Dr. Anthony Fauci enjoys an exalted reputation throughout many echelons of society. His charisma and confidence, omnipresent on TV throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, made him a trusted face for “science.” There are Tony Fauci fan clubs and donuts, an “I heart Fauci” throw pillow, an “In Fauci We Trust” coffee mug, a “Honk for Dr. Fauci” yard sign, and even a Dr. Fauci prayer candle! To dare question Fauci easily removes one from Twitter or Facebook, and books questioning his probity go unlisted by media giants such as Amazon. Fortunately for Fauci, a fawning media have largely shielded him from serious critiques, dismissing them as conspiracy theories concocted by devious cranks and misfits. Consequently, we have a thoroughly misinformed public, leaving, for example, typical Democrats thinking half of those infected with COVID were hospitalized, whereas the real number was less than one percent!
A medical doctor who’s never practiced medicine, Fauci began working in 1968 for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, a department within the National Institutes of Health) and ultimately became its director. He is now the most senior and highly paid ($417,608 annually) bureaucrat in the federal system. A consummate manipulator, he’s created a scientific and financial empire that controls an enormous segment of public health policy. Fauci’s success is rooted in his skillfully snaring federal grants for research in the early 1980s. Under his guidance, NIAID funding for AIDS mushroomed from $297,000 in 1982 to half a billion dollars by 1992! Virtually all this money was poured into seeking a vaccine to prevent the HIV virus from developing into full-blown AIDS. (Such a vaccine has never been found and many scientists now think HIV is simply present in some AIDS patients without being the actual cause of the disease). In time Fauci would become a trusted advisor to presidents and ultimately emerge during the COVID-19 epidemic as the face of the federal government.
Countering all the acclaim Fauci has garnered, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. insists we should know The Real Antony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, c. 2021; Kindle Edition). Unlike Fauci’s public personae, Kennedy judges him to be a devious Machiavellian who has orchestrated harmful policies while enriching himself and his loyal cadres. Sharing this view, Nobel laureate for medicine Luc Montagnier says: “Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote that ‘A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.’ Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Throughout this book it’s clear that Kennedy is writing as a prosecutor rather than an even-handed historian, but the evidence he presents (if true) is truly damning, for the damage done to the world by one man is virtually beyond belief. “The disturbing story” Kennedy tells “has never been told, and many in power have worked hard to prevent the public from learning it. The main character is Anthony Fauci” (p. 26).
Robert Kennedy Jr. is himself is a lifelong Democrat, a member of perhaps the most prominent and powerful political family in recent American history. He personally knows scores of politicians and bureaucrats, including Anthony Fauci. His uncle “Ted” Kennedy helped write many of the regulatory laws overseeing federal departments that now serve as “sock-puppets” for the industries they’re supposed to supervise. Much of his life RFK Jr. devoted to environmental and public health issues, serving as president of Waterkeepers and fighting “Big Oil, King Coal” and assorted corporate polluters. While so doing, he enjoyed the favor and support of leftists in his party and the media. He “published regularly in the New York Times and all the major papers” and magazines. He gave speeches all over the country, deriving a significant income thereby. But: “All that changed in 2005, after I published an article, “Deadly Immunity,” about corruption in CDC’s vaccine branch” (p. 327).
He’d dared enter the debate over vaccines, and he soon discovered that “Big Pharma” essentially controlled the nation’s health agencies through incestuous, corrupt schemes. Federal agencies now receive billions of taxpayer monies to research diseases. The researchers getting the money, working in universities or government-supported labs, then propose medicines (most likely vaccines) for the diseases. Promising meds are then patented by the researchers, who profit handsomely as the public pays for their use. “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control], for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines. NIH [National Institute of Health] owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits royally from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process” (p. 26)
So Kennedy “wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms. Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability” (p. 23).
Honestly confronting what happened during the past two years should shock us. Fauci’s policies—masks, quarantines, lockdowns, and social distancing—were all prescribed, if not mandated, and none of them were ever justified by peer-reviewed studies showing their effectiveness. On the other hand, Fauci et al. discouraged and actually sought to ban doctors from using demonstrably effective therapeutics, resulting “in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet.” Consequently, the United States, “with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths” (p. 30). Just recall, for example, the deafening drumbeats demanding everyone wear masks, and then realize: “There is no well-constructed study that persuasively suggests masks have convincing efficacy against COVID-19 that would justify accepting the harms associated with masks.” Indeed, “retrospective studies on Dr. Fauci’s mask mandates confirm that they were bootless. ‘Regional analysis in the United States does not show that [mask] mandates had any effect on case rates, despite 93 percent compliance. Moreover, according to CDC data, 85 percent of people who contracted COVID-19 reported wearing a mask’” (p. 54). Nor did lockdowns reduce infection rates. In fact, the less a country followed Fauci’s prescriptions the better it fared! Kenya, for example, suffered only 97 deaths per 1,000,000 residents whereas the United States suffered 2,107! Quarantining the healthy has never dealt effectively with infectious diseases and was consequently discouraged by the WHO [World Health Organization], an arm of the United Nations. That Fauci encouraged it suggests he is both scientifically and morally obtuse.
