it's administrative segregation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50025327)

https://x.com/HansMahncke/status/2081148704279474638

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50025261)

He starts every diary entry documenting the COVID death tool. Which is exactly what you'd expect from someone in his position.

His reaction to becoming a national figure as an 80 year old man who spent his life out of the spotlight is also completely human. In fact, if he reacted differently I'd think he was feigning humility to look better if these were published, which is far more vain than this.

Fauci sucks and did come to value his celebrity too much. But most importantly he downplayed and often straight up lied about all sorts of shit. It's a shame that so often in this polarized, clickbait climate people embellish shit and wind up ginning up sympathy and people defending people that deserve criticism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030667)

WHAT?

are u like 20 or something jfc

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030676)

this jew lives on attention and has his entire career

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030695)

Not true by any stretch of the imagination

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030740)

You just reacted to my comment because you misinterpreted it as "Fauci is humble!" but now that you see I explictly disclaimed that you're too stubborn to cop to an RC error so you're prepared to die on the hill that Fauci was an attention whore before despite no one knowing who tf he was. Why would they?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030750)

Anyone who isn't 20 knows about this yid

Way more than just his aids stint too

Also lol if u think I'm reading ur word vomit

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030796)

No one knew about him pre-covid. You didn't. Every director gives press conferences from time to time. I've been reported on. That doesn't make me a national celebrity.

We're talking about his reaction to becoming a celebrity, which he was not before. Easily provable with a Google trends search. But because you're a stubborn fag you'll reply forever while evading any real responsiveness, so I'll cut it off now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030816)

Someone in his position should have a team not only actively tracking and segmenting the numbers in real time, but also vetting the underlying assumptions and possible biases that exist in the raw data rather than manually writing them down in a diary like a 15 year old girl tracking how many handjobs she's given. also it's weird as fuck for a grown man to do this shit in general.

you wouldn't understand this because you suck at data analysis

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50031703)

i know that MSM still have a vested interest in protecting the Fauci-led side, but history will be savage about Fauci.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50025338)

he's the individual who has been singularly responsible for the most evil in the 21st century

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50025353)

https://x.com/tomselliott/status/2081411477131375059/photo/1

it's an image so i can't quote his diary entry. but he takes credit for shutting down NY and CA.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50026602)

https://x.com/0rf/status/2081531339845894640/video/1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50026625)

https://x.com/tomselliott/status/2081488566706692393

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030638)

Fauci deserves a shit ton of criticism, but if Dems engage in that in the hopes the response to future problems are different than they'll get blasted by their comrades and those clips will be used against them. Same reason Trump never apologizes or acknowledges criticism. Meanwhile, Fauci probably well-intentioned, did more good then harm, and deserves some grace for being the main guy in a global pandemic. Yet the right wants to crucify him, despite the fact he's an 85 year old man and out of power. There's no reason to go after him personally except thet it gets Rand Paul and others attention.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030690)

I think that effort would be better spent on analyzing what went wrong so we can react better in the future. Instead, this is just fodder for a political circus. Sound and fury accomplishing nothing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030724)

what went wrong: Fauci

analyzing what went wrong = analyzing Fauci

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030735)

Focusing on crucifing the most prominent guy responsible for all COVID missteps is tantamount giving all the true causes a free pass. You're more concerned that someone faces consequences to sate your *righteous indignation than making sure it doesn't happen again.

*I mean sincerely righteous, not implying your outrage is misguided

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030765)

the obsession with Fauci is just retard-pandering reductivism

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50031632)

If Fauci is orchestrated all of that he's a genius supervillian, who apparently made the fatal misstep of documenting everything in some gay ass diary for broccoli hair Rand Paul to tweet about.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50031662)

He did the opposite until it was too late

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50034499)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50030773)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/black-trans-protests-rally-america

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50031577)

May seem like I'm a Faucu apologist from this thread so let me be clear: he is an evil demon. But, guilty or innocent, anyone summoned to a senate inquiry is right to lisp about slander and invoke the 5th.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50031616)

https://www.wsj.com/video/series/opinion-docs/wsj-opinion-the-lockdown-dissidents/179C024E-10D0-4428-AF47-2941CDB5CC83

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50034434)

but the odds that on occasion Barry led some people to believe he was foreign born are like 98%.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50034959)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50035095)

====

Opinion

Anthony Fauci Unmasks Himself

His diaries make clear that he saw the pandemic less as a historic emergency than a media opportunity.

By

Peggy Noonan

July 30, 2026 6:05 pm ET

It wasn’t good for Anthony Fauci or anybody else that he took the Fifth at his Senate hearing this week. That plus his diary may well have been a reputation-destroying event.

It was obviously his right as a citizen to invoke the protections of the Constitution, and he surely had his reasons, but everyone who takes the Fifth knows what it looks like: It’s the early ’60s, we’re at congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.

Dr. Fauci is the man who ran the pandemic response in America. He was the face of it. When you have been appointed, in effect, to lead a nation through a disaster you owe that nation a full and frequent accounting. To seem to dodge is unbecoming. He has already been given a sweeping presidential pardon by Joe Biden; in the time after and not covered by that pardon, he owes it to the public to speak truthfully.

It would have been good to hear Dr. Fauci, now 85, distill what the entire pandemic experience was and what it did to us as a society, what could have been done to make its management better, what decisions in retrospect made it worse. Looking back, did he or others, in their newfound ascendancy, get carried away? On reflection, is there any justice to the charge they became power-drunk?

Dr. Fauci’s pandemic diary, released this week, was also damaging. When I heard of its existence, I thought: Good. What history most needs is first-person testimony, the more the better, in real time—if possible.

I thought of Samuel Pepys, a senior government administrator for the British navy in his late 20s and 30s, whose diary gave history the finest first-person reporting on two different cataclysms that hit London, the Great Fire of 1666 and the Great Plague the year before.

