Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) stripped “Mr. Anthony Fauci” of his professional title, as least for the duration of her questioning on the floor of the House, citing the explosive revelation in The New York Post that, “NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide.” The figure cited in the headline refers to royalties paid by pharmaceutical companies to the government agency and its scientists for patents they held on drugs or drug technologies utilized by the companies in developing the Covid vaccines and/or other drugs during the Covid pandemic years.
There is a clear distinction in the article, missing from the headlines, that these royalties were paid, “the agency and its scientists.” In other words, $710 million was not paid out to individual scientists in varying amounts based upon their patent claims. Rather, some portion of the money was paid to the government agency as a whole and some went to individual scientists.
Fauci has previously answered questions from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on this matter, refusing to disclose the full details of the royalty payments, but indicating his personal gain from such payments was nominal. While we don’t know that’s true, one suspects that if the details of the $710 million were fully disclosed, the lion’s share of the money was likely paid to the government and some small portion paid to individual scientists who developed the patents, with no one scientists becoming fabulously wealthy because of them.
But even with this most charitable assumption, there is still a massive problem here. The vaccines these companies developed were mandated by the government. There are plenty of arguments against such mandates without the royalty aspect, but knowing an agency like NIH had a financial incentive to recommend these vaccines for such a mandate is particularly egregious, even if most of the money wasn’t paid to private individuals employed by it.
It is one week until the U.S. mid-term elections and some members of the Regime seem worried that, for once, elections might actually have consequences. The smart money still says that if there is a “red wave” on November 8, Republicans will enter Congress next January and do precisely nothing about what has happened to the American people over the past 32 months. Criticism of the Ukraine War is as likely to be of the “Biden is not tough enough on Putin” variety as it is cutting off the Ukraine Gravy Train to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Still, there are some signs insiders are worried something different may be afoot, as demonstrated by the plea for “amnesty” in The Atlantic by Covid Regime propagandist Emily Oster. According to this alternative reality take, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
No, “we” need do no such thing. The lies, tyranny, and aggression all ran one way during the pandemic – towards those who, it turns out, were never “in the dark.” Whether those mandating lockdowns, masks, and later vaccines were honestly mistaken – “mistaken” seems wholly inadequate here – or acting in bad faith and with malice aforethought should be the subject of a formal investigation.
We have been subjected to six straight years of investigations into hoaxes and hobgoblins, from the nonexistent “Russa collusion” to the inconsequential Ukrainian “quid quo pro” to the farcical “insurrection.” It is past time for an investigation into the real crimes against humanity perpetrated against the American people under the pretense of fighting Covid-19.
Such an investigation would include sworn testimony as to the origins of the virus itself, whether or not data supporting lockdowns and vaccine mandates were knowingly corrupted and/or whether data contraindicating same were knowingly suppressed.
The existence of alternative treatments for Covid would have legally prohibited the issuance of any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid vaccines, developed in record time under the government program known as “Operation Warp Speed.” Were alternative treatments prohibited and their proponents deplatformed to ensure these EUAs could be issued? Did people die who otherwise could have been successfully treated had these alternative treatments been made available?
These questions need to be answered. Both Anthony Fauci and his co-conspirators along with deplatformed experts like Robert Malone, M.D. and Peter MCullough, M.D. must be put under oath and questioned, preferably on live television so the American public can judge for themselves who is telling the truth and who is not.
Throughout 2021, Rep. Thomas Massie publicly asked the CDC to change information on its website indicating the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was effective for those previously infected with Covid-19 because the FDA’s review of Pfizer’s clinical trial data clearly showed it wasn’t (pg. 30). To this writer’s knowledge CDC website was never corrected. The Pfizer vaccine was among those later mandated by President Biden for large swaths of the U.S. workforce.
Massie, those he spoke with at the CDC, and the person(s) responsible for refusing to correct the false claims must be put under oath and questioned. If fraud was committed, charges should follow.
These are just a few of the egregious lies, distortions, and obfuscations perpetrated against the public in support of the Covid Regime. Studies in support of the government mandates were intentionally flawed. Even the integrity of the data has been called into question. Both freedom and the future of science itself depend upon these issues being settled once and for all via an adversarial process with penalties for lying.
The government response to Covid-19 was the most egregious assault on liberty in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever. The U.S. economy is approximately 5 million jobs short of the number that would have been created to employ its growing population had the lockdowns never occurred.
An as yet unknown number of people died as a direct result of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That number must be established and those responsible for the deaths held accountable if the investigation shows they acted in bad faith.
We are constantly regaled with the vapid, “we must ensure this never happens again” after a mass shooting or other tragedy, always in support of new government power that will punish the innocent and do nothing to achieve the stated goal.
