Fauci is a Useful Idiot and Fall Guy for the System he fronted

A few days ago a dear friend, trusted colleague and triple Board Certified medical specialist and follower of this substack texted me: “So? Are you going to write about Fauci?”

She is an excellent clinician and stands apart from most of my friends in medicine. Unlike most doctors, she knows that former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, MD, didn’t do “the best anyone could have done under the circumstances”.

I know that if I pushed her to explain what he did wrong and why, she wouldn’t be able to respond with any conviction about the specifics. She’s like most of the one million or so doctors in this country—she’s just too busy and exhausted to go down rabbit holes. So we pick sides based on some rough ideas that get refined as the information algorithms learn which posts and articles attract our attention the most. To her credit, she trusts yours truly.

I told her that there were a lot of other people writing about Dr. Fauci. My attention had been on another example of medical misdirection: the preliminary hearing around Tyler Robinson and the stunning information Candace Owens had been sharing from whistleblowers.

On her last livestream which aired July 30, Owens reported that the Emergency Room at Timpanagos hospital where Charlie Kirk had been allegedly shuttled in an SUV by his “security team” had been emptied two hours before Kirk was assassinated. If true this would be the most damning evidence that powerful interests had foreknowledge of the killing and had the power to command a medical center to do their outrageous bidding.

When I was in training at the University of Pennsylvania there were a few times when a large operating room would be prepped for a trauma, with instruments and a surgical technician ready to go at a moments notice. This is happened whenever the POTUS was in town. Our facility, the biggest in the city, was where the President would be brought in a medical emergency. But closing an entire wing of a hospital and moving all the patients and staff to another facility is unprecedented and nonsensical.

There’s no way for any of us to verify this independently. You have trust to either Candace or trust the folks at TPUSA who are hell-bent on putting Tyler Robinson to death for a crime that seems less and less likely that he had the means to pull off. Once again, we are picking sides based on some rough ideas that get refined as time goes on.

Earlier in the week Ms. Owens had been scrutinizing what had been released from the coroner’s report to see if it tracked with basic sense making. Charlie’s left carotid artery and jugular veins had been injured. There were bullet fragments lodged in his cervical spine. These were findings consistent with a gunshot to the left neck. However other things were mentioned: hemorrhaging in both lungs and around the heart. Did this make sense?

No it did not. She properly acknowledged that she did not have medical training and that her opinion couldn’t and shouldn’t be taken as expert opinion. I wrote to her and explained why I thought she was right. She took four minutes on her livestream to read my email to her audience the next day:

As I have repeatedly explained, we as individuals are the ultimate arbiter of validity. We each decide who and what to trust. That is a decision based on our own understanding of what is true/reasonable which is in turn based on other information which we also independently validate in the same way.

The best we can do is to remain curious and attentive to how we reach conclusions. Our job is to hone our intuition.

I am of the opinion that a bullet fired in a downward angle striking one side of the neck could not cause bilateral lung damage AND end up high in the cervical spine. Either the coroner’s report was wrong or something moved at high velocity across his chest and upward.

In case you were unaware, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in a Senate Homeland Subcommittee hearing this week. He was subpoenaed by the panel chair, Senator Rand Paul, MD who has long believed that the former NIAID director hid evidence that SARS-COV2 was the product of gain of function research which his department funded. Prior to exercising his fifth Amendment rights 111 times, Fauci explained why he would be doing so:

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, 'behind bars.'

Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."

The controversy began at the outset. Could a person with a Presidential Pardon retain their right to avoid answering questions from a Congressional committee? My understanding is that he could not.

Fauci also took the liberty to offer an opening statement. Legal experts say that by doing so, he automatically waived his rights under the Fifth Amendment.

The point is, none of that really matters. He could be held in contempt of Congress and get hit with a slap on the wrist in the future. What kind of punishment could be reasonably enforced and endured by an 85 year old man? Certainly not the kind of retribution many are looking for.