Pepys watched the Great Fire from the Tower of London, near where he lived, and came to grasp, with shock, the size and scale of it. In a famous passage on Sept. 2, 1666, he described seeing “poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.”

Pepys recorded all the chaos around him. His writing was jagged and real-time. He reported what he’d seen to King Charles II.

He was also an eyewitness to the Great Plague of 1665, which took an estimated 100,000 lives, about a fourth of London’s population, in 18 months. He records empty streets and carts collecting the dead. On June 7, 1665, Pepys passes the homes of the quarantined: “This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.” He was pained and frightened: He’d never seen such a thing.

With this frame, alas, I read the first five months of Dr. Fauci’s pandemic diary.

As has been reported, it isn’t about witnessing or capturing the size and scale of a crisis, or feeling shock or anxiety. It is about other things.

On Jan. 6, 2020, he goes to a “Super A list” party. At a meeting later that month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugs and kisses him and tells everyone “how great I am.” At another, President Trump tells Dr. Fauci, “Lou Dobbs . . . told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.” Dr. Fauci was “very pleased,” others “stunned and impressed.”

Jan. 30: “All my friends kept saying I was a national hero” and that they “ ‘felt safe in my arms.’ ”

March 8: “Nice profiles of me in Politico and NY Times today.”

March 15: “I did all 5 Sunday Shows today (my 3rd ‘Fauci 5’).” Apparently this is his version of “the full Ginsburg,” named for Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg, when he did five Sunday shows in one morning.

March 26: “Donuts are being named after me; T shirts have my picture on them.”

April 7: “Press still hot and heavy about me.”

May 21: “POTUS seems to be enamored of me.”

That’s before he gets to the movie star sending him flowers.

In one sense, it screams Seven Deadly Sins—he gave in to his pride. But it also makes the history in which he took such a big part look banal and inhuman: Your historic emergency is his media opportunity.

A deeper criticism is that in the diary he doesn’t seem at all humbled by the role in which he’s been cast, or by his responsibilities. I saw no deep reflection on the sufferings of his countrymen. He doesn’t see the red crosses on the door. He attaches clippings of or links to fawning newspaper profiles and columns, but not to stories about what was happening in the civilian population of his country as it went through a crisis.

The sweep and detail of Pepys’s diary captures the spirit of his age, the Restoration; let’s hope the flatness and self-adulation of Anthony Fauci’s doesn’t capture ours.

I end with a thought that may sound extreme, but I think there’s some degree of truth in it.

Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.

It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.

The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50041561)

=====

Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid for Everything It's Worth

Anthony Fauci's personal diary reveals an obsession for soliciting awards, squelching dissent, & and circumventing independent agencies

Tom Elliott

Jul 26, 2026

On May 28, 2021, Anthony Fauci learned that the Department of Health and Human Services would refer EcoHealth Alliance — the New York nonprofit that had routed NIAID money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — to its inspector general. That night he wrote in his diary:

“I am certain that there will be some deficiencies that the IG will find as is always the case with IG audits. Certainly, whatever they find it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story.” (p. 753)

Our involvement in the outbreak. Followed closely by a plan to get out in front of it.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

That instinct — get ahead of it, control the story, decide what the public needs to believe and then saturate every channel with it — is the organizing principle of these documents. It shows up in the origins fight. It shows up in masks, transmissibility, and boosters. It shows up in how he handled the people who disagreed with him. And it shows up, most revealingly, in what he chose to write down.

What was released

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul’s committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci’s personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards — nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

Fauci does not date the composition of his entries, so we cannot always distinguish what was typed the same evening from what was assembled later. Page numbers refer to the released PDFs.

I. What they thought at the start

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid’s point person. He writes:

“White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests.”

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who’s the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield’s own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: “Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view.”

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding “very concerned,” with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

“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.”

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release — accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was “not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion,” he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn’t waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci’s own words:

“the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

Ten of 12 thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was "expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka."

II. What happened next

Three days later, four of the scientists from that call were circulating a draft arguing the opposite. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” appeared in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluding that the virus was not a laboratory construct. Andersen told the journal in his cover note that the paper had been prompted by Fauci and Francis Collins. Drafts went to both men before publication. Fauci’s reply to Andersen: “Nice job on the paper.”

Two months after Proximal Origin published — Fauci's institute approves an $8.9 million grant for Andersen.

On April 16, Collins wrote to Fauci asking whether NIH could help “put down this very destructive conspiracy.” The following day, Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House briefing room podium — the most watched platform on earth at that moment.

Three weeks after that, on May 4, 2020, he told National Geographic that the evidence was “very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” citing “a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists.”

The doubt referenced in his diary never reached the public.

And his account of that February call has never stopped changing.

A June 7, 2021 diary entry (p. 767), recounting the same meeting: "About half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence."

In a June 3, 2024 sworn opening statement to the House Select Subcommittee, Fauci said he joined a call with about a dozen international virologists, that the discussion was "lively, with arguments for both possibilities," and that after further examination several who had been concerned about lab manipulation became convinced the virus was not deliberately manipulated. So we’ve gone from one or two in support of zoonotic origin, to 50-50, to an apparent majority. The facts of the meeting never changed; Fauci just became increasingly bold with each recounting.

The June 2021 account of that meeting contains another problem: he says “a few weeks later” Andersen and colleagues re-examined the data and concluded natural origin. The draft was circulating on February 4 — three days after the call. The June 2021 entry shows how he’s trying to mould history into something different for posterity.

III. Intel community

On June 4, three CIA officers briefed Fauci in a secure compartmented information (SCIF) facility at NIH. He found the whole thing “extremely strange and unexpected,” and the lead briefer “almost pathetic in her naivety” (pp. 764–765). They showed him intercepted communications out of Wuhan as well as intel on the transfer of pangolin viruses from a Beijing group to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, believed to have been used in a transgenic mouse study. A source reported “unknown experiments” had been “conducted by the military in Wuhan.”

