COVID revisited
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Anthony Fauci Is Not the Villain in This Story
If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.
But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.
Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.
Gift link to Atlantic.
The Fauci hearing was a disaster. I think that Rand Paul has no interest in really looking at what happened during the pandemic. He is just trying to persecute Fauci.
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Fetterman had some interesting things to say during the hearing; he asked no questions. Pity he wasn't the one running the show...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/fetterman-fauci-regret-dismissing-lab-130000611.html
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I agree he’s not the villain. Remember Trump gave him an award on his last day in office.
Public health officials are not blameless though. I had this to say next door. Fauci’s personal involvement varies over the four.
I don’t blame him for the evolving messaging as we learned more. I don’t blame him for recommending lockdowns, public health officials are by nature conservative.
I blame him and other public health officials for four things, which ultimately hurt them and their credibility.
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The proximal origins paper and the actions around it which seem to have been designed to stigmatize even the discussion of a lab leak origin.
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The ‘regulatory bank shots’ where they tell you a lie so that you’ll behave in a way they want you to (eg early advice to not buy masks which they later reversed when supply chains recovered)
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The exceptions to Covid restrictions granted for approved political purposes. That ruined their credibility for a generation.
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The attempts, only partially thwarted, to prioritize certain races in vaccine distribution even at the cost of net higher deaths as long as those deaths occurred among less favored races.
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We may never get to the bottom of it. It seems too much a coincidence to me that my cousin ended up in hospital in December of 2019 with respiratory problems. His illness, whatever it was--the doctors didn't know--progressed rapidly. He was told he'd be on a respirator for the rest off his life. He was 72ish. He died in January 2020--a month after symptoms appeared. I have never spoken to his wife about it, but the last time I saw her was at his funeral.
Then there are the December 2019 case(s) that appeared in Italy. Even though the official story is that the first US case was documented on Jan. 20, 2020, it seems to me that the virus was making it's way around the world before then. And it seems likely to me that's what my cousin died of.
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