't doing his job. Secondarily the press refused to do their job: holding his or any other decisionmaker's feet to the fire. But there’s also another key cause that relates to the systemic defanging of the press and sweeping restriction of free inquiry. As we now know, but only because of the Twitter files, throughout the pandemic government and intelligence community was intimately engaged in the wholesale suppression of not just individual voices but whole species of ideas and evidence related to this virus and its impacts, especially true information but even satire and jokes. They effectively cut off any possibility of open, public discussion online and did so broadly across the internet from the world’s only true haven for free expression. (Really, what could smell more like an admission of culpability? Too, would you be surprised to learn that Dr Fauci's own daughter was an engineer at Twitter, working on backend and technical development until Elon Musk bought the company?)

That's how we arrived at today. In his dogged pursuit of answers to the most obvious and basic questions, senator Rand Paul and his team discovered that Dr Fauci kept a personal journal on his government computer and, as such, that was able to be retrieved and made public. Fauci’s personal writings are not just strange. They don’t merely document his professional thoughts and dealings but reveal his incompetence (for instance, apparently he enjoyed going into classified briefings from the intelligence community only to emerge and spell everything out in an email on his hackable and FOIA-able work computer), his curious vanity (his clear obsession with his personal celebrity, getting media attention and the attention of the famous, as well as documenting every instance of praise and, most weirdly, spelling that out to himself, like a mother praising her toddler or something, and also documenting all of it not in his bedside diary but on his work computer), his astonishing sense of superiority and infallibility (according to his diary, the man is incapable of believing any criticism could be sincere and felt any dissenting opinion was a radical, far-right, anti-science view, even when arriving from subject matter experts), along with his seemingly inappropriate connections with those in the press and government (here and elsewhere we learned he was having literally daily phone calls and dinners with individual media personalities, all of whom spent the entire pandemic and since praising the man, just as they defend him now).

More than all that, these diary entries show, conclusively, that Dr Fauci lied about everything all along. What is revealed is not just terrible for his public and professional image, which must be devastating for such a vainglorious person, but has also justified the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee issuing a subpoena for him to return to answer questions — post-retirement and after his unprecedented and truly zany pardon (a blanket preemptive pardon for an entire decade of no-one-knows-what) delivered from a cognitively impaired president (who did not sign the pardon but electronically approved it through an unprecedented us of an auto-pen). Still, given that Dr Fauci quickly lawyered-up, despite the most sweeping presidential pardon rendering him immune from all actions taken in his role during the pandemic and going all the way back to 2014, I think most onlookers assume he will choose the non-incrimination route and say nothing beyond a prepared self-defence and reiteration of his total legal immunity.

Because everything related to the pandemic has become deeply and weirdly political, Fauci has many defenders, particularly in the popular media. I presume this is because they're all friends and, in the public eye, none can possibly look back with pride; so they reflexively defend the man hoping that doing so amounts to self-defence. But, let there be no doubt, it’s impossible to read the diary entries and come away feeling anything but that all of it is damning. It would be alarming to hear that someone could know what took place during the pandemic, or review even a few news reports, then read these emails and diary entries, and come away feeling like Fauci and his co-conspirators in elite institutions were well-intentioned and doing their best under difficult circumstances rather than have the strong sense that he and his friends engaged in a thoroughly spelled-out conspiracy to employ all their political, academic, institutional, and media influence to conceal and censor what they knew was the truth — and not for national security purposes or to save lives but really to cover their own asses and protect their undeserved prestige and power.

TWEAK AND LEAK

For instance, as early as January of 2020, two months prior to the declaration of a global pandemic, Fauci was writing in his diary that the scientific consensus was that the source of the pandemic virus was a lab leak, not associated with a spillover to humans from wild mammals caged in some Chinese market. On Jan 26th he wrote:

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.

At the same time he was learning from his colleagues in China that the situation was far worse than folks were being told, particularly that they assumed half of all transmission was asymptomatic. Further to the origin of the virus, on Jan 31st Fauci writes, talking about having conference calls with experts from the US and Australia:

The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary “jump” that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely. Jeremy was calling me for advice. I suggest that we get a larger group of qualified evolutionary biologists/virologists together under the auspices of a convening body and carefully look at this. We agreed to convene by phone the next day.

