Dr. Makary gives an excellent summary of the egomaniacal depravity of Anthony Fauci, but I would like to put a finer, and admittedly less eloquent, point on it.
Dr. Fauci is one of the most fundamentally evil human beings to walk the earth in the last century. If a dictator did the things he did- suppress fundamental human rights, drive children to levels of despair and suicidality unknown before in the western world, create cult like behavior among his followers, and seek to destroy the careers and lives of his critics, we would call them a maniac. Why is this descriptor inappropriate for Fauci? The short answer is, it isn’t.
I don’t know that the destruction he has wrought (both tangible and intangible) will be fully understood for some time, but one thing is for certain...faith in medical institutions in the US will be lost for a generation at least. Nobody who lived through Covid will forget, nor should they.
I pray that Rand Paul and Republicans in Congress grow a spine for once and do not give Fauci another peaceful day for the rest of his time on earth. His name should be turned to mud to such a degree that anyone who shares his last name, whether related or not, wants to change it because there has been such a pall cast over it.
Makary seems all too kind. One does not have to dig very deep into Fauci to find the ugly. Gain of function research. Horrifying experiments on dogs. And I don't see many people having anything kind to say about his approach to AIDS.
I find his attempts to avoid any blame for the harmful Covid responses based on his advice disgusting at best and near-criminal at worst. People in government did things because HE told them to. And when his assertions were questioned (which is the way science is done), he made sure the questioners were silenced.
I've met (mercifully few) medical doctors with a "God complex," but the insistence that he was "The Science" really takes the cake.
I am one of the physicians who signed the Great Barrington Declaration and one who used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat adult patients, although admittedly a very small cohort. I am glad that Science is retiring, although that begs the question as to why the vast majority of doctors abdicated their responsibilities to evaluate and honestly report on treatments that appeared to show promise - political pressure from The Swamp notwithstanding. Their job, and their sworn duty, per that dead white guy Hippocrates, is to take care of their patients; why didn't they do that?
Now I see that some medical schools are lowering their standards in the name of "equity." When I was a medical student I had the same conversation with the Associate Dean, Dr. David Z. Morgan, may he rest in peace. When I asked him if the school would lower its standards to accommodate calls for "diversity," his comment was that if forced by politicians to lower standards, he and the dean had agreed they would publicly shut down the school. Where are men such as these?
Fauci is another in a long line of public officials and politicians for whom there is no accountability. It's the result of politics as cult of personality and the public's constant yearning to feel they have it all figured out, and national media that is more that happy to indulge that delusion. If you decide that a figure like Obama or Fauci is right about a serious social issue such as health care or responding to a pandemic then every criticism must be born of ignorance - the Fox News syndrome. Pretty soon, to admit any fault would mean the whole house of cards collapses, which is why we are all now being treated to national news stories about Fauci as the tireless public servant.
If Fauci knew that Covid-19 was being studied at the Wuhan lab, then why did he actively deny and push back against even the mere possibility of a lab leak origin in the initial months of the pandemic? This is a simple question that most anyone who still trusts Fauci has never been asked, or at least never seriously considered.
You lost me when you described him as kind and gentle. Perhaps he seems that way to a colleague he esteems. He is a well known narcissist and bully. Anyone who ever worked on the 7th floor in building 31 knows this. I watched him bring my boss at the Office of Policy analysis to tears. He’s many things, but kind and gentle ain’t it.
