Dr. Fauci’s mask deceptions were among several “noble lies” that, his critics complained, revealed a manipulative and deceptive disposition undesirable in an evenhanded public health official. Dr. Fauci explained to the New York Times that he had upgraded his estimate of the vaccine coverage needed to insure “herd immunity” from 70 percent in March to 80–90 percent in September not based on science, but rather in response to polling that indicated rising rates of vaccine acceptance.15 He regularly expressed his belief that post-infection immunity was highly likely (with occasional waffling on this topic) although he took the public position that natural immunity did not contribute to protecting the population. He supported COVID jabs for previously infected Americans, defying overwhelming scientific evidence that post-COVID inoculations were both unnecessary and dangerous.16,17 Under questioning on September 9, 2021, Dr. Fauci conceded he could cite no scientific justification for this policy.18 In September 2021, in a statement justifying COVID vaccine mandates to school children, Dr. Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade school measles and mumps vaccines—an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr. Fauci attended grade school in the 1940s.19 Dr. Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda. If the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed anything, it is that public health officials have based their many calamitous directives for managing COVID-19 on vacillating and science-free beliefs about masks, lockdowns, infection and fatality rates, asymptomatic transmission, and vaccine safety and efficacy, which took every direction and sowed confusion, division, and polarization among the public and medical experts.
Dr. Fauci’s libertine approach to facts may have contributed to what, for me, was the most troubling and infuriating feature of all the public health responses to COVID. The blatant and relentless manipulation of data to serve the vaccine agenda became the apogee of a year of stunning regulatory malpractice. High-quality and transparent data, clearly documented, timely rendered, and publicly available are the sine qua non of competent public health management. During a pandemic, reliable and comprehensive data are critical for determining the behavior of the pathogen, identifying vulnerable populations, rapidly measuring the effectiveness of interventions, mobilizing the medical community around cutting-edge disease management, and inspiring cooperation from the public. The shockingly low quality of virtually all relevant data pertinent to COVID-19, and the quackery, the obfuscation, the cherrypicking and blatant perversion would have scandalized, offended, and humiliated every prior generation of American public health officials. Too often, Dr. Fauci was at the center of these systemic deceptions. The “mistakes” were always in the same direction—inflating the risks of coronavirus and the safety and efficacy of vaccines in order to stoke public fear of COVID and provoke mass compliance. The excuses for his mistakes range from blaming the public (now blaming the unvaccinated), blaming politics, and explaining his gyrations by saying, “You’ve got to evolve with the science.”20
At the outset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci used wildly inaccurate modeling that overestimated US deaths by 525 percent.21,22 Scammer and pandemic fabricator Neal Ferguson of Imperial College London was their author, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) of $148.8 million.23 Dr. Fauci used this model as justification for his lockdowns.
Dr. Fauci acquiesced to CDC’s selective protocol changes for completing death certificates in a way that inflated the claimed deaths from COVID, and thus inflated its infection mortality rate. CDC later admitted that only 6 percent of COVID deaths occurred in entirely healthy individuals. The remaining 94 percent suffered from an average of 3.8 potentially fatal comorbidities.24
Regulators misused PCR tests that CDC belatedly admitted in August 2021 were incapable of distinguishing COVID from other viral illnesses. Dr. Fauci tolerated their use at inappropriately high amplitudes of 37 and up to 45, even though Fauci had told Vince Racaniello that tests employing cycle thresholds of 35 and above were very unlikely to indicate the presence of live virus that could replicate.25 In July 2020, Fauci remarked that at these levels, a positive result is “just dead nucleotides, period,”26 yet did nothing to modify testing so it might be more accurate. As America’s COVID czar, Dr. Fauci never complained about CDC’s decision to skip autopsies from deaths attributed to vaccines. This practice allowed CDC to persistently claim that all deaths following vaccination were “unrelated to vaccination.” CDC also refused to conduct follow-up medical inquiries among people claiming vaccine injuries. Inspired by rich incentives to classify every patient as a COVID-19 victim—Medicare paid hospitals $39,000 per ventilator27 when treating COVID-19 and only $13,000 for garden variety respiratory infections28—hospitals contributed to the deception. Once more, Dr. Fauci winked at the fraud.
Dr. Fauci’s refusal to fix the HHS’s notoriously dysfunctional vaccine injury surveillance system (VAERS) constituted inexcusable negligence. HHS’s own studies indicate that VAERS may be understating vaccine injuries by OVER 99 percent.29
The public never received facts about infection fatality rates or age-stratified risks for COVID with the kind of clarity that might have allowed them and their physicians to make evidence-based personal risk assessments. Instead, federal officials relied on vagueness and deception to recklessly overestimate the dangers from COVID in every age group. All of these deceptions riddled virtually every mainstream media report— particularly those by CNN and the New York Times—leaving the public with a vastly inflated and cataclysmically inaccurate impression of its lethality. Public surveys showed that, just as Fox News audiences were shockingly misinformed following the 9/11 bombings, CNN viewers and New York Times readers were catastrophically misinformed about the facts of COVID-19 during 2020. Successive Gallup polling showed that the average Democrat believed that 50 percent of COVID infections resulted in hospitalizations. The real number was less than one percent.30
Trust the Experts
Instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open, and responsible debate on the science, badly compromised government health officials charged with managing the COVID-19 pandemic collaborated with mainstream and social media to shut down discussion on key public health questions. They silenced doctors who offered any early treatments that might compete with vaccines or who refused to pledge unquestioning faith in zero liability, shoddily tested, experimental vaccines.
The chaotic and confusing data collection and interpretation allowed regulators to justify their arbitrary diktats under the cloak of “scientific consensus.” Instead of citing scientific studies or clear data to justify mandates for masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, our medical rulers cited Dr. Fauci or WHO, CDC, FDA, and NIH—captive agencies—to legitimize the medical technocracy’s assumption of dangerous new powers.
Dr. Fauci’s aficionados, including President Biden and the cable and network news anchors, counseled Americans to “trust the experts.” Such advice is both anti-democratic and anti-science. Science is dynamic. “Experts” frequently differ on scientific questions and their opinions can vary in accordance with and demands of politics, power, and financial self-interest. Nearly every lawsuit I have ever litigated pitted highly credentialed experts from opposite sides against each other, with all of them swearing under oath to diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. Telling people to “trust the experts” is either naive or manipulative—or both.
All of Dr. Fauci’s intrusive mandates and his deceptive use of data tended to stoke fear and amplify public desperation for the anticipated arrival of vaccines that would transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to pharmaceutical executives and shareholders. Some of America’s most accomplished scientists, and the physicians leading the battle against COVID in the trenches, came to believe that Anthony Fauci’s do-or-die obsession with novel mRNA vaccines—and Gilead’s expensive patented antiviral, remdesivir—prompted him to ignore or even suppress effective early treatments, causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths while also prolonging the pandemic.