See You Later, Anthony Fauci
Fauci may have resigned from his positions in the federal government, but that doesn’t mean he’s leaving his power, money, fame, or influence behind.
In August of 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he would be stepping down from his position as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) as well as his role as President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor by the end of December 2022. His resignation from those positions brings an end to his long and eventful career in the federal government, but Fauci assured us that, although he has chosen to resign, he will continue wielding his influence over public health.
“While I am moving on from my current positions, I am not retiring,” reads Fauci’s statement. He goes on:
After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field. I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats.
Regardless of how you feel about Anthony Fauci, it’s undeniable that his half-century as a public health bureaucrat gave him quite a level of influence over federal policies and regulations, especially during the last few years. Covid-19 wasn’t the first or only “infectious disease threat” that Fauci oversaw, but the mitigation policies that he voiced support for in response to Covid-19 have permanently altered our society and he deserves to be held accountable for the part he played. The fact that Fauci will receive a hefty taxpayer-funded pension and likely continue a lucrative career in the private sector after being such a prominent figure of the Covid Regime is, in my opinion, infuriating.
Fauci essentially became the face of the federal government’s response to Covid-19 over the last few years, largely because of his constant public interviews and appearances on corporate media, which naturally led many U.S. citizens to blame him specifically for the devastation that the lockdowns and other mitigation policies caused. While the blame doesn’t necessarily fall entirely on Fauci’s shoulders, as there were many other politicians and bureaucrats between Fauci’s advice and those policies actually being enacted, he did support those policies from a very powerful and influential position, and therefore, he should carry some of the blame.
In my opinion, Anthony Fauci comes off as narcissistic and conceited; so much so that I’ve called him “the Left’s Donald Trump” for years at this point (referring to establishment American liberals, not actual leftists). His routine public appearances provided plenty of evidence to support my suspicions on their own, but it wasn’t just simply his apparent need to always be on camera. It was also what he said during those appearances that really helped make my case. For the sake of time, I’ll provide just a couple of examples, but there are undoubtedly more.
The first and arguably best example of the type of behavior I’m talking about occurred back in 2021 during an interview Fauci did on MSNBC in which he infamously said that anyone who criticizes him is essentially criticizing science itself.
“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” Fauci said without even a hint of irony. “Because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science.” That statement — aside from being incredibly arrogant — is wholly inaccurate, as there were many times that Fauci contradicted not only “the science” but also his own previous statements.
The second example was more recently when Fauci was interviewed by Dr. Larry Corey at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center last August. During that interview, Fauci stated that “People go to medical school now, people are interested in science, not because of me … It's what I symbolize.” He went on to say that what he symbolizes “in an era of the normalization of untruths, and lies, and and all the things you're seeing going on in society from January 6 to everything else that goes on, people are craving for consistency for integrity, for truth and for people caring about people.” [Emphasis added]
It would be a fair point to say that Fauci having some personality traits that I find to be disagreeable had nothing to do with his work as the director of the NIAID and as a leading medical advisor for both Trump and Biden, if not for the fact that his arrogance did in fact affect his job. Namely, as I’ll further elaborate, it caused him to lie to Congress and to the American public, and he has also refused to acknowledge his many mistakes. Most recently, it likely led to his current denial of the level of involvement he had in the enactment of harsh mitigation measures (not to mention his potential involvement in the possible creation of Covid-19 itself).
The sort of behavior that Fauci exhibits, as well as his sycophants’ undying devotion to him — especially during the height of Covid — is what led me to refer to Fauci as “the Left’s Donald Trump” because it’s so similar to the way Donald Trump behaves and how he is still viewed by the MAGA faithful.
Not only did Fauci incessantly spend much of the last three years stroking his ego in the public eye, but he was also the highest-paid government employee while doing so. He received a larger annual salary than even the President, and his household’s net worth has skyrocketed since the onset of the pandemic. You could argue that Fauci played an important role in the government’s response and deserved to be fairly compensated for it (however, that argument would have to ignore all the horrible effects caused by that response), but even if that were the case, it still seems odd that Fauci was paid more than literally any other federal employee. While his increase in net worth wasn’t solely due to his taxpayer-funded paycheck, it’s still worth mentioning, as it sure seems like he financially benefitted from Covid-19’s existence.