The most shocking though comes from the meeting the following day, on February 1st, where a dozen top experts in infectious disease, virology, and evolutionary biology from the US, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, and Australia join a conference call. Fauci writes in his journal that only two experts leaned toward a natural virus and spillover, while noting also that the pair have a personal and professional conflict of interest, and that “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible”. Even more, together they clearly spell out what took a long time for others to piece together. Fauci writes, point directly to the lab and the researcher doing this work, that lab manipulation and leak is especially likely “given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan [the same woman smuggling vials in 2018 and 2021] has been working for years in GOF on coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.” And in future diary entries Fauci refers to this gain-of-function work and the pandemic virus it would have produced as “a constructed virus.”

All of this is so important because in public Fauci and these same experts vehemently rejected all of the above, from the mere conceivability of a lab leak or gain-of-function giving us the virus to the kind of language used to describe any virus manipulated in the lab. Fauci even did so under oath while being questioned by government officials. Dr Fauci and these same expert voices went on to author and/or promote the proximal origin paper, which is really now looks to be the clearest of hoaxes meant to divert attention from the source lab in Wuhan and its US connections, that just so happen to trace right back to Fauci and friends. The proximal origin paper first emerged in public as a draft on a forum called Virological.com on February 16th, 2020, right after the above communications where effectively everyone agreed that lab manipulation and leak we totally in play. Their natural origin argument was under review for publication at Nature around that same time and finally accepted on March 6th. The paper, authored and signed off on by many of the same folks on the February 1st call and published just weeks later in the journal Nature Medicine. There they asserted “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” They claimed “the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone” and that the only plausible explanations for a COVID-19 origin were natural. Their weird cover-up, of course, arrived right at the start, prior to a pandemic being declared, prior to any real “lab leak conspiracy” emerging, and even before a lot of people were getting sick, certainly in North America, where the first deaths did not happen until late February and early March of 2020. It would love to hear how all of the above could be something other than a legitimate example of a true conspiracy to hide the truth.

Dr Fauci was on with the press almost daily saying the opposite of what he and most other experts privately believed. Was that because the virus was constructed by way of the very gain-of-function techniques used by the researchers at the labs he spent his whole career advocating for, building, and helping to fund and all despite the known risks? Why else?

Most bizarrely, Fauci goes on to write the same fiction in his diary as he offers publicly, continually stating throughout that neither he nor any of his colleagues, nor any sane person, ever considered lab manipulation or leak legitimate origins for the pandemic virus. Too, as if to convince himself, he goes on to keep a large collection of news and journal articles about various parties debunking “lab leak” theory and “the lies of the Trump people” who wrongly suggest there was any possibility the pandemic virus was tweaked in or leaked from a lab in China — the very place he earlier records in his own diary that they have been “working for years” to use “gain-of-function” techniques “on coronaviruses” to make them better able to infect humans.

Though the lie worked on most of us for a time, by summer of 2021 not even Jon Stewart (that notorious far-right Trump-supporting, science-denying, conspiracy loon) was believing it any longer, even if Steven Colbert will forever claim to believe and argue before the cameras that it far more probable a bat bit a pangolin who climbed into a turkey's cloaca who then sneezed on Dr Fauci's chili and gifted us this pandemic. What explains that?

“IT’S LIKE THE FLU”

We also learn that right at the outset, even prior to the declaration of a pandemic, Dr Fauci fully understood that the virus had a likely case fatality rate of between 0.1-0.3%. His emails and diary entries reveal he was having high-level conversations with other experts about the lethality of the virus, and that it approximated the common flu, that up to half those infected and transmitting the virus were asymptomatic, and that those harmed were overwhelmingly the elderly. As early as Feb 8, 2020 he writes in his work diary about confirming this with a prominent public health physician and former Director of the US CDC under Obama:

Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking that this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%.

At the same time, and even a much later, he was being brought on and quoted by everyone in the mainstream press suggesting the mortality was very high, ten times as high as he knew it was. The WHO and other authorities were commonly reporting 3.4% while the president was telling everyone his sources said it was "a fraction of 1%." Of course the press and pundit class chose not to look into it but instead decided to mock and spread fear, claiming that Trump was engaged in an outlandish game of misinformation that was getting people killed.

https://youtu.be/-s5DYknp9cc?si=KCZr7NoBPtIL5eb0

For scale, 2.0-3.4% would be on the order of scary stuff like Spanish Flu of 1918, Yellow fever, Lassa fever, a severe case of Dengue fever, or Variola minor (the serious but milder form of smallpox). And your favourite new sources continually cited Fauci saying things like:

• Feb 2 - “The mortality rate looks like 2% to 3% but could be much lower if many mild cases or infections with no symptoms are going undetected, Fauci said.”