For once, that hackneyed appeal is appropriate. What must never happen again is the dystopian nightmare visited upon Americans by their federal, state, and local governments over the past two years. The only way to ensure that is to hold those responsible for it accountable. It is time for due process, not amnesty.
Since early in the pandemic, Americans have been led to believe immunity to Covid-19 acquired from previous infection – to the extent natural immunity has been acknowledged at all – fades after three or four months. Why? Because after that time period, antibodies to the virus are no longer detected in the blood.
That was an immediate red flag for me because that’s not how the immune system works. Antibodies don’t stay in the blood indefinitely after infection or vaccination for any virus. If they did, your blood “would be thick as molasses,” as Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California San Francisco, put it.
Rather, after natural infection or an effective vaccine, your body “remembers” the infection. B cells produce new antibodies upon encountering the same or a similar enough virus again and T cells kill virus-infected cells directly.
Having done my undergraduate and graduate work in English, I’m not sure where I acquired this knowledge. Perhaps it was a high school biology or health class, but the first time I heard Anthony Fauci or another “expert” imply immunity went away with antibodies I knew it was wrong.
I had the same experience when I went to my own physician after testing positive for SARS_COV-2 antibodies in January 2021, following an infection the previous December. The physician’s assistant made the casual statement that I should have antibodies for at least three months and left it there. I had to challenge the statement with, “but that doesn’t mean I no longer have immunity to the disease, right?
How many Americans have simply accepted that immunity goes away with the antibodies produced from the infection?
But in an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC on Sunday, Fauci acknowledged that immunity does not go away simply because antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. He now says it is “quite natural” that antibodies go down after a few months (which it is) but that:
“There is an element of the immune response, B cell memory and T cell responses, where even though you see a diminution of antibody levels, it is quite conceivable, and I hope it’s true, that the third shot boost will give a much greater durability of protection. We’re following that very closely.”
I’m not sure why Fauci believes more durable immunity will be provided by a third shot that was not provided by the first two. He did not elaborate.
We have known since July 2020 that prior infection likely does elicit durable immunity, based on a study published on the NIH website (Fauci’s own agency). That study found that even people infected with the original SARS virus in 2003 had a strong T cell response to SARS_COV_2 seventeen years later. So, there is every reason to believe immunity from natural infection with SARS_COV_2 itself confers the long lasting, durable immunity Fauci hopes a second booster will produce.
So, why the sudden acknowledgment of the way the human immune system really works? We can only speculate. Perhaps Fauci is uncomfortable recommending a fourth dose of mRNA given the light shed on risk by high profile figures like Robert Kennedy and Dr. Robert Malone. He can certainly scoff at them in public and know they’re right in private. Or maybe he’s just reading the room politically and knows Americans are losing patience with the booster shots (and mandates).
Since more people get infected every day (although I’m not sure Omicron infection is relevant here), acknowledging B cell and T cell immunity and hoping to connect them to the vaccines rather than prior infection could be a way out once the Omicron wave is over.
Whatever his motives for telling at least half the truth, no one should listen to this man about anything ever again. Yet, I cringe when I imagine the way historians will treat him and this pandemic. The same schools presently teaching your children the government ended child labor, protected us from “robber barons” and their “monopolies,” or ended segregation – all falsehoods adopted as articles of faith in the progressive religion – will someday teach future children Dr. Fauci and the Covid Regime saved America from a deadly virus.
Strike a blow for freedom. Get your kids out of the school system.
“Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science,” said Anthony Fauci to widespread ridicule or approval, depending upon which side you are on. If you doubt his judgment personally, he’d have you believe, you must not believe in “the science.” Fauci went on to claim that all of the “things he’s talked about” were “fundamentally based on science.”
Let’s put the weasel words aside and recognize that what he wants you to believe – that all his official policy recommendations (“all the things I’ve talked about”) were firmly proven effective through application of the scientific method – is demonstrably false. The most rigorous, most scientific studies show precisely the opposite.
Fauci was a proponent of what has become to be known as “lockdowns,” the widespread closure of businesses and/or stay-at-home orders for the general population. Dozens of studies show this had no demonstrable effect on the spread of Covid-19. As one after another came out, Fauci went on talking about lockdowns as if this evidence did not exist.
Now, there are studies being conducted every day on this or that aspect of Covid-19 and I’m sure Fauci and his supporters can produce links to some that support lockdowns. While there are no absolutes, here is a general observation: the most scientific studies – the randomized controlled trial studies with large sample sizes measuring results in the real world – tend to point towards inefficacy of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs include (anti)social distancing, masks, and lockdowns.
