Tierney vs Fauci; Tierney wins, of course
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John’s 1996 article for the NYT Sunday Magazine, “Recycling is Garbage”, still holds the title for generating the most hate mail directed at the Times’ editors, ever. He was right, then, and he’s right now:
I’VE READ ALL 480 PAGES SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO: Fauci’s Master Class in Deception. Some excerpts of my book review in the Wall Street Journal:
At the end of his memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” Anthony Fauci laments: “We are living in an era in which information that is patently untrue gets repeated enough times that it becomes part of our everyday dialogue and starts to sound true.” He’s right about that, and he has inadvertently produced a 480-page master class in how to get away with it.
The memoir chronicles Dr. Fauci’s rise in Washington from an obscure researcher to his fame during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he became, as he writes, a “hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” This image bore no relation to reality, given the evidence that the lockdowns and school closures accomplished little or nothing while causing unprecedented social and economic damage.
So how did Dr. Fauci spin it into a personal triumph? The memoir chronicles the development of his techniques. He tells how, after becoming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, one of his first “crucial lessons” was “how important it was to cultivate relationships with people who are in a position to make things happen.” These people included politicians in the White House and the Capitol, activists demanding bigger budgets, and, especially, journalists eager for stories that would terrify their audiences.
In the memoir, Fauci proudly details the budget increases he received as a result of the false alarms he helped spread: the AIDS “heterosexual breakout,” the bioterrorism attack on America supposedly imminent after 9/11, the doomsday pandemics of bird flu and swine that never arrived.
He went on seeking more funding to prepare for a future catastrophic flu pandemic, a threat he considered so dire that it justified “generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” as he argued in a 2011 article in the Washington Post.
In retrospect, given the mounting evidence that Covid-19 was created by just that sort of gain-of-function research in China, does Dr. Fauci have any second thoughts about advocating such a risky endeavor? None worth mentioning in this memoir. In dismissing the “smear campaign” to link him to a lab-created virus, he ignores the obvious possibility that the Wuhan virologists exploited knowledge acquired in the lab’s previous bat-virus research funded by his agency.
Nor does he regret his pandemic guidance, despite the vast collateral damage of lockdowns and the evidence that nations and U.S. states that shunned Dr. Fauci’s advice fared as well or better than the ones that locked down. Sweden experienced one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in Europe while keeping businesses and schools open and urging its citizens not to wear masks. Nowhere in Dr. Fauci’s memoir is there a mention of Sweden or other such counter-evidence.
The glaring omissions confirm the criticisms of Dr. Fauci in Dr. Scott Atlas’s pandemic memoir, A Plague Upon Our House.
At the White House Coronavirus Task Force meetings, Dr. Atlas recounts, Dr. Fauci never presented scientific evidence in favor of his policies, refused to respond to the contrary evidence that Dr. Atlas presented, and never considered the collateral damage from the policies.
In fall 2020 there was ample evidence that schools could reopen safely, but Dr. Fauci kept offering reasons to keep them closed. When Dr. Atlas argued that Americans were irrationally frightened, he writes, Dr. Fauci replied: “They need to be more afraid.” Dr. Fauci’s determination to panic the public astounded Dr. Atlas, but it’s understandable after reading “On Call.” For Anthony Fauci, fearmongering was always an excellent career move.
And never mind at what cost to everyone else.