Fauci supporters immediately took to legacy media platforms to frame this as a disgusting partisan attack upon one of the greatest medical scientists of all time:

USA Today reports “Fauci praised as ‘hero’ by public health experts after Senate hearing”

The Guardian: “Trump administration needs to stop ‘public harassment’ of Fauci and scientists, open letter says”

Meghna Chakrabarti, host of the popular NPR radio program, ON POINT, wasted no time taking to X to offer her interpretation:

Ironically, an investigatory panel which should, in a rational world help people to come together under a common understanding, is actually widening the divide. Posing questions to Dr. Fauci, according to Ms. Chakrabarti, is “awful treatment” in her book. Interestingly she goes further. This kind of treatment, she says, will drive every qualified health professional from public service.

What?

It seems to me that the unqualified would avoid public service because there may be repercussions if they try to hide indefensible mistakes. What is she suggesting? That qualified health professionals shouldn’t be held accountable or that if Senator Paul would just ask him nicely maybe Dr. Fauci would answer his questions? Is that how it works?

The reality is that both sides have an incomplete understanding of the role this man played during the pandemic. Fauci and his throngs of supporters have argued that he had no authority to enforce mask mandates, school closures, the isolation of dying people from their families, restrictions around travel and public gathering and, of course, Covid shot requirements to work or go to school. Neither did he have the authority to demand that State Boards of Medicine suspend or revoke medical licenses of doctors who exercised their authority to use a fully licensed medicine like Hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid.

They are right.

On the other hand, employers and lawmakers at the state and municipal levels took their guidance from this man, who has admitted that some of the irreproachable science he wielded was not based in any evidence.

I believe that the public and the medical and scientific communities have lost the story around Fauci’s actions and those improperly attributed to him.

One of my physician friends, a surgeon, asked me last week amidst the Fauci testimony (or lack thereof) if I thought the virus came from a lab. This is an old story, but worthwhile to review for those who have forgotten.

It is impossible to prove, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that a virus like SARS-COV2 could not have arisen through natural processes. If this pathogen was created in a lab and was intentionally spread the orchestrators of such a crime will always have (barely) plausible deniability.

However, Dr. Fauci was almost certainly involved in making sure that this highly probable story would never get traction. Fairly incriminating evidence was available way back in 2021 that this was the case.

Let’s follow the timeline. This line of questioning in public discourse was the direct result of a groundbreaking piece on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News way back in May, 2021. Fox picked up a remarkable essay by Nicholas Wade who unleashed a precise and well informed attack on the natural origins theory of the SARS-COV2 virus on the self-publishing site, Medium.

Mr. Wade, author of the piece “Origin of Covid — Following the Clues”, is a journalist who has covered scientific topics for Science and Nature magazines as well as the NYTimes for decades. In this scintillating essay he told the story that researchers like Dr. Alina Chan and a group of unaffiliated scientists and journalists going by the name of DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) have been screaming about since March 2020. Why are we assuming that a virus leapt from another mammalian species into a human host in a wet market in Wuhan province and resulted in a global pandemic within a few weeks when one of the most advanced virology labs in China which happened to be working on bat coronaviruses was also at ground zero?

The reason is in large part due to a seminal article written in Nature Medicine on March 17 2020 by KG Anderson et al that concluded that the virus could not have come from a laboratory. A closer examination into their reasoning reveals a peculiar set of arguments that are, at the very least, non-sensical if not deliberately misleading. This had been pointed out repeatedly for months prior but got little attention as paper after paper continued to cite the Nature Medicine article as the irrefutable last word on the matter, thereby manufacturing a wall of scientific consensus that could never be breached.

But why would a researcher like Kristian Anderson, professor of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps institute make non-sensical assertions about Covid origins in a scientific publication? Why did his co-authors go along with it? I do not have his background or credentials. I am a clinical anesthesiologist, but I could see the ‘bunk’ in his debunking article.

Anderson et al essentially argued that the virus did not, based on computer modeling, optimally bind with the human ACE II receptor. Thus, they claimed, it was not a product of human design or tinkering. The authors of the paper assure us that if it was a weapon it would have been designed for maximal effect.

The argument is ridiculous. Biological weapon designers would explicitly avoid a perfect fit—the very sign Anderson attributes to human engineering. The whole point of biological weapons is to weaken a population without leaving any fingerprints. The authors of the Proximal Origins paper would have never come to that conclusion of their own.

