Fauci draws Elon’s ire

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., might have achieved something he never intended. He seems to have given the “Red Pill” (apologies to the Brothers/Sisters Wachowski of Matrix fame) to Elon Musk. Beginning early yesterday morning, Musk revealed more insight into Fauci’s career – or, as Musk clearly sees it, his crimes.

Anthony S. Fauci and his roles

Anthony S. Fauci has served as Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984. More to the point, he played a checkered role in the drama surrounding SARS-CoV-2. As CNAV reminded people two days ago, governments all over the world taught their people an official story that defied logic. Which was: a hapless resident of Wuhan, China, bought a bat at a wet market, made soup out of it, ate it, sickened, and died – but not before spreading this brand new virus to a critical number of other city residents. The disease, so the story went, spread from there.

No serious student of this affair believes that anymore. Dr. Fauci already has a reputation for having used U.S. government funds to run a gain-of-function research program. What became SARS-CoV-2 was part of that. When then-President Barack H. Obama realized how politically damaging any “lab leak” could be, he ordered Fauci to toss the hot potato to someone else. Fauci chose the Chinese, and in particular the Wuhan Institute of Virology – who released it. Did their staff break isolation after the virus broke containment in one of their laboratories? Or did some Minister Without Portfolio (or an unknown portfolio) make a cynical calculation he hoped would advance the goal of making China the Middle Kingdom to Rule the World? We will likely never know.

Marc Andreessen sets the stage

Furthermore, during the last year of the Trump Administration, Dr. Fauci tried to make sure no one would know his role in this affair. The Wet-Market-Bat-Soup Theory became the only theory of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that anyone was permitted even to mention. And that theory held, long enough to crash the economy and somehow cost Trump the election.

Yesterday morning, a Twitter commentator named Marc Andreessen shared a pair of ironic photographs to give his opinion that Anthony S. Fauci has told a pack of lies.

One of the photographs is an image of text defending Fauci:

It is not accurate or fair to say that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and a leading expert on infectious diseases, has ever lied. Dr. Fauci is a highly respected scientist and physician who has spent his career working to improve public health and combat infectious diseases.

Where that text came from, Mr. Andreessen doesn’t say. But the second photograph clearly shows Andreesson’s attitude. It is a screencap of Actor Frank Sinatra, as Major Bennett Marco USA, in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The screencap has this caption:

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Which, as anyone who has watched that movie knows, is absolutely false.

Elon Musk answers with the big reveal

Shortly thereafter, Elon Musk replied with a small thread. Herewith every other tweet in it:

This thread leads with an article that appeared in Newsweek a year ago, quoting new documents suggesting that Fauci was less than truthful in speaking to Congress.

Next Musk includes a link to the Wikipedia biography of Christine Grady, director of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. The problem is: she is married to Dr. Fauci. And as Elon points out, very few people know this.

Next, Elon says the quiet part out loud: gain-of-function research means the weaponization of a wild type. He links to this article by Brittany Bernstein of National Review, dated May 28, 2021. It refers to his 2012 paper arguing that the benefits of gain-of-function research outweigh the risks. The problem is: he never once stated positively what benefit would result from fashioning a wild-type virus into a weapon. So we must assume worst-case. Which is: the benefits to a governing elite outweigh the risks to the rest of us.

Last came the most important revelation relevant to Twitter:

Twitter … had an internal Slack channel unironically called “Fauci Fan Club.”

In closing, he challenges the internal ombudsman’s committee @CommunityNotes to “correct or amend” his thread, as/if appropriate.

Reaction

Reactions vary from outrage to cynicism. Several users recalled and shared other articles pointing to federal funding of gain-of-function research.

And to Fauci’s earlier touting of an anti-malarial to suppress the earlier version of the virus.

To say nothing of the promotion of azidothymdine (AZT) for the treatment of Acquired Immunei Deficiency Syndrome. That treatment proved more lethal than the disease itself.

Rarely someone will actually apologize for Fauci and suggest that opposition to him is politically expedient.

But one user reminded others sharply of Fauci’s funding of experiments on dogs, that caused them unspeakable suffering.

Then we have this tweet, reminding us of Fauci declaiming,

I am the science.

What makes a Dr. Fauci?

Your editor has a medical degree, and trained in pathology and “medical information science” at three institutions for seven years. Toward the end of that training, the death of a New York State Assemblyman’s daughter at the hands of a “house officer” who operated on her after having no sleep for twenty-four hours, prompted the first serious reform in medical training since the raising of housestaff salaries with the Medicare program. From that day forward, for the first time, teaching hospital house staff were subject to workload limits that recall those that apply to truck drivers and commercial pilots. But not before then.

Anthony S. Fauci trained in internal medicine. House officers, or residents, on such services, during the time he trained, often went without sleep for nearly full days. More to the point, they were subject to psychological abuse at the hands of their teachers – The Attendings. In such manner, academic medicine instilled in its students and trainees an arrogance probably no layperson can understand. And perhaps that is still the case. In any event, the idealized vision of medical training one sees in the Doctor Kildare franchise, or the “soap operas” of the latter half of the twentieth century, is not accurate. The novels of Robin Cook, M.D. (The Year of the Intern and especially Coma) present a far more accurate picture. It is ugly as sin – because that’s what medical training is like. Anthony S. Fauci is a product of his environment, no more, no less.

How long has this been going on?

The reference to novels (and motion pictures and television mini-series) like Coma requires a disclaimer. Your editor has never seen an illicit organ-harvesting program like that which Dr. Cook depicted in Coma. But Dr. Fauci’s research recalls the mind-set of the villains in that novel, and the 1978 motion-picture adaptation. The essence of that mind-set is: the sacrifice of some lives is noble if it saves many more lives.

Or at least, that’s what a Dr. Fauci tells himself. In fact, he could never rise to the pinnacle he reached without becoming an initiate into the elite. And they want to wipe out every living soul on the planet, except themselves. Bill Gates, for example, spoke of thinning the ranks of humanity – in a TED Talk, no less.

To get the best sense of how long this has been going on, CNAV recommends Mary Shelley’s original novel, Frankenstein. In that work we have the quintessential warning that some lines of scientific inquiry are better not pursued. Recall the very etymology of the word monster – from moneo, a Latin verb meaning I warn. Mary Shelley warned us, but we did not heed that warning.

For that matter, God Himself warned us even earlier. “Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Adam and Eve ate, and we have been paying for that error ever since. But Dr. Fauci turns a blind eye – he declared himself atheistic. Let us not make that same mistake.