Perhaps the most damning accusation Kennedy levels at Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic is this: “Medicines were available against COVID—inexpensive, safe medicines—that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country. But Dr. Fauci and his Pharma collaborators deliberately suppressed those treatments in service to their single-minded objective—making America await salvation from their novel, multi-billion dollar vaccines” (p. 52). One of the nation’s premier epidemiologists, Yale’s Harvey Risch, the author of over 350 peer-reviewed publications, insists you should “‘quarantine and treat the sick, protect the most vulnerable, and aggressively develop repurposed therapeutic drugs, and use early treatment protocols to avoid hospitalizations.’” Had we aggressively used therapeutic drugs and implemented sensible policies, we “could have easily defanged COVID-19 so that it was less lethal than a seasonal flu. We could have done this very quickly. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives’” (p. 63).
Agreeing with Risch, Dr. Peter McCullough (an internist and cardiologist who has published 600 peer-reviewed articles, making him the most published physician in history in the field of kidney disease related to heart disease) says the pandemic should have been handled quite differently. “‘We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations,’” he says, by “‘using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.’” He has successfully treated 2,000 COVID patients and “points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “‘The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,’ McCullough continues. ‘Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir’” (p. 65). Such physicians are Kennedy’s heroes! More than merely seeking to find the truth, McCullouigh has spearheaded a “worldwide network of front-line physicians using repurposed drugs to save lives around the globe” (p. 83).
Rather than working with scholarly doctors such as Risch and McCullough, the federal bureaucracy sought to suppress their views. Research universities, having received millions of dollars from the NIH and Fauci network, toed the line he drew, refusing to do anything but search for a magical vaccine. Says McCullough: “‘Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines’” (p. 79). Sadly enough, some of this nation’s most distinguished doctors “believe that Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatment and off-patent remedies was responsible for up to 80 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID. . . . . The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals” (p. 80).
Assessing all this, Kennedy declares: “There is no other aspect of the COVID crisis that more clearly reveals the malicious intentions of a powerful vaccine cartel—led by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates—to prolong the pandemic and amplify its mortal effects in order to promote their mischievous inoculations. From the outset, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other therapeutics posed an existential threat to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates’ $48 billion COVID vaccine project, and particularly to their vanity drug remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake.” If drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (which had long enjoyed the approval of the FDA and were both inexpensive and widely available, were to prove effective) the “pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their billion-dollar vaccines to market under Emergency Use Authorization. Instead, vaccines would have to endure the years-long delays that have always accompanied methodical safety and efficacy testing, and that would mean less profits, more uncertainty, longer runways to market, and a disappointing end to the lucrative COVID-19 vaccine gold rush. Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owner of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public” (pp. 84-85).
Kennedy’s dark suspicions regarding Fauci are fueled by his examination of Fauci’s treatment of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Thus he devotes several lengthy chapters of the book to detailing and condemning what Fauci did by using his bully pulpit to “terrify millions into wrongly believing they were at risk of getting AIDS when they were not” and thereby getting lavish federal funding for his agency. He “perfected his special style of ad-fear-tising, using remote, unlikely, farfetched and improbable possibilities to frighten people” (p. 307). His “first instinct as national AIDS czar had been to stoke contagion terror,” and he wrote an article in 1983 “warning that AIDS could spread by casual contact.” Though the disease was largely restricted to intravenous drug users and male homosexuals, Fauci deviously declared that anyone, through even casual contact, could catch the disease. He and his close colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, early focused in on HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) as the “sole cause of AIDS,” but despite enormous expenditures and clinical trials “no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs” (p. 401). In fact, not nearly all AIDS patients have the NIV virus and millions of folks have NIV but never contract AIDS. It seems to be yet another fallacious example of confusing correlation with causation!
Taking over the HIV program from the National Cancer Institute, Fauci quickly began promoting AZT, an anti-cancer drug that he thought might successfully treat AIDS. But AZT itself had proven to be horrendously toxic! Arguably “the world’s most accomplished and insightful retrovirologist,” Dr. Peter Duesberg, actually accused “Dr. Fauci of committing mass murder with AZT, the deadly chemical concoction that according to Duesberg causes—and never cures—the constellations of immune suppression that we now call ‘AIDS’” (p. 403). But Fauci zeroed in on AZT as the magic bullet, and for 36 years he funneled all federal grants to researchers vainly determined to make HIV the culprit causing AIDS. His grants helped fuel the panic regarding HIV-induced AIDS in Africa. Scary news stories said some half of the adults in some African nations were infected with HIV and would soon suffer massive depopulation. None of these doomsday predictions came true, “and most HIV-infected Africans showed no sign of illness” (p. 415). But millions of dollars were raised and sent to African research centers and thousands of Africans suffered in clinical trials alleged designed to stop the AIDS “epidemic.” Numerous scholars now believe the African epidemic was simply fabricated! This sorry story—and Bill Gates’ involvement in it—deserves a fuller discussion than I can afford here, but it should be widely shared!