“Fauci emails” that were released in 2021 under the FOIA hint at what was going on behind the scenes at the time. First, Anderson, whom Dr. Fauci consulted as one of the key experts in the matter, informed him that his team analyzed the virus and had to conclude that parts of the virus look engineered and are “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”.

As of January 31, 2020, it would be fair to say that at this point, he seemed to believe that the virus had been engineered while admitting more analysis was required.

Approximately five weeks later, Anderson addresses Dr. Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins (head of the NIH) and Sir Jeremy Farrar, a British medical researcher but perhaps more importantly, former director of the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation in the UK focused on mental health, climate and infectious diseases with a 26 billion dollar endowment. Anderson expresses his gratitude for their advice and “leadership” around the infamous paper in Nature Medicine that was soon to be published:

There is no smoking gun here however it seems that Fauci’s hand picked experts on the topic seemed to agree that lab origins was the most plausible theory at the end of January. Five weeks later, with “advice and leadership” from Fauci, Collins and Farrar they changed their tune and proceeded to publish a paper that definitively concluded the opposite position: the virus did not come from a lab. What kind of “advice” would three physician administrators offer the team of researchers who were given the final word on the solution to an extremely complicated molecular puzzle that was, for all intents and purposes, a forensic analysis?

In my opinion Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, impelled their own consultants to arrive at a conclusion which would divert attention from the dangerous Gain of Function research which they funded.

Anderson and his team may have been willing to go along with Fauci and Collins’ conception of “the greater good” but why would they expect that the entire medical community would accept this reasoning as reasonable? Fauci did what was necessary to make sure this wouldn’t be a problem. Rather than attempting to argue the merits of the specious argument in the “Proximal Origins” paper, he instead did what would work: constantly and publicly accuse anyone who challenged his own experts’ conclusion as a conspiracy theorist.

Dr. Fauci got what he wanted. The world bought an indefensible theory while never taking responsibility for it.

Later that year, in October of 2020, former NIH Director Francis Collins, directs Fauci to bring his attention to the “fringe” epidemiologists who authored the Great Barrington Declaration:

One of those fringe epidemiologists, is, of course, the present NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya. Collins calls for a “quick and devastating” take down of a different approach to the pandemic.

Fauci and Collins continued the exchange over the next few days. Those email exchanges have been heavily redacted. Fauci proudly reported to his boss at the NIH that the “take down” was underway. (I can’t seem to find that specific email)

The important point here is that the GBD was a widely supported approach to the pandemic which involved the isolation and treatment of the most vulnerable while letting the majority of the population continue to participate in society, knowing that the infection was highly survivable and would result in broad and enduring natural immunity in the public. In other words, if adopted, this plan would have kept the world open. Businesses would not have shut down, jobs would not have been lost and holiday dinners between loved ones would have continued.

This is perhaps the greatest misdeed that Dr. Fauci directly participated in. Early on in the pandemic, in the summer of 2020, Fauci attacked the possibility that an old, cheap and well known licensed medication, Hydroxychloroquine could effectively treat Covid-19.

It was known that the disease caused by SARS-COV2 had three predictable stages: viral replication, inflammatory response and clotting. It was already well established that HCQ suppressed RNA virus replication, that it was a potent anti-inflammatory (it’s a go to drug for autoimmune disorders like Rheumatoid Arthritis) and that it was an anticoagulant. It was the ideal medicine to treat Covid-19. The idea that it wouldn’t work, at some level, would be astounding.

While Fauci demanded that properly powered, randomized placebo control trials for HCQ were required before he would sanction the drug, he instead insisted that Remdesivir, an expensive IV medicine with a questionable safety and efficacy profile be the mainstay of treatment.

Why insist on such rigorous proof in the middle of a viral outbreak when no vaccine was yet available? It was because the Emergency Use Authorization for any countermeasure (i.e. modRNA products) would only be in effect if there were no proven efficacious alternatives. If HCQ was shown to work it would obviate the need for a vaccination campaign.