• Feb 19 - “The mortality -- or the case fatality rate, as we refer to it, is approximately 2 to 2.3 percent.”

• Mar 4 - “‘If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about 2 percent,’ Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.”

• Mar 12 - “In testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill, [Dr Fauci] warned that the coronavirus mortality rate is 10 times as great as that of the flu…”

Fauci and his colleagues simply knew all along the risk was a tiny fraction of what he and others were offering and that the virus was far closer to being flu-like than what they were presenting. Still, the press and authorities continued to insist “it’s like the flu” was the refrain only of vaccine skeptics, flat earthers, and alien abduction victims. Worse still, everyone including Fauci was busy confusing the world by shifting between, mixing up, or just failing to define “mortality rate”, “fatality rate”, “case fatality rate” and “infection fatality rate” while neglecting to make it perfectly clear that those with severe cases or even who arrived in hospital were outliers and that effectively everyone was going to become infected, many of whom would have a very mild case or even never know they got it. It's up to you to figure out why he was lying and misleading people, because even at 86 years of age and with legal immunity I don't think he'll spell it out.

SHUTDOWN REBOUND

In just the same way as he lied and prevaricated about gain-of-function, lab leak, and the lethality of the virus, Fauci was also misleading the public about his actions, his influence, and the impact he had on the world. Batya Ungar-Sargon asked Dr Fauci on the air in 2022 whether he had any regrets about shutting down schools. Batya knew that on many occasions he had called for local and nationwide school closures as a key mechanism for impeding community transmission. As early as March of 2020, for instance, during a House Oversight Committee it was reported that Fauci stated: “The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings and multiple briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what is done when you close the schools is mitigation.” But what did Fauci tell Batya for the record? That he was neither responsible for nor had he ever recommended locking down anything.

His now-public diary shows the opposite. He wrote on March 9th 2020, right at the start, that the governor of New York calls to ask whether he should close Orthodox Jewish schools and the subways. Then governor Cuomo appears to act on Fauci's advice. The following week Fauci notes that he personally was able to convince the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio to close all the schools. He also writes that he recommended shutting down bars and restaurants and that the mayor would do so merely on his recommendation alone. Fauci also notes that he had the same influence on Gavin Newsom, governor of California, and that Newsom’s Chief of Staff told him that it was Fauci's television appearances that convinced him to shut everything down across the whole state. The most generous we can be to Dr Fauci is to admit that, on paper, in his job description, it was not his role to call the shots the way he very clearly was and that other individuals and agencies, technically, had the final say. It is totally transparent, however, that he knew he was the sole authority those ultimately pushing the button were looking to for direction and validation.

UP IS DOWN, DOWN IS UP

On July 8th, 2020, Fauci notes in his diary:

Tension building up with the press (especially CNN) stressing Trump versus Fauci.

Trump tweeting negative things about me. When asked about my comment of “false narrative”, he said I am wrong on a lot of things. He said that I said not to shut down China (this coming from Peter Navarro) (when I actually said to shut it down). He is also saying that I was against masks before I was for them. Someone is obviously feeding him this shit.

So, by his own words, what was Dr Fauci's position on masks? Released by an earlier FOIA request, a February 5, 2020 email to former HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell reads:

Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep[ing] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.

Then on March 8th, 2020, a month after he sent that email, Dr Fauci went on to CBS's “60 Minutes” and asserted, “Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks.” The host responds, “You're sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.” Dr Fauci replies “No, right now people should not- there's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better- and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is, and often there are unintended consequences: people will keep fiddling with the mask and keep touching their face...”

One month later, on April 3rd, Dr Fauci was on PBS NewsHour discussing the growing data on asymptomatic transmission (which he was being told directly from his colleagues in China for months, right from the start) and tepidly endorsed, along with distancing, folks using [useless] cloth face coverings. The US CDC and US Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams even put out a video on how to transform a t-shirt, hand towel, or bandana into a [useless] mask. While acknowledging that asymptomatic people can spread the virus and that so little as speaking can cause aerosolization and airborne transmission, he and everyone else was not promoting N95 masks or even surgical masks but basically holding a t-shirt in front of your face. That, to me, was not an endorsement of people wearing masks but a way to provide a false sense of security and buy time for ill-prepared institutions to acquire a supply of useful masks. He says as much six minutes into the interview. He also makes it clear that neither him nor the administration was requiring anyone to mask.

