Believe your own eyes about Fauci e-mails, not the fact checkers

Jeffrey Tucker
RealClearMarkets
Sat, 05 Jun 2021 06:58 UTC

© Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP

Reading through the 4,000-plus pages of Dr. Fauci's emails - where's the bottle of Visine? - has not been the most exciting of literary experiences, but it certainly has been revealing.

After all, Dr. Fauci was the US architect of the lockdowns that smashed all that we believed was true in the good 'ol US of A; namely that we had rights and freedoms and a system of government that protected both. Suddenly we found ourselves housebound by law, prevented from going to concerts, movies, church, or even to the hospital if we didn't have Covid-19 (health care spending fell 6% in 2020).

So, yes, these emails are remarkable. You want to know what this guy was thinking? How and why did he convince President Trump to shut down major parts of the economy? These emails provide hints and clues as to what he was thinking before and after. They are a major key to understanding, and investigators of all sorts will be scouring through them for years.

Whatever you do, however, don't you dare call them a "leak" even though if Fauci had his druthers, they surely would not have been leaked; whoops, I mean released through multiple FOIA requests. The fact checkers are all over that misuse of terms, such that USA Today offers a marmish corrective to anyone who would use that term, while the Washington Post offers a mini-treatise assuring people that they do not say what you think they say.

Say it over and over until it becomes true: there are no smoking guns herein!

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, who are you gonna believe, the fact checkers or your own eyes? Most of the attention so far concerns when Fauci was warned that the virus might have been a lab leak, in a lab that received indirect US funding. What did Fauci do about such warnings and to what extent did he take them seriously?

There is so much more here than just that, even though this one concern has overshadowed everything else. A short list of what stands out to me:

• His remarkable shift from downplaying the virus and urging people not to panic, much less lock down (Feb 26, 2020, or thereabouts)
• His extremely compelling case that layperson masks achieve nothing in terms of disease mitigation, only to flip later to say that are essential
• His early lack of interest in vaccines that later turned into virtual vaccine mandates
• His ridiculous obsession with friendly media: they get loving answers and agreement to appear whereas anyone vaguely incredulous was deleted
• His later dismissive attitude toward anyone who questioned lockdowns
• His nonstop reveling in his personal fame and power, basking in praise from anyone ready to offer it
• The way the media sucked up and became his echo chamber, thanking him daily for his glorious leadership even though this consisted mostly of going on TV and pontificating ambiguities
• His wink-wink relationship with reporters, treating them as on his team, and we all know what that meant (he was no fan of Trump)
• His general stumbling around from one opinion to another while completely ignoring what was actually happening on the ground, here and abroad

I generally get the sense of a lifelong bureaucrat who implausibly found himself as the world's most influential public-health official during the most dramatic upheaval in public policy in generations. He didn't entirely know what to do with his new-found influence. It's shocking to observe his complete lack of interest in the health and economic consequences of lockdown policies.

Maybe he believed they would work but it is hard to say because he was putting down the idea as late as February 25:

"You cannot avoid having infections since you cannot shut off the country from the rest of the world," he wrote to CBS News. "Do not let the fear of the unknown...distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day...do not yield to unreasonable fear."

A few days later, he was pushing virus suppression via closures, human separation, and travel restrictions, while finding a good friend in "unreasonable fear." Medical professionals from around the world wrote to him and begged him to stop this, that people were being bullied by cops all over the world in the name of a virus control method that could not and would not work. He read these and did not answer them.

So, yes, these emails do provide tremendous insight, despite what you are reading today from the mainstream press, which continues to defend him no matter what. Even so, the great truth cannot be forever ignored. What is that? To my mind, it is the elephant in the room: there is zero evidence that lockdowns actually worked to mitigate severe outcomes from the disease.

Even Vox has started asking the real question:

"After a year of debates over mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures, that mixed evidence might suggest a certain fatalism: Did none of these state policies really matter? Or was the virus going to spread no matter what states did? Was it all for nothing?... If you look at a list of states by their number of Covid-19 deaths per capita, it's hard to discern much of a pattern."

You have to dig pretty deep to get the answer here, even though myriad studies have failed to demonstrate any empirically observable relationship between lockdowns and disease control. Vox finally argues that lockdowns do work provided they happen early and hard. Vox does cite one article that examined data from March and April 2020 and hesitatingly suggests that perhaps there was a 5.4% reduction in cases due to social distancing, but only reaches that conclusion using modelled counterfactuals and very limited testing data. This study stands against some 35 otherss from around the world, deploying far larger data sets, showing otherwise.

Right now, Covid infections and deaths are at the lowest point in the US since March 2020. While commentators credit the vaccines, it's not entirely obvious since low-vaccine states have the same trends as high ones. Sorting out the contribution here of natural immunity vs. vaccines is a job for high-end virologists, not journalists.

Looking at the curves of this thing here and abroad - while adjusting for climate, geography, demographics, and population immunity profiles - they all look suspiciously the same, regardless of policy.

Vox at least asks the right question: "Was it all for nothing?"

Sadly, the answer is probably yes. Get a clue, Washington Post and all the rest: this is the reason why Fauci is being hounded now. He was lockdown's unlikely champion. It's on him. He owns them. Now he needs to answer questions, not merely rely on his media friends to continue to give him cover.

Comment: After the public release of Fauci's e-mails, the whole narrative of the PTB about the dangerous virus and the tyrannical inhuman measures that were supposed to protect us is just tumbling down.

The question is, who decided to publish his e-mails, and why are all the manipulations and lies about the false Covid pandemic being exposed now?

An epidemiologist and professor at Stanford University said Dr. Anthony Fauci's credibility is "shot" after his recently released emails showed him flip-flopping on the use of masks.

"I think his credibility is entirely shot," said Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, during a segment on The Ingraham Angle.

The Stanford professor said people will have a hard time trusting Fauci after his emails, which have recently been made public through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that he did not initially think face masks were effective.

"I think he's been all over the place on masks," Bhattacharya said. "There are emails you can find in the treasure trove of emails that have been released where he acknowledged that the virus is aerosolized — well, the cloth masks people have been recommending, they're not very particular[ly] effective against aerosolized viruses."

Fauci first said masks were not effective, and even privately told one person as much, before reversing his advisement on the matter.

"Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading the infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection," he said in one of the recently released emails.

"The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material," he wrote. "It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep 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."

Bhattacharya said he was not sure what spurred the flip-flop from saying masks were not effective to imploring the country to stay vigilant on mask-wearing.

"I really don't understand his back-and-forth, and his answer made absolutely no sense," he said.

Yeah, you should change your mind when the science changes. But what is that science that changed that convinced him that masks are the most effective way?" the professor asked.

Fauci ultimately agreed that face masks should be universally worn, advice that has been adhered to by most businesses and states across the country.