I am grateful for Dr. Makary. His voice was one I listened to during this ordeal. It will be years before we truly understand the harm caused by the draconian measures prescribed by Dr. Fauci. IMO the damage this one man has done is incalculable. I was 60 when this started. I don’t have any health issues, not overweight, no high blood pressure, not even high cholesterol, just some arthritis. I decided to wait before getting the vaccine. I was fearful of the rush to embrace it despite all the assurances. All I wanted was time to see how everything played out before I signed up for, what appeared to me to be, mass hysteria. I hadn’t anticipated the demonizing of anyone who thinks outside the box….a quality valued once upon a time. Our boob President Biden, with the assistance of big tech and MSM, painted a white strip down the backs of all of those who did. Just like Fauci and Collins did to the Great Barrington Declaration. If you read the Declaration you will understand how much sense it made. The price I paid, while not as high as losing my job or educational learning, was among family, friends, colleagues, and associations. I was banned from everything and whispered about because I was “one of those”. Many well intentioned people took me aside and “for my own good” lectured me on my choice and then scorned me, others just scorned me. I will not forget! I will never ever consider what comes out of the CDC or any of our other politicized institutions, which means just about all of them, to be anything I should put stock in. As for my friends and family who followed all this garbage, well, let’s say they’re on the bottom of my Christmas card list.
Wow - just wow. Fauci & Co., especially Twitter, Facebook and other social media created one of the weirdest, frenetic & hyperbolic moments in my six plus decades. It was odd and distressing and seemingly much of it unnecessary. Another thing not mentioned in this overview is that 78% of deaths occurred in obese people but there was never a campaign to educate the public about this. Instead, we get left leaning magazines like Vogue (and it’s crazed editor Anna Wintour) and Sports Illustrated flaunting super fat women on the covers. This was pervasive in most media. Given that obesity was an obvious co-morbidity, this move by the liberal media was weird & Dystopian. Shame on Fauci and them all.
My children will never trust the medical establishment and their lofty pronouncements ever again, due in large part to this man. They learned that the world can loose its mind, that common sense and reason can leave the room, and that whole systems (school districts, universities, rec departments, corporations and nonprofits, etc.) can adhere to rules and mandates that fly in the face of logic and tradition. They learned that prominence and popularity and titles and credentials don’t create wisdom or justify authority. I’m grateful that these lessons were learned and proud of how my kids have come out the other side. I hope they learn too that people like Dr. Fauci are held accountable and forced to face the consequences of their poor and demonstrably damaging “guidance”. I fear instead that they will learn instead that all of these actors, and those in the future as well, will never be held to account for the destruction they caused.
Another victim of the closures were mainstream churches. The more conservative, larger churches thrived because they remained open. Our church lost many members who have found it is just easier not to attend and I honestly think it was a dereliction of duty to restrict access to our houses of worship. (I want to make it clear, that this was a policy of the national/state church who followed CDC guideance- not state imposed.) People didn't HAVE to attend if they were nervous, but basically locking us out was never a good idea, especially during a time of international crisis. But I absolutely agree that the school closures were the worst idea with the most far reaching terrible effects.
Dr. Makary has been a beacon of reason and sense since the start of the pandemic.
I think Anthony Fauci - and many, many, many like him, all over the world - are fundamentally emotional and flawed human beings. What they did was allow their own primal fears of COVID-19 to overtake their rational thinking and completely overrun their obligations to the public they serve
It is for this reason that Fauci sacrificed children and ignored obvious science around natural immunity and so on. His entire decision making was driven by fear; his own. Hundreds of public health officials around the globe were the same - abject cowards above all else
The words of Jordan Peterson ring very true here: "if you thought tough men are dangerous wait until you see what weak men are capable of"
The reference to George Washington is timely. For some time now I’ve made same point, not just in reference to dictators like Putin and Xi, but especially toward Angela Merkel, who spearheaded the denuclearization of, and thus the dependence on Russian gas, of Germany. Germany’s industrial heartland is now shutting down. Any human in power for a long time starts thinking of their own legacy and place in history. Grandiosity. Surround themselves with toadies who echo back Amens. They believe their own BS. They get comfortable arrogantly wielding power. Fauci is no different.
Ever consider how many who proclaim their belief in science do not believe in the scientific method? In a free society, questioning and challenging should be part of everyone's DNA. Those who quash dissent make clear where they stand when it comes to freedom. Note that freedom and democracy are not the same tjing especially today when you hear the phrase "majority rule."
