Anthony Fauci’s testimony before congress reveals experts got little right during the pandemic

Dr Anthony Fauci didn’t appear to enjoy being reminded of his 2021 advocacy of de facto compulsory Covid-19 vaccination during his interrogation by congress this week. Picture: AFP

“When you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit and they get vaccinated.”

Dr Anthony Fauci didn’t appear to enjoy being reminded of his 2021 advocacy of de facto compulsory Covid-19 vaccination during his interrogation by congress this week, quibbling that he’d been misunderstood.

It was a humiliating four hours of testimony on Monday for the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose role in convincing governments to impose lockdowns, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates is looking more and more destructive as time goes by.

If only there’d been more respect for “ideological bullshit” – also known as human rights, including free speech – throughout the pandemic the US and the developed world might have avoided one of the greatest public policy fiascos in history.

“What’s funny is everything I was censored on, I was proven to be right,” said Republican congressman and former emergency room physician Rich McCormick, who railed against bureaucrats dictating how he could treat his patients during the pandemic.

“I want to point out that I’m probably the only member of congress that actually treated patients during the pandemic from the very beginning to the very end,” he said, noting that Fauci had treated none.

The select subcommittee hearing featured fiery attacks from Republicans, including from congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded Fauci be jailed. “Children were put in plastic bubbles because of your repulsive evil science, healthy children were forced to wear masks, muzzled in their schools, forced to learn from home,” she said. But the histrionics weren’t necessary to condemn the former Covid-19 tsar.

Anthony Fauci adjusts his facemask in 2020. Picture: AFP

Fauci, 83, conceded the “six feet apart” rule, the intellectual underpinning of lockdowns, wasn’t based on science or even logic. “It just sort of appeared,” he said, referencing a policy that induced world war levels of debt, money printing and inflation.

“It was felt that transmission was primarily through droplets, not aerosols, which is incorrect because we know now aerosol does play a role,” Fauci said, pointing out that SARS-CoV-2 floats in the air, making a mockery of masks, distancing and the costly plastic barriers that popped up in shops everywhere.

No wonder evidence that the draconian measures made any difference remains scant, in the US and globally, not least because Sweden, which eschewed Fauci’s advice, ended up with among the lowest cumulative excess deaths of any nation.

By contrast, evidence that children, especially from low-income families, have suffered permanent learning loss equivalent to years of education has become incontrovertible.

Fauci, in his first public testimony since retiring at the end of 2022, even said he agreed with the erstwhile head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, who last year conceded lockdowns were a mistake.

At a conference in July last year, Collins said the public health advice was concerned only with saving lives from Covid-19: “It doesn’t matter what else happens … This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and that was really unfortunate. It’s another mistake we made,” Collins said. Next time, Fauci surmised, public health officials should “consider the balance”.

Once dubbed “America’s doctor”, Fauci told the subcommittee that deaths of “5000 a day” from Covid-19 early in the pandemic justified a tough response. But, according to official data, deaths never exceeded 2500 a day in 2020 in the US, a nation of 330 million people. Indeed, adjusted for years of life lost, the Covid-19 toll would be much less shocking given the advanced age of the vast bulk of the disease’s victims.

It wasn’t only the quality of Fauci’s advice, pushing measures that no nation’s pandemic plan ever recommended for a virus with a lethality as small as Covid-19, that was proved wanting. US health officials even may have had a hand indirectly in the creation of the virus given US grant funding of the Chinese lab, which could carry out the risky gain-of-function research that was restricted in the US.

Anthony Fauci insisted he’d “kept an open mind” about Covid’s origins. Picture: Getty Images

Fauci insisted he’d “kept an open mind” about Covid’s origins, despite repeatedly pushing academic papers in 2020 that discounted what by now has become the likeliest explanation for the pandemic: SARS-CoV-2 leaked accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I cannot account, nor can anyone account, for other things that might be going on in China,” Fauci told the subcommittee, conceding the virus might well have been engineered and leaked in Wuhan – a radical change from his previous public statements.

Fauci also conceded one of his top assistants, David Morens, potentially had broken the law by communicating with him and other top scientists by private email to avoid freedom of information laws.

The resurrection of the demonised lab leak theory, once censored vigorously by social media giants at the government’s insistence, has been remarkable.

In 2021 The New York Times’ science writer said it had “racist roots”. This week that same newspaper ran an essay suggesting a lab leak was the likeliest origin. “A growing volume of evidence – gleaned from public records … digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analysing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the US government – suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China,” molecular biologist Alina Chan wrote on Monday.

Perhaps Fauci’s greatest humiliation is yet to come, as the near religious veneration accorded to the Covid-19 vaccines begins to crumble.

This week British newspaper The Telegraph reported studies suggesting the vaccines in part could be behind the surge in excess deaths in developed nations after the rollout began, something unthinkable only a year ago.

Fauci had assured Americans the vaccines, developed under emergency authorisation, stopped transmission and infection, despite clear evidence from the start they did not.

“It’s important to point out something that we did not know early on that became evident as the months went by: the durability of protection against infection and hence the transmission was relatively limited,” he testified this week.

In fact, in late 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration already had concluded that “data were not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person”.

Fauci’s testimony was an extraordinary reminder of how much top bureaucrats arrogantly got wrong early in the pandemic, conclusions that surely will become only more damning.

“If you came down and visited me and interviewed my patients … you’d interview patient after patient after patient that did not have Covid but are very sick,” former US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield, who was shunned by Fauci and others early in the pandemic for arguing the virus might have leaked, told journalist Chris Cuomo this week. “You would say very sick, long Covid patients. And it’s all from the vaccine.”

The reckoning is far from over.