Dr. Fauci is a hero
The most economically consequential event of the past decade was the COVID pandemic. It saw countless heroic actions that will be forever unrecognized. Among those who were recognized were Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines.
A more controversial figure during that period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who became the public face of the US government pandemic response. Because of his visibility, he’s become a political magnet and whipping boy for opportunistic politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has told Fauci that he should be in prison for crimes against humanity.
On the contrary, Fauci withstood groundless vilification to advocate for the best public health response based on the information available at the time. Here’s Fauci’s reflection:
“If you look at it in two separate buckets, the scientific bucket and the public health bucket, the preparedness and response over many, many years that led to our ability to develop and deploy a vaccine that was over 90% effective in less than 11 months is totally unprecedented. So we need to make sure we maintain our support for basic and biomedical research that allowed us to make that unprecedented accomplishment that saved millions of lives globally, certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions in the United States.
“The area that we really need to look at lessons learned is our public health response, our somewhat fractionated response in the interaction between the federal response and the local response, which was somewhat different from place to place, that didn’t have a uniform set of principles, which made our response less uniform and less coordinated, I believe, than we saw in other countries. But that’s something we’re aware of and hopefully that can be corrected.”
*snip*
“If we had the kind of tsunami of hospitalizations and deaths that we had at one period of time, the only option that you had was to shut things down or we would’ve overwhelmed the hospitals and we would have to have made a Sophie’s choice of who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t get a ventilator.
“The real issue is that if you do — I don’t want to use the word “shutdown” because we never completely shut down — but if you do profound interruption of services and the steady flow of the regular social interactions that we’ve had, we’ve got to reexamine how long you do that for. Because the question is less, “Should we have shut down and shut the schools?” than “How long should we have kept things shut down and how long should the schools have shut down?”
“I think the initial decision to just put things to a halt until we somehow flattened that very disturbing accelerated curve was the right decision. The real questionable issue is how long we kept that up.”
These quotes come from an interview in which Fauci is asked for his expert opinion, not the data behind it. But the course of the pandemic, the decisions made and not made, and the events that followed from those decisions are well-documented. Based on the best available evidence at the time, Fauci provided clear and honest guidance. America owes him a great debt for his leadership in a trying time.
Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci
A more controversial figure during that period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who became the public face of the US government pandemic response. Because of his visibility, he’s become a political magnet and whipping boy for opportunistic politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has told Fauci that he should be in prison for crimes against humanity.
On the contrary, Fauci withstood groundless vilification to advocate for the best public health response based on the information available at the time. Here’s Fauci’s reflection:
“If you look at it in two separate buckets, the scientific bucket and the public health bucket, the preparedness and response over many, many years that led to our ability to develop and deploy a vaccine that was over 90% effective in less than 11 months is totally unprecedented. So we need to make sure we maintain our support for basic and biomedical research that allowed us to make that unprecedented accomplishment that saved millions of lives globally, certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions in the United States.
“The area that we really need to look at lessons learned is our public health response, our somewhat fractionated response in the interaction between the federal response and the local response, which was somewhat different from place to place, that didn’t have a uniform set of principles, which made our response less uniform and less coordinated, I believe, than we saw in other countries. But that’s something we’re aware of and hopefully that can be corrected.”
*snip*
“If we had the kind of tsunami of hospitalizations and deaths that we had at one period of time, the only option that you had was to shut things down or we would’ve overwhelmed the hospitals and we would have to have made a Sophie’s choice of who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t get a ventilator.
“The real issue is that if you do — I don’t want to use the word “shutdown” because we never completely shut down — but if you do profound interruption of services and the steady flow of the regular social interactions that we’ve had, we’ve got to reexamine how long you do that for. Because the question is less, “Should we have shut down and shut the schools?” than “How long should we have kept things shut down and how long should the schools have shut down?”
“I think the initial decision to just put things to a halt until we somehow flattened that very disturbing accelerated curve was the right decision. The real questionable issue is how long we kept that up.”
These quotes come from an interview in which Fauci is asked for his expert opinion, not the data behind it. But the course of the pandemic, the decisions made and not made, and the events that followed from those decisions are well-documented. Based on the best available evidence at the time, Fauci provided clear and honest guidance. America owes him a great debt for his leadership in a trying time.
Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci
Rubbish.
august:
Almost six months since your last visit and at a loss for words. Good to see you again.
@august,
I consider this content-free comment trolling. I have no problem with honest disagreement, but if you disagree with a post, you need to explain why, not just a middle school bleat. One more vacuous comment like this and into spam you go. Capisce?
This is a decent start. But wait, there’s more—-for anyone interested enough to actually find out, it’s all easily available.
Dr Fauci ‘has long history of being wrong’ (youtube.com)
@august,
LOL! It’s full of lies just in the first couple of minutes. Fauci didn’t cause a single lockdown or school closure. That’s not within the power of the director of NIAID. You’ll have to do better than link to right-wing propaganda.
