Anthony Fauci's New Covid Book Is Even Worse Than Expected, And It's Full Of Revisionist History | Ian Miller
Surprise, surprise, Anthony Fauci is out with a new book on COVID. And in an even more stunning turn of events, he believes he did an amazing, nearly perfect job handling the virus.
Though even that undersells how his book reveals just how disconnected from reality, facts, and evidence Fauci is. As well as how committed to promoting himself, his agenda, and his ideology.
It's a masterpiece of misinformation, contradictions, and self-congratulation. In short, it's everything you'd expect out of Anthony Fauci and yet somehow so much worse.
![Fauci and Biden wearing masks](http://images.outkick.com/static.outkick.com/www.outkick.com/content/uploads/2024/01/668/376/GettyImages-1231106919-1024x682.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
White House Chief Medical Adviser on Covid-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci (R) looks on as US President Joe Biden tours the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, February 11, 2021. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Anthony Fauci's Dishonesty Knows No Bounds
An excerpt from Fauci's new book was published in The Atlantic, and it starts off with Fauci immediately revealing how committed to revisionist history he continues to be. He opens by discussing the first few days of the pandemic, where he spoke to employees at the National Institutes of Health.
"'We don’t know what’s going on with this virus coming out of China right now,' I told the group assembled in a conference room at the National Institutes of Health," Fauci wrote. He continued by revealing what his initial plan was for ultimately dealing with COVID. "'We are going to need a vaccine for whatever this new virus turns out to be,'" he said.
If he thought that as early as January 3rd, 2020, as he claims, how in the world did he expect lockdowns and masks and school closures to be remotely feasible policies? In April 2020, news stories quoted outside "experts" such as Peter Hotez and Paul Offit, who all said that Fauci's hope for 12-18 months of vaccine development was "ridiculously optimistic."
One doctor, from Fauci's own agency, said in that same article that even 18 months would involved "not looking at all the data."
"Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at NIAID – which is part of the National Institutes of Health – said the typical vaccine takes between eight and 10 years to develop. While she is careful not to contradict her boss’s timeline – although she did say '18 months would be about as fast as I think we can go' – she acknowledged that the accelerated pace will involve ‘not looking at all the data.’"
The COVID vaccines were, of course, made available to the public by December 2020, just eight months after the April story was published. But no one thought they'd be ready sooner than 12-18 months from April 2020, including Fauci. And he believed that vaccines would be necessary in January 2020. Why would he demand lockdowns until a vaccine, when that vaccine wouldn't arrive until mid-late 2021, even after skipping the usual important steps in vaccine development?
That revisionist history to make himself look better continues, as does blatant examples of his political ideology.
Fauci Goes After Trump In New Book
Unsurprisingly, Fauci did not get along well with former President Donald Trump, saying he had a "disregard of facts."
"He had shocked me on day one of his presidency with his disregard of facts, such as the size of the crowd at his inauguration. His apocalyptic inaugural address also had taken me aback, as had his aggressive disrespect for the press," Fauci said. It's ironic that anyone as committed to the "disregard of facts" as Fauci has been dared to criticize anyone else. Fauci ignored facts on COVID spread, on masks, on vaccine efficacy, on the harms of school closures, and the overwhelming evidence showing harm to children from universal masking.
Similarly, he went after anyone who dared to post accurate information on social media that undermined his policy demands and public statements.
"On social media, anyone can pretend to be an expert, and malicious information is easily amplified," Fauci wrote. But most of Fauci's critics on social media didn't "pretend" to be experts, they shared data, studies and evidence that went against what he believed. That's the "malicious information" he argues against; studies showing masks don't work, or observational data disproving vaccine efficacy against infection.
Still though, Fauci said that it was simply "misperception" about the "factual information" he shared that caused the "frustration and anger" towards him.
He described being booked on more media shows, which was simply altruism on his part, not an attempt to grab more attention and influence. "This was useful, in that I could both try to calm the country’s anxieties and provide factual information," Fauci said. "But it also led to the gross misperception, which grew exponentially over time, that I was in charge of most or even all of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus. This would eventually make me the target of many people’s frustration and anger."
What he fails to realize or reckon with is the fact that the frustration and anger came as a result of the lies he told in his pronouncements and media appearances. The backtracking, the refusal to update his beliefs as he was proven wrong. The harm that was caused by his relentless promotion of masking and lockdowns and vaccine passports. It had nothing to do with the public hearing inconvenient "facts," and everything to do with his "facts" being wrong.