Legacy media had a field day with the dangers of HCQ immediately after the Lancet, still presently considered to be one of the most venerated medical journals, published this paper purportedly demonstrating not just no effect, but harm in HCQ recipients treated for Covid-19.

The data used by the authors was falsified and the paper was retracted two weeks later. This was astonishing to any familiar with medical research and its publication. The authors made up data, drew conclusions from it and got it published in one of the biggest medical journals in the world? How could such a medical journal not verify the validity of the data used in such a massive trial before it was published? What happened to peer-review? Could it have been done on purpose?

The damage was done. The media refused to acknowledge that the HCQ story they ran was wrong. The only way the media juggernaut could be stopped was if someone with Dr. Fauci’s stature brought attention to the “mixup”. Fauci remained mum and the damage caused by Remdesivir is still yet to be quantified. Meanwhile patients treated with sanctioned and harmful protocols continued to die in hospitals driving fear among the public and softening them up for what was to come next: modRNA “vaccines”.

Such an assertion will irritate both those who regard him as the mastermind of a global depopulation agenda as well as those who continue to view him as a brilliant scientist and clinician who saved millions of lives at a crucial moment in our history. Call him good, call him evil, but never call him dumb.

Obviously he isn’t dumb. He is a useful idiot, which connotes something different. He was part of a bigger operation of which he himself may not have been completely aware.

To those who regard Fauci as a modern day Josef Mengele because he knowingly exaggerated the risk of Covid as well as the safety and efficacy of the shots, why would he receive the primary series and several boosters? Was it all just a show for the public? Did he get a saline injection for the cameras? Maybe. But according to the public record he contracted Covid-19 a total of three times (twice in 2022 and once in July, 2024) despite having received a total of four boosters. If anything, he served as a good example for the modRNA skeptics.

He’s not the only giant in the establishment who we know readily took the jabs. Dr. Greg Poland, head of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, was very public about his Covid vaccine injury, tinnitus, which he described as “extraordinarily bothersome” in my face to face conversation with him three years ago. Rather than eschew more shots, Poland was a good soldier and trudged onward, showing up on schedule for his appointment with a booster.

The point is, these doctors and leaders in their fields actually believed in the therapy they exhorted the rest of us to accept despite their own poor experience with them. They modeled proper behavior and compliance for millions while remaining clueless to what was transpiring right in front of them.

They were useful idiots. But to whom? I don’t know exactly, but clearly it was to those way above Fauci’s pay grade. The pandemic response was driven by the big dogs within the National Security Council (NSC).

Sasha Latypova and Debbie Lerman summarize the bigger picture here:

https://sashalatypova.substack.com/cp/145279572

Writes Lerman:

“In fact, we know from the official U.S. government pandemic planning documents, that the pandemic response policy was actually not set by these public health figures at all. It was determined by the National Security Council — the advisory board to the President of the United States on matters of national security. Not a public health board. A group of military and intelligence people who advise about war and terrorism. They were in charge.”

The idea that the pandemic response was orchestrated by people in uniform and not lab coats or scrubs is hard for most people to accept. I can understand why you might not believe the receipts that Sasha and Debbie have found. In this piece I outline why I believe them: our pandemic policies from the outset were illogical and became increasingly deranged. Such wacky strategies can only be conjured up and rationalized by people whose business requires them to regard collateral damage as an unavoidable part of public health and a human life as a data point.

My brief summary of their must-read Covid Dossier:

Do you know who Alex Azar is? I will give you a hint. The name of the person who has his job today is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Azar was the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump 1.0 administration. He, like many HHS Secretaries, have deep ties to the Pharma industry. Azar is an attorney and was the president of Eli Lily’s US Division for years before taking charge of public health in this country in 2018.

One might wonder why it would be a good idea to have someone like him in charge of the HHS during the early days of the pandemic. Azar has no medical or science training. Perhaps that is why he quietly made one of the most indefensible and egregious public health policy decisions.