I can barely read this article without wanting to spit nails. Where were you two years ago when those who chose to be unvaccinated were reviled and excluded. When pharmacists refused your doctor’s prescription for Ivermectin or Hydroxychloriquin? When the VAERS numbers just kept climbing and no main stream media would touch it? When people pointed fingers at their neighbors for not wearing a worthless mask? When anyone thinking that early intervention was a conspiracy theorist.
If Robert Kennedy is right, Fauci’s “monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus” is is ONLY play from AIDS to COVID and science is not the basis. Some kind of monomaniacal power play is.
The man should be stripped of his pension if not tried for crimes against humanity!
I don’t claim to know what Fauci thinks, but I’ve found that it’s generally useful to look at peoples’ actions and reason backward from them. Fauci and Collins both leapt into the spotlights by claiming to represent “science.” Their recommendations caused mandates that imposed draconian restrictions on society, presumably for its own good.
What kind of people do that? What motivates them? Money and power are usual incentives. My guess is that Fauci and Collins expected Nobel Prizes—or at least nominations. No Prize for work on AIDS, which must have been a bitter pill for Fauci to swallow. This time, by not “letting a crisis go to waste,” would be his time.
And I’d be surprised if significant money didn’t also find its way to them. I hasten to point out that I know none of this—it’s merely guesswork. But they’re guesses entirely consistent with the actions we’ve seen.
Actual science involves proposing and then verifying hypotheses. Or failing to verify them. It’s been said that nothing is quite as ugly as watching a beautiful, magnificent theory being beaten to death by a gang of unruly facts. When theory and data come into conflict, data must prevail: data = facts. What Fauci and Collins did was prevent people from getting usable data. Which means that what they did was about as far from real science as Tarot cards and astrology. Damage done to credibility in real science is immense and likely to have negative impacts for years.
Dr. Makary gives an excellent summary of the egomaniacal depravity of Anthony Fauci, but I would like to put a finer, and admittedly less eloquent, point on it.
Dr. Fauci is one of the most fundamentally evil human beings to walk the earth in the last century. If a dictator did the things he did- suppress fundamental human rights, drive children to levels of despair and suicidality unknown before in the western world, create cult like behavior among his followers, and seek to destroy the careers and lives of his critics, we would call them a maniac. Why is this descriptor inappropriate for Fauci? The short answer is, it isn’t.
I don’t know that the destruction he has wrought (both tangible and intangible) will be fully understood for some time, but one thing is for certain...faith in medical institutions in the US will be lost for a generation at least. Nobody who lived through Covid will forget, nor should they.
I pray that Rand Paul and Republicans in Congress grow a spine for once and do not give Fauci another peaceful day for the rest of his time on earth. His name should be turned to mud to such a degree that anyone who shares his last name, whether related or not, wants to change it because there has been such a pall cast over it.
Goodbye and good riddance...
Makary seems all too kind. One does not have to dig very deep into Fauci to find the ugly. Gain of function research. Horrifying experiments on dogs. And I don't see many people having anything kind to say about his approach to AIDS.
I find his attempts to avoid any blame for the harmful Covid responses based on his advice disgusting at best and near-criminal at worst. People in government did things because HE told them to. And when his assertions were questioned (which is the way science is done), he made sure the questioners were silenced.
I've met (mercifully few) medical doctors with a "God complex," but the insistence that he was "The Science" really takes the cake.
I am one of the physicians who signed the Great Barrington Declaration and one who used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat adult patients, although admittedly a very small cohort. I am glad that Science is retiring, although that begs the question as to why the vast majority of doctors abdicated their responsibilities to evaluate and honestly report on treatments that appeared to show promise - political pressure from The Swamp notwithstanding. Their job, and their sworn duty, per that dead white guy Hippocrates, is to take care of their patients; why didn't they do that?