Fauci dismissed each item in turn. It would be “perfectly natural,” he wrote, for a laboratory that studies coronaviruses to work on pangolins. Then the questioning turned, and, in his telling, “almost made me believe she was grilling me” — at which point he asked, half in jest, whether he ought to have a lawyer present. He closed the entry: “There is something very fishy about all of this.”

This briefing, Fauci wrote, was “very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA.” He was not a stranger to the agency. He had been dismissing its work for some time.

Seven weeks later Fauci was in a different SCIF — in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — at a counter-briefing that Beth Cameron of the National Security Council had arranged, in his own words, “because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago” (pp. 804–805). Across the table sat Maher Bitar, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs — the official who sits between the intelligence community and White House policy.

Fauci used the meeting to grade the agencies. The FBI, which favored a laboratory origin, “has no idea what they’re talking about.” The NSA, which leaned the other way, was treated more kindly. He then explained to Bitar why natural emergence was “almost certain.”

And then he told the National Security Council whom to believe:

“I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others.”

Those are three of the four authors of Proximal Origin — the scientists he had convened 18 months earlier, who had told him on February 1 that deliberate insertion was possible, and who had published the opposite within the month. The intel community, Fauci insisted, should trust his experts, not their own analysts.

He judged the meeting a success. “I believe that they understood where I was coming from,” he wrote, “and it turned out to be a very good meeting.”

Six weeks after that, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its 90-day origins review, Fauci disposed of the dissent in a clause: the FBI’s lab-leak assessment was “based on no data at all” (p. 863).

In January 2025, the CIA publicly assessed that a research-related origin was more likely than a natural one — a low-confidence judgment, but a reversal. It was reached, as CBS reported, without new intelligence. The same body of evidence its officers had carried into that NIH conference room in June 2021, when the man they were briefing decided the problem was them.

IV. Habit becomes routine

Origins is where this pattern is most consequential, but it is not where it started or where it stopped. The diary shows the same strategy applied to every contested question of the pandemic: decide what the public needs to believe, then flood the zone.

Consider masks. Fauci’s public reversal in the spring of 2020 is well known, and he has explained it as a response to shortages and to emerging evidence on asymptomatic spread (p. 375). But watch what happens when the question comes back around in February 2021, when he begins pushing double-masking (p. 619):

“CDC starting to do practical things that I have actually been pushing for some time. For example: Wearing 2 masks could be better than just one. They did a dummy study and showed that a cloth mask over a surgical mask actually gives a more complete fit and keeps out aerosols.”

Note the order of operations: He had been pushing it “for some time,” the evidence arrives afterward, and the evidence is a mannequin. That is the entire evidentiary basis for double-masking in a 1,141-page diary kept by the government’s chief spokesman on the subject during the month he was urging 330 million people to adopt it. In another email he recommends masks because “people are wearing them anyway.”

We see every time Fauci is turned to for guidance, he makes bold proclamations without feeling burdened to verify any scientific basis. We also see it in the numbers.

Across 1,141 pages by the nation’s senior infectious disease official during the largest public health event in a century, here is how often certain terms appear.

Never once: “peer review.” “Meta-analysis.” “Risk-benefit.” “Learning loss.” “Mental health.”

Once: “N95.” “Seroprevalence.” “Cost-benefit.”

Twice: “Cloth mask.” “School closure.” “Natural immunity.”

Against which:

“Award” — 80

“Hero” — 49

“Instagram” — 36

“Bobblehead” — 23

“Selfie” — 19

Entries headed “PRESS:” — 641

The question of whether prior infection conferred meaningful protection — the question underpinning the vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs — is never worked through anywhere in these pages. It appears twice, both times as an attack to be repelled.

V. The flex

What the diary contains instead of evidentiary reasoning is an extraordinarily detailed record of influence.

March 15, 2020: Fauci records calling Bill de Blasio and convincing him to close New York City’s schools, then telling him he should close the bars and restaurants, too — de Blasio “said that he would base this on my recommendation.” He records a parallel call with Ann O’Leary, Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, who tells him that based on his television appearances, California will close its schools, bars, and restaurants. He records walking out of the White House to drivers honking their thanks. The next morning, federal guidelines emerge “that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy.”

Image

So here we have Fauci humble bragging about shutting down the largest city and state in the country, via leverage that was entirely a function of being the guy Gov. Newsom & Mayor de Blasio watched on TV.

His impact extended beyond the continental United States. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett requested a Zoom to secure Fauci’s “opinion and ultimate support” for Israel’s booster program, recorded it for his own Instagram, and asked for Fauci’s cell number so he could “intermittently call me for advice”; with State Department approval, Fauci gave it (p. 830). The presidents of Ecuador and Chile called. So did health ministers in Brazil, Gabon, Israel, and Quebec.

The MLB commissioner wanted guidance on spring training; the NHL players’ union wanted projections (p. 507). Bill Gates had a standing biweekly slot. Coach K, on a podcast, called him “the point guard for the world,” and Fauci wrote it down (p. 83).

Then there is the CDC, which he seemed to be furtively running through his cellphone.

May 13, 2021: Rochelle Walensky calls to say she is changing the mask guidance for vaccinated Americans. Fauci: “She will take my advice ... I’m very pleased that she listened to me.” Then the tell: “The radical right-wing maniacs who blamed me for the rigidity of the CDC recommendations will probably not realize at all that it was me that triggered this change” (p. 736).

September 2021: the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory committee votes 9–6 against the booster recommendation the White House wants. Fauci, the White House’s Jeff Zients, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Leslie Dach — a Democratic operative who founded the advocacy group Protect Our Care — work the phones. Fauci texts Walensky and, in his own words, “begged her to override” the vote. She calls back at 11:25 p.m.; he misses it; they speak at 5:40 a.m. His entry: “Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP.” He congratulates her on finally showing “clear leadership” (pp. 883–884, 887).

So, Zients had been calling him “multiple times per day asking me to continue to mentor Rochelle such that the CDC/ACIP does not veer too far off the FDA recommendations and our ultimate intent” (p. 880).

We can only guess what their “ultimate intent” is, but recall the context is loosening rules for those who’ve agreed to be vaccinated.

In January 2021, Zients called Fauci at dinner “asking for a favor” — a Politico reporter was preparing a story that Biden was unhappy with his Covid team, and Zients wanted Fauci to go on background and say otherwise. “I told Jeff that I would of course be happy to do this,” Fauci wrote (p. 580). The next day: “I convinced them that the Biden team is a good team.” In March, Zients wanted him “comfortable with” the CDC’s forthcoming guidance for vaccinated people; Fauci reviewed it, decided the agency had loaded it with qualifiers, and “edited their document some what.” Without a hint of irony, Fauci then adds: “Jeff was very sensitive in not having the White House interfere” (p. 642).

Image

Here we have three nominally independent agencies, a White House coordination office, and a party-aligned outside operative, converging by telephone on predetermined outcomes, with the advisory committee that voted the other way treated as an obstacle to be routed around. This is the structure that enabled them to steamroll actual, data-driven scientists.

VI. Threats to the structure

Real science requires dissent. But to Fauci, who once infamously likened himself to science itself, dissent was a danger to his entire enterprise.

Scott Atlas, the Stanford radiologist Trump brought onto the task force, generated an October 2020 email in which Fauci formally demanded his removal “from the Task Force and quite frankly from the White House itself” (p. 388). Days earlier, Fauci had recorded a meeting between Alex Azar and “Atlas and his 3 stooges” — Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (p. 390) — a week before those three published the Great Barrington Declaration. After a Good Morning America appearance that month, Fauci, trying to squelch these burgeoning critiques, congratulates himself: “I blew away the Great Barrington Declaration” (p. 406).

Tom Elliott

@tomselliott

Wow, @Alyssafarah -- formerly of the Trump Admin, currently of The View -- emailed Fauci in 2020 saying she's trying to get Dr. Scott Atlas fired: "He goes rogue and it’s wildly unhelpful. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this. I’ve advocated for his dismissal for months to no

6:15 PM · Jul 25, 2026 · 89.3K Views

71 Replies · 626 Reposts · 1.46K Likes

Richard Ebright, the Rutgers microbiologist who has been the most persistent scientific critic of NIAID’s gain-of-function portfolio, is “truly an asshole” (p. 834); then a man pushing lab-leak because he “wants to be somebody” (p. 888); then “this complete idiot” whom Fauci resolves to handle in his memoir “since he really is a horrible person” (p. 906). In the same passage he writes that he is “terribly disappointed” in virologists Jesse Bloom and David Relman and believes they are “pushing for and even hoping that this was a lab leak.”

Then April 2021 (p. 695), David Morens has told Fauci that people are trying to “bring me down.” Fauci takes umbrage that these critics have received funds from the agency he was running: “It is my suspicion that some of these so-called NIAID grantees are Imperiale and Rich Ebright.”

He notes that both have publicly claimed he would cut their funding for criticizing him, calls that preposterous — then closes the entry: “Let us see if in fact these are the villains.”

You can only imagine him as Dr. Claw gently stroking his cat as he typed those words.

VII. Fauci’s colleagues, the press

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant “journalists” to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir — the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force — be interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was “talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him.” Then (p. 263): “I gave Jake some questions to ask him.”

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

The diary records CBS’s chief medical correspondent, Jon LaPook, emailing Fauci over a weekend “to prep him for his interview” before going on air, then cited Fauci repeatedly during it (p. 2). LaPook later produced the admiring 60 Minutes profile Fauci credits with driving Trump “over the edge.”

Fauci even got stories killed, at least according to his telling: In January 2020, the Washington Post’s Lena Sun called to check a tip that Beijing had leaned on the WHO’s director-general to delay declaring an emergency; Fauci told her it was nonsense and wrote, “I probably stopped her from writing the story” — noting that Sun had come to him because he is “in all the important meetings” (p. 7).

Members of the corporate media make many embarrassing cameos in these pages: Jake Tapper sends Fauci a text making fun Laura Ingraham’s intelligence (p. 113) and twice hosts Fauci for dinner at their family home (p. 420); George Stephanopoulos texts after an interview, “Thank you, Tony. So impressive” (p. 264); Andrea Mitchell calls his cell, apologetic, having assumed he had declined her show rather than been blocked from it (p. 235); Jimmy Kimmel writes his TIME 100 citation in the year he was ranked first among “Leaders,” another puff piece he saves for his scrapbook (p. 357).

The pattern becomes easy enough to understand: He supplied access and the guise of expertise, they supplied a platform and a halo, and the arrangement was load-bearing enough that when a reporter got a genuinely hard tip about the WHO and China, she brought it to him before she wrote it.

VIII. The scrapbook

Which brings us to what the diary mostly is: 641 entries in these pages are labeled “PRESS:” — lists of the day’s media appearances, often a dozen at a time, frequently followed by the articles themselves transcribed in full. A senior scientist’s pandemic journal turns out to be, by volume, a clipping service devoted to his favorite subject: himself.

The tone of what he preserved is worth registering. He kept the Washington Post column comparing a Rand Paul cross-examination of him to “watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner.” He kept the Joan Baez portrait and her calling him an American hero (p. 292). He kept the cookies from Joe and Jill Biden with the note “You are our hero” (p. 175), and Julia Roberts gasping on an Instagram livestream that he was her personal hero, and Marian Wright Edelman calling him “a true national treasure” (p. 1113), and Beth Cameron of the NSC texting that he was her hero for what he did with Rand Paul (p. 815).

By my count he records someone calling him a hero at least 10 times across three years.

He also recorded receiving many standing ovations, including one he could not see because he was attending by Zoom, noting in the same passage that it would be his 58th honorary doctorate and that Holy Cross was naming a science complex after him (p. 951). He recorded a Seattle Mariners crowd’s ovation three separate times in one entry — claiming his opening pitch was “perfect” — alongside a complaint that the Washington Examiner had reported some fans booing (p. 1,020). He recorded being “totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)” (p. 1084). When the Infectious Diseases Society of America established a perpetual Anthony S. Fauci Prize, he transcribed the entire citation (p. 1086).

Tom Elliott

@tomselliott

Anthony Fauci, writing in his diary in March 2020, clearly loving life:

"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 [sic] to

6:05 PM · Jul 25, 2026 · 85.6K Views

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And then there is the second document Sen. Paul’s office released, which shows that a good deal of this was not happening to him. Our tax dollars were helping arrange it.

In October 2018 — 14 months before any of this — Barton Haynes of Duke nominated Fauci for the Shaw Prize. Fauci wrote back the same day (Awards, p. 2):

“Thanks, Bart. There is another one that looks possible for me if you are willing to do it. As usual, I will supply all of the material. It is the Dan David Prize.”

As usual? Four days later he pitched a third and wrote the strategy himself (p. 4): the Heinz Award, category “The Human Condition,” using the PEPFAR record — “We obviously will take care of all of that on my end.” He coached Haynes through qualifying as a nominator, noting the “minor glitch” that the Heinz people require a CV first “because they do not want just anyone nominating anyone.” He tracked prize calendars like a portfolio, telling Haynes to stand down on the Dan David until “medicine/science returns as a theme” (p. 5). He collected it two years later.

The Dan David Prize — $1 million, headquartered at Tel Aviv University — announced Fauci as its 2021 public health laureate on February 15, citing his “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition.” None of the coverage mentioned that the nomination pipeline had been running since 2018 with the laureate supplying the materials.

Every message in the awards file copies NIAID staff, who assembled packages, chased clearances, and eventually arranged a wire transfer. NIH’s ethics counsel was described by her own superior as playing “the seminal role in assembling of the award packages” (p. 19). (Which to me sounds like the opposite thing an ethics counsel should be doing.) That superior was Lawrence Tabak, then NIH’s principal deputy director, who personally wrote to HHS General Counsel arguing across several pages that Fauci should be allowed to keep the $40,000 attached to a National Academy of Medicine award — invoking the Academy’s 1863 charter, a 1997 amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and a Congressional Research Service report (p. 30). Days earlier Tabak had written to Fauci about the delays: “my goal is to support you in the strongest possible way” (p. 18).

When the Dan David Prize cleared on April 9, 2021, the internal traffic was preserved (pp. 120–121). Arthur Bennett: “At last!!!!!!!” Patricia Conrad, forwarding to Fauci: “Congratulations....you’re rich!” Greg Folkers: “I want my 15%.”

We know the sum to the penny because Fauci corrected his own financial disclosure the following spring (p. 135): “The Dan David prize that was deposited in my bank account was $899,960.00, not $901,400.”

Technically soliciting one’s own nomination is not illegal, and in elite science it is not even unusual — most major prizes require a qualified nominator. But here we have some pretty well-scaled machinery: a federal agency’s staff and the NIH’s chief ethics counsel running a standing campaign, a legal argument built at the deputy-director level so a cash prize could be retained, and roughly $900,000 landing in the personal account of a sitting official who had arranged the nomination that produced it.

The final verdict

These two document dumps go a long way helping us understand how the sausage is made, and it’s not pretty.

The White House needed a face that performed well under lights; governors needed cover for decisions they had half-made and took it from a man whose authority came from TV hits rather than peer-reviewed studies; a press corps needed access and a protagonist and traded a halo for both; a White House coordination office needed a scientist willing to serve as an anonymous source, edit another agency’s guidance, and lean on another agency’s director when her experts voted wrong. Foreign leaders needed the imprimatur of Official Science on a phone call. NIH’s own leadership needed the world’s most famous scientist happy, and built him the legal argument to keep his bank account flush.

And Anthony Fauci got the largest edifice of public esteem ever assembled around an American civil servant — much of which, it turns out, he had personally arranged the scaffolding for, starting 14 months before the first case of Covid.

Fauci’s blast zone was wide: On a public told that guidance was science when the diary records it as message discipline and mannequin studies; on three highly credentialed academic epidemiologists who found themselves recorded as “stooges”; on a CDC director cut out of briefings on her own agency’s guidelines; on an advisory committee whose 9–6 vote was reversed by telephone before dawn; on international agencies leaning on U.S. officials for guidance, on everyone who lost a job over a mandate …

The story began with Fauci acknowledging his own panel of experts virtually unanimously agreed Covid was manmade, before shifting to the elaborate effort put into convincing the world otherwise. Throughout it all, we see little discussion or concern about the humanitarian impact of anything they’re doing. Instead we see a craven egomaniac milking it for all it’s worth.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50041571)

"This summary is correct:

Social distancing was a hoax

Masks were a joke

Lockdowns were worthless

mRNA jabs were dangerous

Case fatality rate was low

Ivermectin worked

Hydroxychloroquine also worked

Remdesivir was a killer

COVID came from the Wuhan lab

Fauci funded it"

======

The Rise and Fall of Anthony Fauci

Being pathetic is no protection against being malevolent.

By Roger Kimball

August 2, 2026

Iam thinking of sending Anthony Fauci a copy of Herodotus’ Histories. After his humiliating performance before the Senate last week, Dr. Fauci might find the story of Solon’s visit to the Lydian king Croesus instructive. Croesus displays his great wealth to the Athenian lawgiver and asks, “Who is the happiest man you have ever seen?” Croesus expects Solon to name him. Instead, Solon says that no one can be judged truly happy while still living because fate can reverse one’s fortune in an instant.