In June of 2020 he is interviewed under the title “Why Weren’t We Wearing Masks From the Beginning? Dr. Anthony Fauci Explains.” He reiterates that they lied early on because they had concerns about preserving N95s and surgical masks supplies for healthcare workers. Still, he explains, as before, that a simple cloth face covering “can work as well as a mask in many cases” and that the recommendation was now “unequivocally” to wear a mask in situations with active infection while maintaining distance. And from there he famously went on NBC TODAY to show people how to wear a pair of [useless] masks. So, yes, he was eventually recommending masks but he wasn't from the start and never really got around to promoting effective masks. In true Fauci fashion, it seems, he wasn't being honest and was even lying to himself.

So what about restricting travel from China and shutting the border? Right at the start of the year, on January 25th, 2020, the doctor wrote in his diary about his surprise at China's actions and confusion around “shutting down” the country.

President Xi Jinping essentially shutting down the entire country. Schools closing in Beijing.

Suspicion that the Chinese are telling us everything that is going on in China. Why are the Chinese reacting so dramatically by essentially shutting down the entire country?

The following day he notes:

The deputies and White House are pushing to close the borders for any traffic from China.

Bob [Redfield, the virologist who served as the Director of the US CDC] and I are against that. Anthony said that he heard that I was in favor of that. Will have 11:00 AM meeting tomorrow from SCIF with Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger regarding possibly closing borders from China entry.

On the 27th the diary reads:

Busy day – two meeting with White House via SCIF. First at 11:00 AM led by Deputy Director NSC Matt Pottinger who still wants to stop all incoming from China...

Second White House meeting via SCIF was on same subject with Mick Mulvaney Chairing and visit to meeting by VP Pence. Still discussing the pros and cons of shutting off China. I tried to squeeze in my opinion, but it was tough since I was remote. I briefed Azar beforehand by phone as to the down side (historically) in shutting out a country.

Two weeks later, on February 11th, he writes:

A PCC document that I just read is proposing that even in Phase IV (see below) we should continue INA 212 (f) travel restrictions.

[PHASE I - CURRENT POSTURE: Description: Foreign nationals who have been in China within 14 days prior to their actual or attempted entry into the United States are ineligible for admission under Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Departments and agencies may exercise certain exemptions.

PHASE IV - MITIGATION: Description: Travel restrictions put in place by active INA 212(f)

proclamations remain in place. Limit non-essential domestic travel, cancel public gatherings, social distancing, execute private sector and government continuity of operations.]

I disagree with this since travel restrictions are to delay the entry of disease into your country. Once you have sustained transmission in your country, it is a waste of resources to try to keep out travelers. I cannot be on the PCC call this AM (on a panel at the Aspen Institute in DC) and so I called Bob Redfield and asked him to respresent me and my reservations about this.

Seems very much like Dr Fauci was pretty opposed to border closures and keeping folks who had been in the hot-zone out of the US. By his own diary entries, right from the very start Fauci was one of the key voices in opposition. And his earliest recommendations, as you can see, were contrary to his later explanations. Keeping folks who had been in China out of the US in January and February of 2020, obviously, would have slowed the spread of the disease. Instead, doubtless on Fauci's recommendations, they kept the border open. And in case you think the number of entrants were minimal, in January alone there were 1,300 direct passenger flights from China and at least 381,000 people (many thousands of whom came directly from Wuhan prior to screening and travel restrictions.) In this way it looks like officials literally seeded the virus rather than even attempting to appear like they were mitigating it's disbursal.

MINI TRUMP

We also read throughout the diary-drop of the Manachean state of Dr Fauci’s mind. He, and seemingly many of his colleagues, simply cannot accept any disagreement. No other ideas are even entertained (here in his personal diary to himself), never mind seen as valid. More than that he is the arbiter of good and evil, right and wrong. Aside from Fauci's public declaration that questioning him is questioning science itself, Fauci continually reminds Fauci that he is infallible, and then emails that to Fauci. Other perspectives can only be forwarded by deranged lunatics — even if those people are: Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist; Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, leading biostatistician and professor of medicine; Stanford researcher and professor of health policy, Jay Bhattacharya; the Harvard/MIT molecular biologist, cell engineer, and investigator of COVID-19 origins, Alina Chan; or White House advisor Peter Navarro. He refers to these folks as buffoonish stooges. And, similarly, Fauci makes clear that he cannot accept at any point that he made mistakes, even when those were almost inevitable and unlikely to have been avoided by anyone.