While it’s true that Fauci did an admirable job of advocating for sensible precautions in the face of the inevitable scientific groping in the fog of a newly discovered threat, he did compromise his credibility by a pious lie. In an attempt to preserve the stock of m95 masks for the health care professionals who would need them to care for everyone else, he publicly denigrated their usefulness to the public at large.
@rick,
All the evidence I’ve seen is consistent with the view that unfitted N95 masks provide little protection from aerosolized SARS-CoV-2. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
On the other hand, enforced masking on long haul flights prevented transmission even when passengers were allowed to remove their masks when meals were served. On flights without enforced masking, transmission was proportional to flight duration. I doubt that every passenger was wearing a fitted N95 mask.
@kaleberg,
Thanks, I hadn’t see that. However, the seating arrangements on airline flights differ markedly from that of restaurants, churches and schools.
The other point worth noting is that masks, even cloth masks *can* protect others when the person wearing the mask is coughing or sneezing. That’s why I specifically mentioned aerosolized SARS-CoV-2.
Evidence shows that properly used masks do provide some protection; but that, more importantly, they provide protection from the user to other people: anathema to MAGAts, but something that could have improved the social climate as well as the death rate. If you think back to the time, the precise value of the masks had not yet been determined; and a precautionary approach would have been sensible.
@rick,
” more importantly, they provide protection from the user to other people”
Yes, I posted that to Kaleberg below. I’ve always said there were three reasons to wear a mask (any kind):
1. To protect others if you are coughing or sneezing;
2. To prevent you from touching your nose and mouth, two routes of infection;
3. Virtue signaling, to remind people to social distance.
He’s neither a hero nor a villain. Sweden took a different approach – the more traditional one of isolating the vulnerable and otherwise letting others get on with their lives. I think we can conclude their approach was at least as effective as ours (that’s generous to ours). And the shutdowns truly hurt many people, seemingly without benefit.
I’m sympathetic to the hospital overcrowding argument although i’m not convinced anything could really have stopped the spread of a contagious respiratory virus. The ‘sophie’s choice’ ventilator argument is rubbish. Ventilation proved to be useless.
I’m a fan of the vaccines, of course. I was troubled by the one-sided narrative and the horrible ‘attack your fellow American’ movement if they chose to not be vaccinated. This is especially true when we learned that vaccines neither stop infection nor prevent spread. Not being vaccinated became truly a personal risk decision. Also, side effects were underplayed. Also, censorship of dissenting qualified voices (or any voice) should be intolerable in a democratic society. Epidemiologists from elite colleges were smeared and throttled on social media, partly due to government efforts. Unconscionable! I think that if you believe in democracy, you tell the people the truth, good and bad. If you desire to skew the truth (because you think your fellow citizens are dumb or ‘will make the wrong decision’ or any other reason) you don’t trust the people and can’t be said to believe in democracy.
Lastly, it does appear that Fauci was on board with funding gain of function research and hiding it. If so (and i haven’t concluded firmly) they he should be held accountable if such actions were illegal or if he lied about them.
@bob,
“I think that if you believe in democracy, you tell the people the truth, good and bad.”
Indeed. And Fauci did.
As for vaccines, the published claims I’ve seen didn’t claim it would prevent infection. The claim was that the vaccines would reduce the number of infections in the ED and the morgue. The published evidence showed that they did. The side effects were well-known and published–I know because I was part of the Moderna phase III trial and followed the study closely. In fact, the local study site director said she didn’t see the point of blinding the study, since everyone in the vaccine arm of the study knew their status because of the side effects. It was never a secret.
I didn’t see these “horrible attacks” you refer to. People who refused vaccination were criticized, and justifiably so, since vaccination did blunt the spread of SARS-CoV-2 through herd immunity. People who refused vaccination were a danger to people with co-morbidities, particularly the elderly who have weaker immune responses. But perhaps these criticisms are seen as horrible attacks by the people who think horrible attacks on Fauci are justified by their discomfort.
I believe in democracy, but I don’t trust people who think they can speed or drive through traffic signals without stopping; they endanger us all. I believe in democracy, but I don’t trust people who think they can discharge firearms in public; they endanger us all. I believe in democracy, but I don’t trust people who think democracy means they can provide habitats to vermin in cities and towns; they endanger us all. I’m troubled by the one-sided narrative and the attacks on your fellow Americans if they believe that public health interests override anarchic constructs of democracy.
Lastly, I’ve seen zero evidence that Fauci approved gain-of-function SARS-CoV-2 research in Wuhan. Claims, yes. Evidence, no.
@Joel,
Folks did make false claims that getting the vaccines prevented infection and transmission. Those claims were false when made. Here’s a CNN (friendly outlet) fact check on our own President: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn-town-hall-july/index.html
Since they did neither, there was no societal obligation to get vaccinated since the risk was only for you. If there were, I would agree with your view about societal vs individual tradeoffs. That isn’t this case. I would agree with you in the case of measles vaccines, which absolutely 100% prevent infection and transmission. That isn’t the case with Covid vaccines. No difference to Covid transmission = no societal (only personal) implications = no justification to impose mandates.