It was not so long ago that Anthony Fauci was adulated worldwide as a wise and caring paragon, a Hippocrates for our age. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years (1984–2022), Fauci was the highest-paid government employee, earning more than the president. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2019–2020, Fauci was the veritable face of science. He told us so himself. He appeared countless times on the podium next to President Trump as the hysteria over the disease mounted. No matter that his advice was contradictory, he somehow emerged as the consoling incarnation of paternalistic nannydom, the perfect foil for the deployment of coercive state power. Remember the nauseating signs proclaiming “In this house we follow the science,” etc., etc.? The “science” in question was defined and transmitted by the Wizard of Oz, Anthony Fauci.

The actress Julia Roberts swooned and tittered over “maybe the coolest man on the planet” as if she were a schoolgirl encountering her first heartthrob. He presided over a conference on COVID at the Vatican in 2021. Perhaps the best summary of Fauci’s celebrity is contained in the second humiliation he experienced last week, the release of his diaries and emails by Sen. Rand Paul. There are essentially two themes to those documents. One is a breathless, not to say narcissistic, account of how popular he is. The other is a darker chronicle of his leaning on colleagues to nominate him for cash prizes (one for $900,000) and various accolades, as well as his furtive efforts to manipulate the story of COVID’s origins and lethality. It is both cringeworthy and infuriating.

This summary is correct:

Social distancing was a hoax

Masks were a joke

Lockdowns were worthless

mRNA jabs were dangerous

Case fatality rate was low

Ivermectin worked

Hydroxychloroquine also worked

Remdesivir was a killer

COVID came from the Wuhan lab

Fauci funded it

Yes, but the American people fell for it. Perhaps the best slogan for what happened to America (and the rest of the world) during COVID was articulated in the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). The world went insane over COVID. Anthony Fauci was the principal ringmaster of the asylum.

At the time, I wrote dozens of skeptical columns about COVID and Fauci. (Here are links to a few I wrote for American Greatness over the years: “COVID-19, the Elephant, and the House Cat,” “Herd Immunity vs. Herd Mentality,” “It’s Not a Choice Between Lives or the Economy,” “This is an Emergency!,” “A Deadly if Dutiful Deference,” “The Coronavirus in Retrospect,” “When Will the COVID Revolt Come?,” “Oh, Oh, Omicron,” and “The Issue is Never the Issue: Senate Hearing Turns into a Proxy War.” And there are lots more where those came from, e.g., this little piece on ivermectin: “Who’s Afraid of Ivermectin?”)

The saga of Anthony Fauci—what might be called “The Rise and Fall of Anthony Fauci”—is inextricably linked to someone even more famous than he, Donald Trump. Fauci would recommend hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment. Then Donald Trump would recommend it. Then Fauci would withdraw his recommendation. Even now, the NeverTrump fraternity is rallying round their fallen soldier, Anthony Fauci, in order to land a few impotent blows against the man they love to hate, Donald Trump.

It is pathetic, yes, but as the case of Fauci himself reminds us, being pathetic is no protection against being malevolent. Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing last week and took the Fifth Amendment 111 times. “What color is your tie?” “On the advice of counsel,” etc., etc. Sen. Josh Hawley eviscerated Fauci. So did many others. I am not sure it will matter. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Fauci will be held in contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to jail for that. But they are Trump supporters. What happened to Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general and self-described “wingman,” when he was held in contempt of Congress? Nothing.

Joe Biden (or his autopen) granted Fauci a blanket pardon just before leaving office in early 2025. Why then did Fauci repeatedly plead the Fifth last week? He had been preemptively pardoned for everything he might have done during the COVID tyranny. Apparently his lawyers were worried that he might perjure himself or otherwise expose himself to fresh liability. So they decided it was better for him to shred his credibility for a few hours on national television rather than tell the truth.

Remember what cruelty he helped to precipitate. You could not visit your dying relative in the hospital. Your children’s schools were closed. So was your workplace. So was your church. You put off that cancer screening your doctor ordered. Wearing useless masks became a sign of virtue. Even toddlers were required to wear them. You were prevented from taking therapies like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but required to take largely untested novel mRNA vaccines. Fauci himself developed a blood clot after taking the vaccine, but he concealed that. Your COVID vaccination card was your required passport to—well, everything outside your home. (I still have mine.) Social distancing—what ought to have been called “anti-social distancing”—was the universal rule. You can still see tattered stickers and signs reminding you to keep at least 6 feet between yourself and others, just as you can still descry here and there the remnants of masks scattered like cigarette butts or used condoms among the pedestrian detritus of life.

Will Fauci face any consequences for his arrogant, “I-Am-Science” megalomania—other, I mean, than the utter destruction of his reputation? Probably not. The state of Florida is launching an investigation into Fauci’s actions. Biden’s federal pardon does not exempt Fauci from state liability. Maybe something will come of that. But I would not hold my breath.

A friend sent me this passage from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. As the invocation of “quack-conjurers” suggests, it is relevant to the story of Anthony Fauci:

One mischief always introduces another. These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things, which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked to encourage them to: and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune, . . .

With what blind, absurd, and ridiculous stuff these oracles of the devil pleased and satisfied the people I really know not, but certain it is that innumerable attendants crowded about their doors every day. And if but a grave fellow in a velvet jacket, a band, and a black coat, which was the habit those quack-conjurers generally went in, was but seen in the streets the people would follow them in crowds, and ask them questions as they went along.

I need not mention what a horrid delusion this was, or what it tended to; but there was no remedy for it till the plague itself put an end to it all—and, I suppose, cleared the town of most of those calculators themselves. One mischief was, that if the poor people asked these mock astrologers whether there would be a plague or no, they all agreed in general to answer ‘Yes’, for that kept up their trade. And had the people not been kept in a fright about that, the wizards would presently have been rendered useless, and their craft had been at an end. But they always talked to them of such-and-such influences of the stars, of the conjunctions of such-and-such planets, which must necessarily bring sickness and distempers, and consequently the plague. And some had the assurance to tell them the plague was begun already, which was too true, though they that said so knew nothing of the matter.