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WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 19: Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on November 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Fauci Defends Inaccurate Policy Proposals, Contradicts Himself Again
While defending the CDC's horrific performance at the start of COVID, Fauci once again unwittingly contradicted later versions of himself. He referenced a speech on February 25, 2020 by the CDC's director of immunization and respiratory diseases, Nancy Messonnier.
According to Fauci, "She told reporters that a pandemic in the United States was no longer a matter of if but when, and that we should prepare to close schools and work remotely." This to him was her telling "Americans the truth." This infuriated Trump, according to Fauci. And if he agreed with this assessment in February 2020, it should also have infuriated later versions of Fauci.
In 2023, when the harms of school closures and policy failures were obvious, Fauci told the New York Times that he had nothing to do with them, "Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down," he said.
But in his book, he now says that schools had to be closed, that the CDC was telling Trump and Americans a hard "truth," that school closures were necessary. It's amazing how consistently he can contradict himself whenever he needs to. Wherever the political popularity winds are blowing, that's where he'll go.
Fauci's most inexplicably tone-deaf and inaccurate self-defense came on the process of science itself, and how he applied that to masks.
"People associate science with absolutes, when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information," Fauci wrote. "As new information is uncovered, the process of science allows for self-correction."
But that's the opposite of what he said publicly. He said that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. Because he represented science, writ large. If science is an ever changing process that self-corrects, there can be no one representative of it. That'd be the opposite of how it works, because there would inevitably be disagreement and different interpretation. It gets worse.
He defended his infamous 60 Minutes appearance where he recommended against masking. And did it in the worst, most inaccurate possible way.
"On March 8, I appeared on a 60 Minutes broadcast in a segment about COVID. At one point, I told the interviewer, ‘Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.’ I was expressing not just a personal opinion, but the consensus at the time—a view shared by the surgeon general and the CDC."
"The supply of masks was already low. One fear was that there would be a stampede, and we would create an even greater shortage of masks needed by the health-care workers taking care of very ill COVID patients. Although there was accumulating evidence that the virus was spread by aerosol, this was not widely accepted, certainly not by the WHO. When additional information became available—including that the virus was readily spread by infected people who had no symptoms—we advised the public to wear masks. But this was how I became the public-health official who, very early in the pandemic, instructed people not to wear a mask. Later, my words would be twisted by extreme elements in an attempt to show that I and other scientists had misled the public, that we could not be trusted, and that we were flip-floppers."
But this ignores that in the interview, he specifically gave a scientific reason for why the masks wouldn't work. Not that there was a shortage, but because the masks didn't block as many particles as people believed they would. He said that the public thinks that masks don't provide nearly the protection people believe. If he was simply trying to protect shortages, he wouldn't have given a specific scientific explanation for his opinion. And of course, there is no conceivable way that the public would access the same purchasing methods as hospitals use to buy their masks. Not to mention that he and the CDC later recommended cloth masks, which would never be used by hospital workers.
It's a masterpiece of disinformation, because it's both a purposeful lie from Fauci, and relies on the ignorance and complicity of the media to continue it.
He kept going. "The controversy over masks illustrates a fundamental misperception of how science works," Fauci said. "In reality, our understanding of COVID continually evolved, and our medical advice had to change to reflect this."
Our understanding of masks also evolved, and repeatedly demonstrated that they never were effective at stopping COVID transmission anywhere on earth. He ignored that data, ignored the evidence, because he flip-flopped to align with popular expert opinion and promoted masking in 2020. And his promotion failed.
Of course, Fauci once again contradicted himself when talking about Hydroxychloroquine. He said he contradicted Trump because "there were no clinical studies proving that this antimalarial drug would alleviate COVID. And it might even hurt people."
So in this instance, Fauci required a clinical study showing efficacy. But in his recent testimony, he said that he ignored the need for a clinical study on masking kids.
"There was no study that did masks on kids before," Fauci admitted. "You couldn’t do the study. You had to respond to an epidemic that was killing 4-5,000 Americans a day."
READ: The Worst Lies of Anthony Fauci’s Testimony
So with masking toddlers, a study isn't necessary because Americans were dying. But with another potential treatment, a study was absolutely necessary because it might not work and could cause harm. Well Fauci, masking kids didn't work and did, in fact, cause harm. And your dishonesty and contradictory scientism was responsible.
He closed the passage with optimism: "That doesn’t mean I’ve given up hope that the country can be healed. I believe scientific education is more crucial now than it has ever been in American history," he wrote.
Scientific education is crucial. So more people stand up and point out what a hypocritical fraud Anthony Fauci is.