Less scientific studies – those with small sample sizes or based on laboratory experiments rather than experience in the real world – tend to point towards efficacy. Remember the experiment on mannequins wearing masks? You get the picture.
Let’s not forget that early in 2020 Fauci said a study based on a single case of asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 “lays the question to rest.” And guess what? It turned out the patient documented in the case had never been asked if she had symptoms. When it turned out she was symptomatic at the time of transmission, the study was unpublished. Subsequent studies failed to prove asymptomatic spread was significant. A December 2020 study looking at secondary attack rates within the same household – published right on the NIH (Fauci’s agency) website – says it’s miniscule if it exists at all.
Yet, Fauci goes on talking as if this study doesn’t exist. He has no choice. Without asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for lockdowns or mandating masks for asymptomatic people.
On a rare occasion where the largely useless national media confronted Fauci with a question about how Texas could be doing so well four weeks after abandoning all Covid restrictions, he had no answer. “Maybe they’re doing more outside,” he mused. Then, he went on recommending the same policies as if the question had never been posed.
Fauci wasn’t alone. When White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Slavitt was asked why locked down and masked California and restriction-free Florida were having similar results in terms of Covid spread, he began his answer with perhaps the only honest words that have escaped a public health official’s mouth: “There is so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that is just a little bit beyond our explanation.” But then, in literally the same breath, he said we do know masking and social distancing work.
Now, you don’t have to be a trained journalist for the obvious follow-up question to occur to you: “No, Mr. Slavitt, the question I just posed to you suggests we don’t know masking and social distancing work because we are seeing equivalent results in states that are and are not following those policies.”
Of course, that follow-up was not put to Slavitt. And you really have to ask yourself why.
The failure of scientists to be scientific is not a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt directly with the tendency of scientists to reject evidence that contradicts the prevailing theory or “paradigm.”
“Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important,” wrote Kuhn, “can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.”
Kuhn’s overall thesis challenged the prevailing understanding at the time that science proceeds in a linear fashion, with new discoveries incrementally adding to the accumulated knowledge that preceded them. Instead, argued Kuhn, science throughout history has featured a series of revolutions, where paradigms like the geocentric theory of the solar system or Newtonian physics collapsed under the weight of “anomalies” (evidence which contradicted the theory) and made way for new paradigms like the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Einsteinian physics.
There is much nuance in Kuhn’s argument which his critics have tended to ignore, but one takeaway that we’re seeing proved in real time is that these scientific revolutions are only revolutionary because of the tendency for scientists to cling to a theory regardless of evidence that refutes it. Kuhn argues that scientists will not abandon a disproven theory until a new theory is presented that they are convinced explains the evidence better than the old.
What makes the New Normal so strange is that a scientific revolution occurred with no anomalies. It was firmly established by a century of scientific research that nonpharmaceutical interventions weren’t effective in combatting the spread of respiratory viruses. Indeed, Fauci himself initially repeated the established scientific consensus that lockdowns and mask mandates were not effective policy responses. He even discouraged people from voluntarily wearing masks.
Then, he and the rest of the government scientists did a complete about face. There was no new evidence that motivated this. They simply abandoned the prevailing scientific consensus based on a desire to do something – even though the scientific evidence before, during, and after the outbreak of Covid-19 said what they wanted to do wouldn’t work. As a result, there is now a New Normal paradigm based on…nothing.
It should be noted that there were plenty of non-government scientists protesting vehemently right from the beginning. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were already loudly protesting lockdowns as early as April 2020. Others contested asymptomatic spread, the mortality rate initially reported (they were right), and the efficacy of masks.
Here is the problem. This New Normal paradigm can’t collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored. Anyone who calls attention to them, no matter how credentialed or qualified, is systematically discredited.
In such an environment, scientifically disproven assertions like “Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically” and “lockdowns and mask mandates work” continue to form the basis of policy. The same goes for vaccine mandates.
It’s not that evidence against New Normal science can no longer be found. Much of it is available right on the websites of the government agencies denying it. It is simply a matter of saying “no” when governments and media demand you refuse to believe you’re lying eyes and obey.
Obedience has a price. We will be feeling the economic effects of lockdowns for many years. An entire generation of children will suffer psychological damage from being forced to wear masks during their most formative years. The damage to society as a whole from lockdowns, mask mandates, and (anti)social distancing policies may be immeasurable.
Neither can you simply go along to get along until things “get back to normal.” If and when the Covid Crisis finally ends, there is a Climate Crisis already teed up to begin as surely as night follows day. It will feature the same breathless media propaganda and ignoring of contrary evidence as did the Covid Crisis. The cost this time will be a significantly and permanently lower standard of living for you and your children.