When he isn’t disparaging everyone who thinks differently from him or spelling out the fraud he is busily engaged in, Dr Fauci also uses this diary, this public historical record on his work computer (presumably during business hours), to reflect on how cool he is, how everyone loves him, and how he has become a local and international celebrity and superhero. He appears to collect every instance in which someone has offered him praise. He spells out seemingly every instance in which he is stopped and asked for a selfie, even when it appears he and others are doing so in contravention of the gathering restrictions he pushed.

To be clear, Fauci’s almost impossible, Trump-level self-regard is not a side story to this but appears to be the whole story. Is there any doubt that it is only with this a mindset that such a person can believe they have magical superpowers and that they can and should orchestrate things just as Fauci did? And isn't that exactly what it takes to think that all of it was going to work and that he should be immune to any push-back or consequences when things, inevitably, don't go to plan? Isn't this the recipe for such endless deception and fulsome conspiracy?

Well, just to spell it out fully, this 80-year-old face of institutional science particularly loved to clip the latest examples of Fauci-themed memes or merchandise along with puff pieces and petitions “to make Fauci People Magazine’s next ‘Sexiest Man Alive’” or where he’s been photoshopped as Captain America. He recounts Donald Trump telling his wife “that I was the smartest person in the world” and others that he is “the best persuader in the world.” He refers to himself, in writing in his own journal to himself, as “the most credible scientist in the world.” He saves articles referring to him as “one of the 100 most influential people in the world” and other places where he is called “the most powerful and dangerous bureaucrat in American history.” He notes in his own diary, and then emails that diary entry to himself, how “millions of people idolize me” and how “I am now probably one of the most recognizable faces in the world.” He reports, about himself to himself:

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world.

Later, when Trump comes down with COVID, Fauci notes that he put in a call with the president’s physician, he says “for the simple reason then when I go out on TV and I'm asked whether or not I have been consulted with it would be rather embarrassing to say that they did not call the so-called most famous infectious diseases expert in the world…”

However you feel about all of this, I would be shocked to learn you don’t find it outlandish that he was preserving all this, doing so on his work computer, or even spending any amount of his own time doing so during a global pandemic. He could have at least paid an intern to do it for him. Well, he may have done just that.

Sadly, we also learn from more than a hundred emails on the topic that in the middle of the pandemic America’s highest-paid federal official, Dr Fauci, was busy trying to win himself awards on top of all the recognition. He deployed everyone from the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health to his personal staff, a total of eight federal employees (in the depth of the pandemic), as well as his friends and colleagues, to pen and submit award nominations for him. That was when he wasn’t writing his own nominations and having these same folks and other prominent scientists submit his work under their own names. And, of course, they expected him to reciprocate. That we know of, Fauci collected over a million dollars in prize money in 2020 and 2021. Worse, he and his staff had to, somehow, persuade the folks in government ethics to permit Fauci to receive this seven-figure sum from all his awards because, of course, it's illegal. Federal law prohibits the solicitation of cash awards or other personal benefits for federal employees. Though an award can be given, with prior written ethics approval, it must be independently established and granted; however:

A) A federal employee (or eight of them) cannot actively lobby, self-nominate, or solicit a cash-backed award as this extensive electronic paper trail shows occurred, and

B) The absolute maximum cash award an internal agency can approve is typically $25,000, meaning that the kind of money Dr Fauci and his team were soliciting would have triggered the highest level of federal screening requiring special clearance from the federal Office of Personnel Management and then also final approval from the President of the United States.

Wow. Just wow. Apparently America’s endless love affair with him and his nearly half a million dollar salary was just not enough. He also won many other non-monetary awards and recognitions, including honorary degrees from around the US and even Canada and Italy, too. It just boggles the mind.

There's a lot more in the more than a thousand pages of documents provided to the public. But I think this spells out how corrupt and incompetent this man was, this elite immunologist and physician with 38 years of experience. The unrelenting trust in and celebration of this guy never made and sense to me and the defence of him even now is still less understandable.

~ ~ ~

What is the cost of lies?

It's not that will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth, and content ourselves instead with stories. In these stories it doesn't matter who the heroes are, all we want to know is who is to blame...

https://youtu.be/fa8hP6DEcD4?si=XbqF4Df-I882EH1d