Now I see that some medical schools are lowering their standards in the name of "equity." When I was a medical student I had the same conversation with the Associate Dean, Dr. David Z. Morgan, may he rest in peace. When I asked him if the school would lower its standards to accommodate calls for "diversity," his comment was that if forced by politicians to lower standards, he and the dean had agreed they would publicly shut down the school. Where are men such as these?
Fauci is another in a long line of public officials and politicians for whom there is no accountability. It's the result of politics as cult of personality and the public's constant yearning to feel they have it all figured out, and national media that is more that happy to indulge that delusion. If you decide that a figure like Obama or Fauci is right about a serious social issue such as health care or responding to a pandemic then every criticism must be born of ignorance - the Fox News syndrome. Pretty soon, to admit any fault would mean the whole house of cards collapses, which is why we are all now being treated to national news stories about Fauci as the tireless public servant.
If Fauci knew that Covid-19 was being studied at the Wuhan lab, then why did he actively deny and push back against even the mere possibility of a lab leak origin in the initial months of the pandemic? This is a simple question that most anyone who still trusts Fauci has never been asked, or at least never seriously considered.
You lost me when you described him as kind and gentle. Perhaps he seems that way to a colleague he esteems. He is a well known narcissist and bully. Anyone who ever worked on the 7th floor in building 31 knows this. I watched him bring my boss at the Office of Policy analysis to tears. He’s many things, but kind and gentle ain’t it.
I am grateful for Dr. Makary. His voice was one I listened to during this ordeal. It will be years before we truly understand the harm caused by the draconian measures prescribed by Dr. Fauci. IMO the damage this one man has done is incalculable. I was 60 when this started. I don’t have any health issues, not overweight, no high blood pressure, not even high cholesterol, just some arthritis. I decided to wait before getting the vaccine. I was fearful of the rush to embrace it despite all the assurances. All I wanted was time to see how everything played out before I signed up for, what appeared to me to be, mass hysteria. I hadn’t anticipated the demonizing of anyone who thinks outside the box….a quality valued once upon a time. Our boob President Biden, with the assistance of big tech and MSM, painted a white strip down the backs of all of those who did. Just like Fauci and Collins did to the Great Barrington Declaration. If you read the Declaration you will understand how much sense it made. The price I paid, while not as high as losing my job or educational learning, was among family, friends, colleagues, and associations. I was banned from everything and whispered about because I was “one of those”. Many well intentioned people took me aside and “for my own good” lectured me on my choice and then scorned me, others just scorned me. I will not forget! I will never ever consider what comes out of the CDC or any of our other politicized institutions, which means just about all of them, to be anything I should put stock in. As for my friends and family who followed all this garbage, well, let’s say they’re on the bottom of my Christmas card list.
Wow - just wow. Fauci & Co., especially Twitter, Facebook and other social media created one of the weirdest, frenetic & hyperbolic moments in my six plus decades. It was odd and distressing and seemingly much of it unnecessary. Another thing not mentioned in this overview is that 78% of deaths occurred in obese people but there was never a campaign to educate the public about this. Instead, we get left leaning magazines like Vogue (and it’s crazed editor Anna Wintour) and Sports Illustrated flaunting super fat women on the covers. This was pervasive in most media. Given that obesity was an obvious co-morbidity, this move by the liberal media was weird & Dystopian. Shame on Fauci and them all.
My children will never trust the medical establishment and their lofty pronouncements ever again, due in large part to this man. They learned that the world can loose its mind, that common sense and reason can leave the room, and that whole systems (school districts, universities, rec departments, corporations and nonprofits, etc.) can adhere to rules and mandates that fly in the face of logic and tradition. They learned that prominence and popularity and titles and credentials don’t create wisdom or justify authority. I’m grateful that these lessons were learned and proud of how my kids have come out the other side. I hope they learn too that people like Dr. Fauci are held accountable and forced to face the consequences of their poor and demonstrably damaging “guidance”. I fear instead that they will learn instead that all of these actors, and those in the future as well, will never be held to account for the destruction they caused.
Another victim of the closures were mainstream churches. The more conservative, larger churches thrived because they remained open. Our church lost many members who have found it is just easier not to attend and I honestly think it was a dereliction of duty to restrict access to our houses of worship. (I want to make it clear, that this was a policy of the national/state church who followed CDC guideance- not state imposed.) People didn't HAVE to attend if they were nervous, but basically locking us out was never a good idea, especially during a time of international crisis. But I absolutely agree that the school closures were the worst idea with the most far reaching terrible effects.
Dr. Makary has been a beacon of reason and sense since the start of the pandemic.
I think Anthony Fauci - and many, many, many like him, all over the world - are fundamentally emotional and flawed human beings. What they did was allow their own primal fears of COVID-19 to overtake their rational thinking and completely overrun their obligations to the public they serve
It is for this reason that Fauci sacrificed children and ignored obvious science around natural immunity and so on. His entire decision making was driven by fear; his own. Hundreds of public health officials around the globe were the same - abject cowards above all else
The words of Jordan Peterson ring very true here: "if you thought tough men are dangerous wait until you see what weak men are capable of"
The reference to George Washington is timely. For some time now I’ve made same point, not just in reference to dictators like Putin and Xi, but especially toward Angela Merkel, who spearheaded the denuclearization of, and thus the dependence on Russian gas, of Germany. Germany’s industrial heartland is now shutting down. Any human in power for a long time starts thinking of their own legacy and place in history. Grandiosity. Surround themselves with toadies who echo back Amens. They believe their own BS. They get comfortable arrogantly wielding power. Fauci is no different.
Ever consider how many who proclaim their belief in science do not believe in the scientific method? In a free society, questioning and challenging should be part of everyone's DNA. Those who quash dissent make clear where they stand when it comes to freedom. Note that freedom and democracy are not the same tjing especially today when you hear the phrase "majority rule."
I can barely read this article without wanting to spit nails. Where were you two years ago when those who chose to be unvaccinated were reviled and excluded. When pharmacists refused your doctor’s prescription for Ivermectin or Hydroxychloriquin? When the VAERS numbers just kept climbing and no main stream media would touch it? When people pointed fingers at their neighbors for not wearing a worthless mask? When anyone thinking that early intervention was a conspiracy theorist.
If Robert Kennedy is right, Fauci’s “monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus” is is ONLY play from AIDS to COVID and science is not the basis. Some kind of monomaniacal power play is.
The man should be stripped of his pension if not tried for crimes against humanity!
I don’t claim to know what Fauci thinks, but I’ve found that it’s generally useful to look at peoples’ actions and reason backward from them. Fauci and Collins both leapt into the spotlights by claiming to represent “science.” Their recommendations caused mandates that imposed draconian restrictions on society, presumably for its own good.
What kind of people do that? What motivates them? Money and power are usual incentives. My guess is that Fauci and Collins expected Nobel Prizes—or at least nominations. No Prize for work on AIDS, which must have been a bitter pill for Fauci to swallow. This time, by not “letting a crisis go to waste,” would be his time.
And I’d be surprised if significant money didn’t also find its way to them. I hasten to point out that I know none of this—it’s merely guesswork. But they’re guesses entirely consistent with the actions we’ve seen.
Actual science involves proposing and then verifying hypotheses. Or failing to verify them. It’s been said that nothing is quite as ugly as watching a beautiful, magnificent theory being beaten to death by a gang of unruly facts. When theory and data come into conflict, data must prevail: data = facts. What Fauci and Collins did was prevent people from getting usable data. Which means that what they did was about as far from real science as Tarot cards and astrology. Damage done to credibility in real science is immense and likely to have negative impacts for years.
Fauci and his gang could not have achieved such total and disastrous control without the full complicity of the tech companies.
These ignorant fools suppressed all dissent, effectively silencing and canceling all who questioned the orthodoxy. They have much to answer for.
Moderate, temperate comments. A lot harsher review of what has been done by the people in power over the past thirty months is fully justified.