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| DATE | 2022-12-02 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Faucci's credibility problem...
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/public-distrust-of-health-officials-is-anthony-faucis-legacy-covid-pandemic-chinese-lab-mask-mandates-misinformation-disinformation-11669566642?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_165&cx_artPos=4&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s
Public Distrust of Health Officials Is Anthony Fauci’s Legacy
He presented his judgment as beyond reproach, while consistently
flip-flopping and silencing dissent.
Allysia Finley hedcutBy Allysia FinleyFollow
Nov. 27, 2022 3:36 pm ET
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Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks during a press briefing at the White House,
Nov. 22.
PHOTO: PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Anthony Fauci gave his final press conference last week as head of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has
held since 1984. Regrets about how he handled the Covid-19 pandemic? He
had a few, but too few to mention.
Asked how “dubious” public-health advice from the Trump White House
affected progress during the pandemic, Dr. Fauci boasted: “Well, you
remember, if you were around, that at this podium I contradicted those,
which set off a whole series of things in my life.”
He added: “The people who have correct information, who take science
seriously, who don’t have strange, way-out theories about things but who
base what they say on evidence and data need to speak up more, because
the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and
disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”
“Strange, way-out theories”? You can only guess whom he had in
mind—those who argued Covid likely leaked from a Chinese lab, opposed
lockdowns in favor of focusing protection on the most vulnerable,
questioned the “science” of mask mandates, and said schools should
remain open since children were at low risk of illness.
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Dr. Fauci said he wants to be remembered for his work on infectious
diseases, such as HIV and Ebola, prior to the pandemic. “Although Covid
is really, really very important, it is a fragment of the total 40 years
that I’ve been doing it.” Alas, Dr. Fauci’s legacy will be marred by his
divisive and arrogant leadership on that really, really very important
fragment.
Start with his dissembling on masks. When the virus began to spread in
the U.S., he advised that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a
mask.” He later reversed himself and acknowledged his earlier guidance
was based on worries that there wouldn’t be enough masks for healthcare
workers. In other words, he told an expedient lie.
Weeks later he endorsed universal masking even though studies showed
cloth masks don’t protect against other respiratory viruses and there
was little evidence they would do so against Covid. Over time it became
clear that Covid was spreading through aerosols, tiny particles that
cloth and surgical masks do a poor job of filtering out.
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So Dr. Fauci recommended double masking, for which there was scant
evidence. “If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put
another layer on—it just makes common sense that it likely would be more
effective,” he told NBC News’s TODAY.
Yet common sense also suggested lockdowns wouldn’t work. When China
locked down its Wuhan region in January 2020, Dr. Fauci expressed doubts
in an interview with CNN: “Historically, when you shut things down, it
doesn’t have a major effect.”
Here, too, Dr. Fauci swiftly reversed his position. The initial call by
Trump public-health officials for “15 days to slow the spread” in March
2020 stretched into two years as Dr. Fauci invoked one virus flare-up
after another to argue for keeping public restrictions.
Some scientists in fall 2020 offered an alternative strategy of “focused
protection” for the elderly and high-risk patients in a document called
the Great Barrington Declaration. “Adopting measures to protect the
vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to
COVID-19,” it read. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be
allowed to resume life as normal.”
Dr. Fauci worked with then-National Institutes of Health Director
Francis Collins to “take down” the declaration. “This proposal from the
three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of
attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt
at Stanford,” Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci in an email. “There needs
to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” he
continued. The two subsequently did multiple media interviews denouncing
the strategy in an effort to chill debate. “It’s nonsense,” Dr. Fauci
told ABC.
Dr. Fauci also dismissed the hypothesis that the virus leaked from a
lab, perhaps to protect his agency, which helped fund gain-of-function
virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Researchers who have
studied the virus’s genetic sequence say it most likely leaked from the
lab, but without assistance from China this may be impossible to prove.
Yet in an interview with Wired magazine this month, Dr. Fauci implied
that those who disagree are ignorant or malicious: “I believe that
anybody who studies this situation can’t in good conscience say that the
lab leak is the most likely explanation.” During last week’s press
conference, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slapped down
reporters who asked Dr. Fauci about the virus’s origins and lab-leak
investigation.
How dare anyone question Dr. Fauci’s expertise and judgment? If you
don’t agree with him, you don’t believe in science. “It’s easy to
criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent
science. That’s dangerous,” Dr. Fauci asserted last November. But open
debate and inquiry is the essence of the scientific method.
Like all of us, Dr. Fauci is a mere mortal who has character flaws,
hubris most of all. He presented himself as infallible. Many liberals
all but worshiped him. His high-handedness and lack of candor with the
public sowed distrust in health officials and vaccines. No matter how
much he pleads to the contrary, that will be his legacy.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
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Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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