Anthony Fauci would have been right at home among those charlatans, mountebanks, corrupt pseudo-sages, and insatiable grifters. It is some modest consolation to reflect that Solon was right in what he told Croesus about happiness and the fickleness of fortune.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50042133)

in last week's hearing there was a suggestion that fauci and his minions deliberately trashed ivermectin out of fear that the emergency approval of the vaccine would not be legally justified. but i haven't seen an explanation, with evidence, of whether that really happened.

otoh, it seems certain that the fauci crowd and the MSM were conducting a campaign to belittle ivermectin. how else can anyone explain why one of the most important human medicines in history, whose inventor won the Nobel for it, was constantly called a "horse de-wormer." and after Joe Rogan utterly dismantled Sanjay Gupta on that point, Gupta and CNN immediately doubled-down on the fraud. something was going on.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50042318)

======

Fifth Amendment Fauci’s Narcissism Destroyed Faith in Scientific Methodology

Congress may be investigating COVID, but the deeper scandal is how one bureaucrat reshaped science into dogma.

by Michael Fumento

July 30, 2026, 10:46 PM

If you believe in karma or that chickens always come home to roost, you have to explain why Mao and Stalin died in bed, and Hitler was able to choose his own way out. But watching Anthony Fauci on the witness stand before Congress taking the Fifth as fast as his lips could flap (more than 100 times), you could see some evidence that at least some hens become broiler chickens.

There he sat — the undisputed grand vizier of American public health — hedging his answers and reciting the familiar line about “following the science.” To the uninitiated observer, perhaps it looked like the noble defense of an overworked public servant unfairly hounded by partisan inquisitors. To anyone who has tracked his career since the 1980s, it looked like something else entirely: another verse in a long song of dodge, delay, and quiet goalpost-moving in furtherance of a career fueled by narcissism so extreme it should have its own place on the Periodic Table. (RELATED: Tracking Dr. Fauci’s Fallout) GeographicReference

The hearing was ostensibly about the origins of COVID-19, gain-of-function research, and the shifting, often contradictory directives that governed life for 300 million Americans during the pandemic. But the real subject was never the virus alone. It was the institutionalized rot of a public health establishment that has long preferred terror-driven consensus to rigorous, skeptical inquiry — an establishment Fauci built, nurtured, and came to embody.

I first learned of the man’s blatant dishonesty when I worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1986-87. As I wrote in these pages almost four years ago, I had invited him to testify at a hearing, and he accepted. I received his CV in the mail, and it was surreal. I think the New York City phonebook back then might have been thinner.

Various online bios claim Fauci is “author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks,” or words to that effect, but definitely including the 1,300 figure. This would be extremely impressive in any case, but remember we’re talking about someone who spent his career as a full-time administrator. Would you believe that General Dwight D. Eisenhower killed 30 Germans on D-Day with an entrenching tool?

As one can see by entering Fauci’s name in PubMed, the government’s archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, there are simply too many papers listing Fauci on too many disparate subjects, and too often as lead researcher, including animal studies. (Fauci enters the lab every morning to check on the mice.)

Keep scrolling, and you find Fauci is apparently a published expert on virtually every medical topic.

Something is going on here. And unless Fauci has had himself cloned, the best guess might be labeled “plagiarism by consent.” There is always steep competition to get in the top-ranked journals or any journal of any reputation at all. It would appear that the true researchers were putting Fauci’s name on their papers to push them up the ladder, in exchange for which he got yet one more academic publication attributed to him, as noted, usually with him as lead researcher. It’s a shame he’s not part of Marvel’s Avengers. ExecutiveBranch

Strip away the publication count, and the background is thin in the specific disciplines a global viral outbreak actually requires. Fauci earned his M.D. from Cornell in 1966 and went straight into the federal apparatus, becoming director of NIAID in 1984. He holds no advanced research degree — no Ph.D. — in molecular biology, genetics, or quantitative epidemiology. He is a clinical physician who became a high-level administrator half a century ago, managing research budgets and political relationships while invoking the unimpeachable mantle of “Science” itself, as he put it on CBS’s Face the Nation in 2021.

COVID-19 wasn’t an anomaly in Fauci’s career. It was the logical outcome of a method he perfected decades earlier, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

To understand how a bureaucrat with that background held such sway over public health policy for four decades — through absurd social-distancing metrics and mask-mandate reversals — you have to look back. COVID-19 wasn’t an anomaly in Fauci’s career. It was the logical outcome of a method he perfected decades earlier, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In May 1983, Fauci published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (now JAMA) that set off a wave of national panic. Reflecting on a handful of pediatric AIDS cases, he wrote that if the disease could pass between family members through routine contact, “then AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension” — raising the possibility that ordinary household contact could spread it.

It was a reckless leap. Even then, the epidemiological data pointed clearly to blood-borne and sexual transmission. But by floating the idea that sharing a dinner table or a bathroom might infect an entire family, Fauci lit a match under public terror. He quietly walked the casual-contact theory back not long after — yet the damage was done, and the strategic value of catastrophic messaging had become obvious. I first reported this study in my 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, and it still gets lots of play.

Having primed the public for irrational fear, the public health apparatus under Fauci faced a new problem by the late 1980s: how to sustain federal funding and public urgency once casual transmission was off the table. The answer was to convince everyone that, as headlines put it, “Now We’re All at Risk of AIDS.” Except heterosexuals were somehow more at risk.

We were told, with total confidence, that a “heterosexual AIDS explosion” was sweeping middle America. The data eventually caught up with the claim: the general heterosexual explosion never happened. It had been manufactured to maximize funding and political leverage. By the time the truth arrived, the panic had already done its job. The budget was secured. The agency had grown. The director had made himself indispensable.