Fauci also disregarded what seemed to be effective treatments developed by physicians treating AIDS’ patients with off-the-shelf “therapeutic drugs that seemed effective against the constellation of symptoms that actually killed and tormented people with AIDS” (p. 345). Despite their successes, Fauci “refused to test any of those repurposed drugs, which had older or expired patents and no Pharma patrons. . . . . Big Pharma and its PIs were loath to test any drug with patents they didn’t control” (p. 346). Sadly, “One of NCI’s top virologists, Dr. Frank Ruscetti . . . recalls of that era, ‘We could have saved millions of lives with repurposed and therapeutic drugs. But there’s no profit in it. It’s all got to be about newly patented antivirals and their mischievous vaccines’” (p. 346). Employing phrases quite familiar to us 40 years later, Fauci blithely asserted “he simply could not recommend a drug until he saw ‘randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trial’ results. That was the ‘gold standard,’ he said. It would be that, or nothing. When they asked him, ‘Why not?’ he shouted, ‘There’s no data!’” (p. 353). He has always preferred quantifiable models to practicing physicians’ demonstrations.
Fauci flourished as he perfected the practice of using academic physicians and researchers whose careers depend upon federal grants. These Principle Investigators (PIs) do the research and clinical trials necessary for licensing new drugs. “Thanks to NIH’s largesse, and to NIAID in particular, a relatively tiny network of PIs—a few hundred—determines the content and direction of virtually all America’s biomedical research” (p. 315). And they dare not displease Anthony Fauci! Still more: these PIs get lucrative grants and “legalized bribes” extended through honoraria, expert witness fees, speaking gigs, and first-class travel to exclusive resorts for conferences” (p. 326). So they are quite subservient to what Kennedy calls “Big Pharma.” Fauci’s critics, including Dr. Duesberg “charge that by stifling debate and dissent, Dr. Fauci milled public fear into multi-billion-dollar profits for his Pharma partners while expanding his own powers and authoritarian control” (p. 405).
Kennedy demonstrates the incestuous nature of all this by telling how PIs worked to develop a vaccine to control HPV (human papilloma virus) and prevent cervical cancer. In 2006 a distinguished (ACIP) panel recommended all girls aged nine through twenty-six get the vaccine. Merck (the pharmaceutical company promoting the shots) acknowledged it had not thoroughly tested the product, “so no one could scientifically predict if the vaccines would avert more injuries or cancers than they would cause.” But Gardasil was approved and became “the most expensive vaccine in history, costing patients $420 for the three-jab series and generating revenues of over $1 billion annually for Merck. That year, nine of the thirteen ACIP panel members and their institutions collectively received over $1.6 billion of grant money from NIH and NIAID” (p. 317).
In this long (900+ pages) and meticulously documented treatise, Kennedy provides much to ponder! This is far more than a book about the coronavirus or Anthony Fauci. It reveals a great deal about our public health and the agencies designed to promote it. Prompting us to take action, RFK says: “We can bow down and comply—take the jabs, wear the face coverings, show our digital passports on demand, submit to the tests, and salute our minders in the Bio-surveillance State. Or we can say No. We have a choice, and it is not too late. COVID-19 is not the problem; it is a problem, one largely solvable with early treatments that are safe, effective, and inexpensive. The problem is endemic corruption in the medical-industrial complex, currently supported at every turn by mass-media companies. This cartel’s coup d’etat has already siphoned billions from taxpayers, already vacuumed up trillions from the global middle class, and created the excuse for massive propaganda, censorship, and control worldwide. Along with its captured regulators, this cartel has ushered in the global war on freedom and democracy” (p. 925). It’s time for us to act both wisely and courageously!
I’ve focused on Robert Kennedy’s book, because it presents the same evidence and comes to much the same conclusions as several other books I’ve read. Charles Ortleb, determined to reveal Fauci’s disreputable conduct in dealing with AIDS, wrote Fauci The Bernie Madoff of Science and the HIV Ponzi Scheme that Concealed the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic (HHV-6 University Press, c. 2021; Kindle Edition). As the editor of a gay newspaper, the New York Native, Ortleb writes with an outrage fueled by his belief that Fauci gravely mishandled his task and bears responsibility for the suffering and deaths of thousands of AIDS victims. He has concluded “that the similarities between AIDS science and Nazi science are too obvious for people of conscience to ignore’ (p. 8). Focusing on other Fauci misdeeds, Steve Deace’s Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History (New York: Post Hill Press, c. 2021; Kindle Edition) delineates his bureaucratic dexterity that has harmed the country.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” So Deace says: “COVID-19 has taught us this history lesson in the harshest of terms.” We did what we were told and watched millions die anyway. “Lockdowns didn’t work, but they kill.” We found a bit of momentary safety and lost our liberty.
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