Tony Fauci is going to join his pantheon, just not the one he wanted.
Tony Fauci was asked a long time ago if the risk of a lab leak was worth the possible upside of gain-of-function virus research. He said that he did believe so. There are those who claim that Lyme Disease as well as SARS were also outcomes of lab research where things got out, and people got sick. Every activity in life involves risk. Some risks, like crossing the street or eating an egg, seem to be very low. Others, like flying a B-17 bomber over a ball-bearing factory in Schweinfurt during World War II, come with enormous potential downside. It would appear that Tony Fauci not only funded the Wuhan virus lab but may have contributed to the creation of the Frankenvirus via a lab run by him in the American northwest. So while other dictators listed above actually murdered people who opposed them, Fauci’s hubris and incompetence got millions of people killed worldwide. Does his lack of intent make him ineligible?
The problem with Tony Fauci and many others in the biomedical sphere is one of religion switching. A God-fearing person might make a different calculation of risk than one whose religion is SCIENCE and who sees himself as the personal embodiment of the high priest of this modern faith. A responsible and somewhat modest scientist would say, yes, I would love to know what would happen if we made the following changes to a natural virus, but I cannot take responsibility for the possible disaster that may occur. A megalomaniac like Fauci can only think about his future Nobel Prize and his name being said in the same breath with Einstein, Curie, and Salk. It’s easy to take risks when the risk is actually on somebody else. If I decide to weaken my fence, where the worst thing that can happen is that it falls on my neighbor’s daffodils, then I might be disposed to give it a try. Fauci talked big in Congress about gain-of-function being worth the risk and no doubt felt the same way with the completely untried mRNA vaccines because somebody else would get screwed if things went sideways — which they certainly did. The current head of the FDA, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whom Fauci trashed in his diary (and who the hell writes a diary on a government-issued computer? Duh?), said that there were three problems with the Pfizer and Moderna products:
1. We don’t know where the mRNA strands go in the body.
2. We don’t know how many copies of the spike protein they produce.
3. We don’t know if all of the spike proteins are complete or defective.
In his summary of the problem with injecting mRNA into a person and hoping for the best, he made more sense than cowboy Fauci, who pulled out hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in order to allow for the emergency usage of the new vaccines. Fauci didn’t care if people got sick and died. He at one point admitted in his diary that vaccinated people were still getting sick and transmitting the virus. Fauci was the high priest! He will do as he pleases and he cannot be wrong! And if people die, as in any battle, victory does not come for free. He overstated the lethality of COVID, with its actual risk being similar to the annual flu. Lives were lost. Lives were destroyed. Businesses went under. Students went down the tubes. Societies went south. Just as the British still had war-damaged parts of the country in the early 1950s, we too have destroyed parts of society because Tony Fauci, the Bat Lady, and their friends decided that the real God wasn’t enough and that they would play god by making a natural virus more deadly to human beings. Fauci’s virus buddies immediately saw the engineered “furin cleavage site” that allowed for stronger binding to human cells, but like Hitler’s generals, they knew when to shut up and defer to the Great Man. Who wants to be selling newspapers on the streets when he can have endless NIH grant money and maybe some patent royalties for just saying that the pangolins are the culprit?
I remember reading a book long ago that discussed the diary of the camp commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss. In one entry, he wrote that they had a morning selection of Russian prisoners whom they murdered. In the afternoon, he ate with his family, and they had a delicious meal of rabbit and wine. The author of the book could not understand the juxtaposition of outright brutality next to complete enjoyment of a lovely meal. But what of Herr Fauci? He could write at the top of his entry how many people died in various countries and then list all of the A-listers on a Zoom call arranged by Dr. Kim Kardashian. The numbers at the top were Stalin’s famous statistics: faceless people, many old and sick, who died alone, removed physically from their loved ones. The bottom was the real deal: I am Fauci I, king of biomedicine! These are my loving fans, and I shared with them my wisdom and godly insights. Long live Fauci!
In Hebrew, the expression “lo nisbal” refers to someone who is so into himself that nobody else can stand him. Tony Fauci took the Moderna vaccine on TV and then had a heart embolism. We have a tradition that Pharaoh used to enter the Nile to do his business so that his people would think that he is a god and does not need the bathroom; so too, Fauci did not announce his illness and its possible ties to the drug he was peddling. No, he quietly had himself treated, and like doctors around Hitler, they knew that they had best keep their mouths shut. The emperor has no clothes? The emperor has a blood clot, but nobody on the outside may be allowed to know.
Every field has its practitioners with massive egos. Boeing refused to admit that a fault in a cargo door would allow it to open during flight; only the engineer parents of a young man lost to such an accident could force them to admit and then redesign the door. The problem with Fauci was that his hubris was connected to the safety and well-being of several billion people. I can be a jerk and anger a couple hundred people. Fauci funded, through his buddy, gain-of-function research that got out of the lab, destroyed the world economy, and led to millions dead and injured. He sat like a fool in the Senate. He could not admit what he did, as maybe the pardon given by Joe Biden’s auto-pen is not as solid as he would hope. Also, it would be a killer for his reputation to confirm the evidence trail he left on his government computer diary. So he pleaded the Fifth on the color of his tie and what he ate that morning. Rand Paul might still get him via the DOJ for obstruction, though I don’t expect him to spend a night in jail.
We are generally enamored by things we know very little about. Someone outside of Boeing would be amazed by the company’s products and history. Go inside and see the cost-cutting-driven engineering failures. My business partner and I once did some Anthrax testing at an Israeli national lab. Our host brought out a vaccination strain to test. The day after our visit, he called to say that we had accidentally been working with live Anthrax. We had been sitting in his office, not in the Level 3 biolab down the hall. Accidents happen in science, and China is no place to expect Swiss lab protocols.