That playbook got reused for Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Zika — low-probability threats elevated to existential crises, alternative views treated as heresy, and the inevitable failure of each doomsday scenario quietly recast as a victory of bureaucratic intervention.

Often, Fauci was involved. In 2022, after Monkeypox temporarily broke its African bonds and began infecting Americans and Europeans — albeit with a low death rate — his concern wasn’t epidemiology but rather that “the government must fight homophobic stigmas surrounding monkeypox.” (I’m not making this up; the WHO was so worried about alleged stigma that it changed the name to “mpox.” No word on whether it reflected input from Minister of Science and also Chief Defender of the Faith, Dr. Zaius.)

Elsewhere, Fauci emphasized “the risk for … children and pregnant women,” adding “We’ve got to understand the modality of transmission.” Yet before his remarks, the data showed the disease was afflicting almost exclusively homosexual men who disproportionately spent a lot of time in bathhouses. Again, outside of Africa, it was much more of a gay disease than HIV ever was.

Still, by 2020, the machinery ran on its own, proof that perpetual motion machines do exist. When a novel coronavirus emerged out of Wuhan, the public health establishment didn’t offer nuanced risk communication, targeted protections, or sober cost-benefit analysis. It offered panic and unilateral mandates.

Consider the six-foot social distancing rule. When pressed on the empirical basis for closing schools, shuttering businesses, and putting one-way arrows on grocery store floors, Fauci admitted during sworn testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on January 24 that the rule “just sort of appeared,” with no rigorous clinical trials or controlled studies behind it. It was, in his own words, an empirical decision, not grounded in solid data. Millions of children lost years of developmental and educational progress. Small businesses went under. Families were torn apart — over a metric that had essentially been made up.

Then there were the masks. In early 2020, Fauci told us on CBS’s 60 Minutes that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Months later he reversed course entirely, championing double-masking and insisting cloth masks were vital shields against transmission, despite a body of pre-existing randomized controlled trial literature showing negligible efficacy against aerosolized respiratory viruses. Asked about the shift, he didn’t concede bad data or poor communication. He said flatly that he kinda, sorta prevaricated at first to preserve masks for healthcare workers. In this world, lying to the public isn’t a breach of ethics. It’s a tactical maneuver.

Perhaps the worst chapter concerned the suppression of debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The hearing revisited late January and early February 2020, when a group of prominent virologists privately warned Fauci and his colleagues that the virus’s genomic sequence looked consistent with laboratory manipulation. Within days of those calls, several of the same scientists authored a paper (aided by Fauci) in the prestigious Nature Medicine, publicly dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as a fringe theory. Millions of dollars in NIH research grants flowed to the signatories not long after, although it’s impossible to prove a connection.

Asked about funding gain-of-function research (experiments that enhance a pathogen’s biological capabilities beyond its natural state) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci fell back on semantics. It all depended on your definition of “gain-of-function.” NIH sub-grants routed through the EcoHealth Alliance were used to engineer chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan — that much isn’t disputed — but Fauci maintained, straight-faced, that this didn’t meet the strict federal definition. Redefine the terms, escape the culpability.

The tragedy here isn’t that Fauci got things wrong. Scientists are allowed to be wrong, provided they have the humility to correct course as the data changes. But the H-word was never in Fauci’s vocabulary. His career comprised furthering his career, whether with essentially fake citations or saying what the mass media and quasi-Marxist public health establishment wanted to hear.

The Atlantic, in a post-hearing article, noted that Sen. Rand Paul had published Fauci’s pandemic-era diary with the writer declaring Fauci “was spending part of his time cataloguing his own growing fame with the excitement of a child star who had been asked to sign an autograph for the first time,” calling it “embarrassing to an excruciating degree.” It speaks volumes that his home office in 2022 was shown with a huge portrait of him, plus two separate images … and a Fauci bobblehead. His diary notes he was particularly proud of the toy.

The tragedy is that he dismantled the core habits of the scientific method in favor of dogma, censorship, and institutional self-preservation… Science

The tragedy is that he dismantled the core habits of the scientific method in favor of dogma, censorship, and institutional self-preservation — that he built a climate where dissent was treated as betrayal, where peer-reviewed debate gave way to media-managed consensus, and where the collateral damage of lockdown policy — overdoses, skipped cancer screenings, economic ruin, learning loss — became a footnote. I’ve revisited several countries where I used to live before the pandemic, and all have changed, apparently permanently, for the worse because of the rules and the social isolation. The U.S. is definitely not least among them. (Please note that pathogens don’t dictate governmental edicts.)

“‘Playing God’ is a trite expression I normally detest, but that’s exactly what Fauci has been doing,” I wrote in The American Spectator in 2022. “He repeatedly throws the fear of, well, God, into us. His advocacy of lockdowns will surely live well past his own lifetime.”

As this week’s hearing wound down, the underlying problem remained exactly where it started. Public trust in the public health establishment hasn’t collapsed because of “disinformation” or “anti-science” sentiment. It collapsed because people finally saw behind the curtain — saw officials playing politics, managing budgets, and shifting goalposts while claiming a kind of unquestionable authority.

Whenever Fauci said, “Trust the science,” he meant “trust me.” The result of which is that many people who should trust scientific methodology do not. He’s not entirely responsible for that, but more so than anyone else. The result is that social media influencers often have more sway than medical doctors and scientists, even in highly established non-political areas such as sleep apnea.

Fauci can now enjoy a comfortable retirement, delivering well-paid lectures and polishing his legacy. But the legacy itself is broken trust, degraded scientific standards, and a template in which fear always outranks fact. Until that template is dismantled and we start demanding real, data-driven accountability from public health officials, the next crisis will look exactly like the last one.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, and journalist who, over the past four decades, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884795&forum_id=2.#50042333)