Oddly enough, Fauci’s role in the saga of the Covid-19 pandemic might have started before the pandemic even began. According to statements made on The Joe Rogan Experience by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who has been an outspoken proponent of the lab leak theory on the origin of Covid-19, Fauci was one of the main people “who pushed to turn it [gain-of-function research] back on after Obama turned it off” and he did so “without really consulting the White House” during the Trump administration.
Whether Fauci was solely responsible for restarting gain-of-function research or not — which involves manipulating existing viruses and often making them more infectious to humans — he supported the idea and played a central role in funding it. The pause that was put on the funding for that research under former President Barack Obama was lifted in 2017, only a few years after it was put into place. During that pause, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the NIAID — the agency that was headed by Fauci until very recently — signed off on grants to a research company called EcoHealth Alliance. Those grants have continued to this day, the most recent of which was approved just a few months ago.
EcoHealth Alliance then used those grants for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in Wuhan, China, a facility that just so happens to be at the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic and is full of safety hazards, according to an investigative report by ProPublica and Vanity Fair. Fauci went on to lie to Congress about that fact during a Senate committee hearing in 2021, which has led to many people, ranging from Elon Musk to Republican politicians, calling for his prosecution.
To be fair, there’s no conclusive proof that the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that was conducted at WIV in Wuhan, China, by EcoHealth Alliance with our tax dollars caused the Covid-19 pandemic; but what’s that old saying about when something quacks like a duck?
How Covid-19 came to exist is still unknown, but even if it turned out to be of zoonotic origin, that wouldn’t negate the potential risks that gain-of-function research poses. Considering those risks, maybe the public should have more of a say in deciding if our taxes fund that research, rather than leaving it in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats.
Regardless of how Covid-19 came to be, Anthony Fauci became a leading figure in crafting and implementing the federal government’s response to it, including lockdowns, mandates, and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like social distancing, which was largely modeled after the Chinese government’s harsh “Zero-Covid” approach.
Although Fauci has somewhat tried to distance himself from some of those policies recently, the fact remains that he was an avid proponent of all of them throughout most of the last three years. During an interview he did on The Hill’s Rising just last summer, Fauci even said that if he could do it again, he would advocate for having “much, much more stringent restrictions” than what we had.
During the course of the pandemic, Fauci contradicted himself several times. One of Fauci’s most notorious contradictions happened very early on in the pandemic when he told the American public not to wear masks. As I wrote last March:
Throughout the pandemic, public health officials continually struggled to gather accurate information and competently relay it to the public, sometimes even intentionally lying out of some warped sense of nobility. A good example of that would be when Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious disease expert to the White House for both the Trump and Biden administrations, told the public not to wear masks just to go back on that statement not long after. His excuse was that he was worried people would hoard as many masks as they could, causing them to be unavailable for healthcare workers who needed them more. Considering how people panic-bought toilet paper and bottled water in the early months of the pandemic, that logic checks out, but it’s not Fauci’s job to decide when it’s appropriate to be honest with the American public, it’s his job to interpret the science and give us the most accurate information at hand.
Personally, it always seemed like common sense that higher quality masks like N95s would offer better protection than cloth and surgical masks, and today that concept is generally agreed upon. However, Fauci argued in favor of universal masking even after there was plenty of evidence to back up the argument that forcing healthy people to wear ineffective masks was always hygiene theater. And what adds to the irony of his “noble lie” is leaked emails have revealed that Fauci recognized that “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus,” yet he advocated for mask mandates anyway.
When he wasn’t outright lying to the American public, Fauci was instead trying to find ways to manipulate how the public perceived the pandemic. In either case, he engaged in spreading misinformation, a buzzword the establishment loves to throw at its political enemies but never wants to acknowledge when it happens within its own ranks.
One of the ways in which Fauci tried to manipulate public perception was by suppressing the lab leak theory and promoting the natural origin theory instead, even though neither hypothesis has been proven and Fauci was definitely aware of the possibility that Covid-19 may have come out of a lab. In the leaked emails that revealed this information, then-head of the NIH, Francis Collins, called the idea that this virus was man-made a “conspiracy theory”.
In another instance, one which also involved Collins, Fauci attempted to discredit the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document authored by credentialed epidemiologists that advocated for a more targeted response rather than sweeping lockdowns and mandates. Fauci and Collins discussed needing a “quick and devastating takedown” of the document and its authors, and they referred to them as “fringe epidemiologists”.