As for social ostracism of the unvaxxed, people were fired, harassed and ridiculed based on that false premise that they were endangering others. Some evidence of such anti-anti-vaxxer sentiment?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36482134/
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027537422/the-anger-toward-unvaccinated-people-is-personal-for-some-who-got-breakthrough-c
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/27/vaxxed-anger-pandemic-public-opinion/
Sweden shut down large gatherings, that is, if Swedish bloggers are to be believed. They had a higher sickness and death rate than neighboring, more restrictive countries, before tightening their rules.
Vaccination isn’t a personal decision. There’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma aspect in which all parties benefit from herd immunity if enough people are vaccinated. Shortly before COVID an unvaccinated child killed an immune compromised patient at one of our local clinics. It’s hard to see vaccination as a personal matter in this light. I know that people on the right are still pissed about laws requiring free living Americans to drive on the right side of the road rather than being able to run over that nasty left side, but a lot of groveling toads prefer not dying in head on collisions to freedom.
Please post the data. Related to Sweden and supposed peer nations (the argument should be a peer, similar demographic, health statistics etc.).
“It’s hard to see vaccination as a personal matter in this light. “
Your use of prisoners game to deny personal freedom over ones’ body is misapplied.
First, you need to defend the logic of the game, then you need to show it has a moral/ethical foundation to justify taking away individual freedom.
The case for using prisoner or such games to justify nuclear arms is considered by some both illogical and immoral. Despite the US wants to spend $2 trillion to upgrade its mutual assured destruction plans.
Somewhere I read that immigration through the borders the past 3 years is good bc US birthing is low. Increases labor pool!
I suppose pro-lifers could roll out your prisoner game to justify the civic duty to have more live births per conceptions….
“Vaccination isn’t a personal decision. ” If they do not affect others by not reducing transmission then they should be. Covid vaccines have not been proven to reduce transmission. If you can provide data that proves that fact wrong, I’ll change my mind here on the spot.
@Bob
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10073587/
@Bob,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39070079/
bob:
What are you trying to state?
1. Vaccines did not reduce transmission.
2. Vaccines did reduce transmission.
Fact Check: Preventing transmission never required for COVID vaccines’ initial approval; Pfizer vax did reduce transmission of early variants.
Bob:
Nobody here is your librarian. You present the data and we discuss.
Sweden as compared to their neighbors sucked.
The OECD found that in terms of pandemic-driven economic contraction, Sweden did marginally better than Europe as a whole, but markedly worse than its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Norway and Finland, “despite the adoption of softer distancing measures, especially during the first COVID wave.” COVID-19, the OECD concludes, “hit the economy hard.”
I believe Sweden was far less restrictive, preserved more of their economy and had better results. That goes counter to the “more restrictions resulted in lower death rates” notion of the article above. But show me data (not opinion or anecdote) and I’ll change my mind.
Here is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10399217/#:~:text=During%20the%20COVID%2D19%20pandemic,faced%20rapid%20and%20continuous%20criticism.:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden was among the few countries that did not enforce strict lockdown measures but instead relied more on voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations. While supported by the majority of Swedes, this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism. Unfortunately, the respectful debate centered around scientific evidence often gave way to mudslinging. However, the available data on excess all-cause mortality rates indicate that Sweden experienced fewer deaths per population unit during the pandemic (2020–2022) than most high-income countries and was comparable to neighboring Nordic countries through the pandemic. An open, objective scientific dialogue is essential for learning and preparing for future outbreaks.
@Bob,
LOL! Biden is not a physician, nor is he a public health expert. That said, I guess you didn’t read your link, which says: “Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective, and they sharply reduce the likelihood of infection, serious illness and death.”
As for social ostracism, I’m sure some of that occurred. People are socially ostracized for race, religion and sexual orientation, too. Nobody claims that there was no social ostracism.
There was a societal obligation to get vaccinated because the risk isn’t only for you. The risk is that when you are infected, you will infect others and put them at risk. Just like the risk of speeding and ignoring traffic laws isn’t only for you. You put others at risk by your behavior.
Thank you doctor Fauci! Ignorance abounds in this country and they pour their ignorance on you. I apologize for all the insults and name calling you have endured. I express my gratitude to you for the gallant effort you made in very difficult times and under such shameful vocal opposition. You have saved lives. Your criticizers have killed people. That is the difference. You were fantastic during the AIDS crisis. Likewise, you were fantastic again during the COVID crisis. You have gotten us through at least two pandemics. No one else can say that. Thank you and God Bless.
” develop and deploy a vaccine that was over 90% effective in less than 11 months”
The good Dr should define “effective”, and how he got 90% of that “effective”.
It is not ignorance to woder where the good Dr is coming from.
At least we didn’t get the “it is safe” quote.
@paddy,
I googled “how is COVID vaccine effectiveness measured?” This is the first result that came up within a couple seconds. I’m sure you can find plenty more if you just read.
Vaccine Effectiveness Studies
@paddy,
As for safety, there are plenty of data out there, so stop attacking Fauci. The COVID vaccines are as safe as any vaccine. A German guy got over 200 jabs and is fine.
This is where the good Dr is coming from. Wonder no more.
Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines