I Hate Anthony Fauci

And you should too.

The New York Times

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I’m currently working on a post about the sham Trump trial and its significance, but I’m going to let it sit for a moment and digest everything a bit more.

Anthony Fauci testified today before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the government’s pandemic response. I haven’t had a chance to watch more than a few clips posted online, but was unsurprised to see that, as an expert prevaricator, Fauci engaged in the same infuriating equivocation that he always employs when questioned—though there were still some inadvertent admissions and confirmations.

Rather than focusing on these, however, I wanted to spotlight recent revelations found in transcripts of congressional testimony Fauci gave earlier this year, which were released by the House subcommittee ahead of today’s public hearing. I think this is important given that mainstream media scribes — whose raison d'être so often seems to be ensuring America does not have a well-informed citizenry — have predictably devoted minimal coverage to these revelations and used obfuscation and deliberate omissions to soften them.

In the aforementioned testimony, which occurred behind closed doors over the course of two days in January, Fauci admitted there was no evidence supporting the six-foot social distancing rule that supposedly limited the spread of covid.

“You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever,” the pandemic czar testified toward the end of day two.

“Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?” a subcommittee staffer followed up.

“I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do,” Fauci conceded.

Upon further questioning, Fauci said six feet was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”

Fauci in July 2020 vs. January 2024 on the science behind 6 feet of distancing.

Recall that we were assured this directive was based on well-researched scientific studies and understandings. Turns out that the exact opposite was true.

Think about how many times you were told to “trust The Science™.” Think of the self-appointed social-distancing police admonishing you because the distance between you and someone else measured out to less than 72 inches. Think about the extent to which that rule shaped American life.

Four years later, visible reminders remain with us.

The Washington Post

Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, believes it was “probably the single most costly intervention the CDC recommended that was consistently applied throughout the pandemic.”

This idiotic NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) deprived small businesses¹ of their profitability—especially restaurants. As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean write in The Big Fail, “Overall, in 2020, 110,000 American restaurants closed, about 17 percent of the nation’s total, and two and a half million restaurant workers lost their jobs permanently, according to the National Restaurant Association.” Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, co-CEOs and cofounders of Boka Restaurant Group, were forced to shut down their twenty-three Chicago restaurants and laid off more than eighteen hundred employees. “We immediately set up weekly grocery giveaways for everyone, extended everyone’s health care through the summer, and Rob and I then put $100,000 in an employee fund to seed a GoFundMe campaign for our team.” Within three months, the two men were $4 million in the hole.

The social distancing rule also kept people from visiting hospitalized patients, holding the hands of dying loved ones, and attending funerals. It made life miserable in all kinds of different ways. One study noted, “To society, social distancing presents the dangers of increasing social rejection, growing impersonality and individualism, and the loss of a sense of community. It negatively affects learning and growth, and it prevents people from effectively socializing, which is a fundamental human need.” And as I tried to drive home in a recent post, the resulting social isolation² radically exacerbated the opioid epidemic, with overdoses skyrocketing across the country.

And then there were the children. The social distancing nonsense likely had the biggest impact on them despite ample evidence that their risk of developing serious complications from covid was “so low as to be difficult to quantify.”³ Because the vast majority of schools were unable to accommodate six feet of space between students’ desks, virtual education became the norm. Those schools that did stay open often forced students to eat on the ground outdoors whilst separated from one another and not talking, and even made children sit for story time outside in below freezing temperatures:

Speaking of children, during the second day of his testimony Fauci made a similar concession about the lack of scientific evidence to support masking them.

“Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children?” a staffer asked Fauci.

“You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have,” Fauci replied.

In addition to suggesting that the debate on the impact of child masking is still unsettled, Fauci said he’s “not convinced” the school closures his agency supported led to learning loss.

The truth is that it was always understood how masking would affect children. At least 85% of the brain’s development occurs before age 5. Literally every interaction a child has gives instructions to neural connections, and face time is absolutely essential. In educational settings, children practice recognizing expressions from their teachers and classmates in order to learn empathy and social skills. When they begin the process of learning to read, children look at their teacher’s mouth to see how he or she makes new sounds.

And Fauci can pretend to be “unconvinced” about learning loss, but it’s not up for debate anymore. Dozens of studies confirm it. According to researchers at John Hopkins, “children, on average, learned almost nothing in the weeks they received virtual education,” with the effect “particularly pronounced in less educated homes, where the negative effects for children with low-educated parents were 60 percent greater than those from well-educated homes.” Even the mainstream media has acknowledged it.

People should be outraged that there was never any scientific support for social distancing and masking children. And while many people are indeed livid, far too many aren’t.

This has a lot to do with the fact that the arbiters of national political discourse have decided that Fauci’s admissions don’t need to be shared with the public in the same way that such admissions would be disseminated if the figure in question were, say, Donald Trump. It’s also because Fauci remains a deity and the physical manifestation of The Science™ among liberals, an identity he assumed after his fall out with the Trump administration, which was taken as proof by Democrats that the NIH official was the protagonist in the improvisational drama around the pandemic. Upon taking office, Biden elevated Fauci’s public visibility even more, and “America’s doctor” became a canonized avatar representing the idea that, were it not for Orange Hitler and his incompetent administration, the pandemic would have been a more manageable, and even avoidable, event.

But more than anything, I think the studied indifference and affected ignorance many folks are demonstrating stems from the unsettling realization that they weren’t on the Right Side of History™ after all. These people desperately want to forget everything that occurred during the pandemic, and so they’ve resorted to a feigned amnesia, which is far easier than admitting they supported what can only be described as a pathologized-totalitarian science experiment with no off-ramp justified by the calculus of the most risk-averse individuals society has to offer.

They don’t want to admit to fetishizing safety instead of coming to grips with their own mortality, and, rather than demonstrating bare minimum courage in the face of uncertainty, prostrating themselves before the altar of Faucism.

They don’t want to admit that they fell victim to the logical fallacies of argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad auctoritatem, even though our noble public health overlords consistently ruled by fiat on the basis of temporary and often contradictory rules adjusted at their discretion—a hallmark of totalitarian leaders.

They don’t want to admit that they very selfishly showed little to no regard for other measures of wellbeing because maniacal avoidance of infection and obsessive concern with “mitigation measures” narrowed their field of attention, while all those who became victims of these measures — people affected by vaccine side effects, food insecurity, domestic violence, unemployment, etc. — were a complete afterthought and received far less empathy compared to covid victims.

They don’t want to admit that they formed ideological convictions justifying the social discrimination and vilification of those who declined the vaccine; that vaccination became the way to separate the apostates from the believers, the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, reducing an infinite number of complex variables to a grossly simplified moral binary: you were either for saving lives or against it, and anything but full-fledged support of the former position meant you were Bad™.

So, rather than admit, they’ll try — or at least pretend — to forget.

After all, forgetfulness is more palatable than shame.

1. Wall Street Journal: “The pandemic resulted in the permanent closure of roughly 200,000 U.S. establishments above historical levels during the first year of the viral outbreak, according to a study released Thursday by economists at the Fed. In recent years, about 600,000 establishments have permanently closed per year, or about 8.5%, according to the study.”

2. “…loneliness is arguably the number one risk factor for premature mortality. An analysis of 300,000 people in 148 studies found that loneliness is associated with a 50% increase in mortality from any cause, making it comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and much more dangerous than obesity.”

3. It was known very early on during the pandemic that the survival rate for children was 99.995%.