Another way that Fauci may have manipulated how the public viewed Covid-19 might have been by influencing Big Tech companies. The Twitter Files — internal documents from Twitter that the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, has released to a handful of journalists — have shown a worrying amount of government involvement in Twitter’s content moderation, including when it came to Covid-19. Even before the Twitter Files were reported, however, there was already plenty of evidence of collusion between Big Tech and the federal government.
Recently, Musk has hinted at the release of the Fauci Files, which implies that there is evidence of Fauci himself influencing the social media platform. It has also recently come to light that Fauci’s daughter worked for Twitter during the pandemic, which may have given Fauci a direct route to manipulating the sort of content that got censored from Twitter. At the time of this writing, the Fauci Files have not yet been released.
Over the last few years, Fauci was confronted by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) during Senate committee hearings several times, and nearly if not all of them escalated into somewhat heated arguments. We should all be grateful for Paul’s willingness to question Fauci at a time when it was very politically damaging to do so, not only because it was a rare moment of sanity from someone in Washington throughout the pandemic, but also because the clashes between Paul and Fauci helped to shine a light on the inherent flaws of the government’s response to Covid-19.
Those clashes involved topics such as school closures, masking, and whether or not the federal government was funding gain-of-function research, as well as Covid vaccine-related topics like whether or not children need to be vaccinated against the virus and the question of when federal employees receive royalties from the drug companies they’re supposed to oversee, how much those royalties are and which drug companies they are from; a question which Fauci refused to completely answer.
Each time one of these debates took place, much of the corporate media attempted to portray it as though Paul, who is a doctor himself, lost those arguments, but the positions Paul took were eventually shown to be correct each time. That saga was a great example of how the pro-lockdown political and media class viewed Fauci as though he could do no wrong.
There are definitely more examples I could go over when it comes to Fauci’s role in the federal government’s response to Covid, his attitude about the policies that accompanied that response both then and now, and how damaging those policies were to our society, but I feel I’ve provided enough information already to paint a pretty vivid picture. There’s also undoubtedly more I could say about the decades he spent as a federal bureaucrat long before Covid-19 existed, but as there was so much to talk about just out of the last few years, I chose to make Fauci’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic the main focus of this article.
With that being said, however, I would be remiss if I failed to mention a scandal Fauci was wrapped up in that came to be known as Beaglegate, which was revealed during the pandemic but had nothing to do with Covid-19. The story was brought to light by a group called The White Coat Waste Project, and it showed that the NIAID — again, the agency that was headed by Anthony Fauci until just last month — conducted cruel and inhumane experiments on dogs, typically beagles, in order to test various drugs. In some of those cases, the drugs being tested had already been sufficiently tested on animals, which means the experiments conducted by NIAID were entirely unnecessary.
Similar experiments that were in the works when that story broke have since been canceled, but had Beaglegate not been brought to the public’s attention, our tax dollars would most likely be funding similar research at this very moment.
Clearly, Anthony Fauci, during his long career as a bureaucrat in the federal government, wielded a massive amount of influence over public health policy. Whether or not you view Fauci positively or negatively is more or less irrelevant at this point, as there is more than enough evidence to show that lockdowns, mandates, and other oppressive mitigation measures were harmful and ineffective, and Fauci did in fact have a hand in the enactment of those policies.
As independent journalist Kim Iversen pointed out back when Fauci first announced his resignation: rather than being held accountable for his lies to Congress and the American people, and his mistakes which affected us all, Fauci will most likely continue to be revered and respected by the establishment. Instead of facing any sort of accountability, Fauci will probably go on to write books, give speeches, and sit on the board of some sort of pharmaceutical company or think tank, all while receiving a taxpayer-funded pension.
Basically, Fauci may have resigned from his positions in the federal government, but that doesn’t mean he’s leaving his power, money, fame, or influence behind. He’ll likely go on to play a role in public health policy for years to come. On one hand, it’ll be a relief to know that Fauci won’t be advocating for draconian policies from his perch in the federal government, but on the other, the idea of him still wielding influence from a less public but just as powerful position is a cause for concern.
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As I always say, you only last that long in a high-level government position if you have the ethics of J. Edgar Hoover