On February 4, 2020 Azar used his unique authority as the HHS Secretary to make a PREP (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness) act declaration with regard to SARS-COV2. He deemed this virus a threat to our nation’s security before there was a single death from the virus in this country and only a few hundred in the entire world, nearly all of them in mainland China. The declaration automatically granted those involved in the design, procurement and deployment of countermeasures (i.e. modRNA therapies) immunity from any liability from any damages resulting from the use of such countermeasures.

Notice the timing of the declaration: February 4, 2020. Less than a week after Fauci’s team of crack virologists let him know that it seemed like this virus was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”.

Are you putting it together now? Azar didn’t have any training to make such a determination. The situation as reported did not call for such a drastic decision. The public was barely aware of the threat (real or not) Covid posed at the time but according to our own government we were facing a threat to National Security? Why didn’t we hear about it? Azar didn’t decide to do this. He was told to. He was compliant. He was another useful idiot.

My point is that useful idiots abound in the Covid story. They were the ones on the evening news and cited by the journalists at NPR and USA Today. These include the “experts” at various academic institutions who regurgitated the same story from the same perspective handed to them from the useful idiots above them. They were the ones who never read Anderson’s “Proximal Origins” paper but ridiculed those who challenged it.

Fauci got his fame. He got his awards. He made his money. He got his pension. He received his Presidential Pardon for any of his actions going back to 2014 when gain of function research was officially banned in this country. And now, instead of exposing the strings which pulled him and public health the good doctor has chosen to respectfully remain silent and protect the system that was really in control.

Senator Hawley (R-MO): “What day of the week is it?”

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

I personally have little interest in the fate of Anthony Fauci or even if he will be repentant. I believe he will go to his grave believing he did the right thing and his legacy was marred by partisan politics and mudslingers who had no business challenging his expertise and experience. I am interested in how he will be remembered. How will trust between the public and the medical establishment be affected by his choice to remain silent? Recall that he explained why he was not going to answer any questions: he didn’t want to say something that might put him behind bars.

Pleading the Fifth is not an admission of guilt. However you do not have to worry about saying anything incriminating if you’ve have been truthful to that point.

He could have admitted that Covid-19 could have been the result of gain of function research and in retrospect, should have called for an open investigation into this possibility as well as a world-wide moratorium on such research. He didn’t.

He could have admitted that using repurposed drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin was a reasonable strategy and supported their use until we knew more. He didn’t.

He could have admitted that an open discussion around alternative pandemic strategies like the GBD would have been worthwhile at the time and should have supported that approach in select areas to see how it worked. He didn’t.

He could have proven himself to be a true scientist, one who invites discussion and challenges so that better solutions can be reached. He didn’t.

Already protected by a Presidential pardon, he could have earnestly answered questions put to him to restore public trust in medicine. He didn’t.

He will be attacked by many for not responding. He will probably be held in contempt of Congress. He may be slapped with some kind of penalty. The system which inserted his name into conversations across the world for the last few years will let him sweat it out over a few more hearings, outside the scrutiny of the media machine which made him a star.

No, it is not the punishment many are seeking for the man that is Anthony Fauci. But Fauci was more than a career researcher and government bureaucrat; he was the trusted face of a system of institutions, funding, laws, policies and agency capture that drove the pandemic response and shielded those materially involved from rebuke and legal action for their errors, intentional or not. He faced some rebuke at the hearing last week. He may face legal action in the future, but the system suffered little if anything. He is the fall guy for that system.

His biggest critic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who would have been his boss’s boss had he not retired, has still not rescinded the PREP act declaration around SARS-COV2. Like Alex Azar, Kennedy serves at the pleasure of other forces.

But by pleading the Fifth Dr. Fauci protected himself and the system he fronted by sacrificing the integrity of “the science” which is ultimately earned not only through its achievements but through its own accountability. I would like to believe that through his refusal to answer any and all questions Anthony Fauci has opened the door for a real reformation of the system to happen. Once the system has been shown to be above accountability, trust in it will be lost. With trust depleted its sway over public opinion will be lost.

Are you more likely to trust a medical professional who believes this man is being unjustly attacked or that he, out of cowardice and self-importance missed an opportunity to restore transparency at a time when it is needed more than ever?

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