One year ago today, an article of mine at American Thinker became a flashpoint of mainstream media coverage and criticism. Before two weeks had passed, my article was referenced, including with links to it and me in four major articles at the Washington Post, two in the New York Times (one of them on page one – which I exposed as Fake News here), Politico, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, New York Magazine, and others. Many of these articles were syndicated and went around the world.

The reason for all this fuss was that I was the first one in the national media to challenge the media-driven image of Dr. Anthony Fauci as a sage and a savior, a man whose commands to shut down the nation must be obeyed.  You see, I had studied Fauci’s handling of AIDS starting almost 40 years ago, and I knew how he operated, and that he was far from politically neutral. The constant media adoration at the start of the “fifteen days to bend the curve” got to me, and I titled my article: “Anthony Fauci, the NIH's face of the coronavirus, is a Deep-State Hillary Clinton–loving stooge.”

In the first article that took me on in the Washington Post (March 26, 2020), national political reporter and former Rhodes Scholar Isaac Stanley-Becker confirmed the impact of my American Thinker item:

Chowka’s piece has generated nearly 20,000 interactions on Facebook alone — more than the typical well performing story in the mainstream media.

That WaPo story was only the beginning, however. It was followed in quick succession by three more in Bezos’s outlet and by two in the New York Times. Subsequent articles implied that I should be blamed for alleged threats to Dr. Fauci and his reported need for federal security to protect him and his family. Nothing that I wrote, needless to say, could have been construed as threatening or advocating that any violence be directed at Dr. Fauci or at anyone else, for that matter.

Because the Post, the Times, and the other publications that linked to and attacked yours truly are among the highest trafficked sites online, collectively they generated tens of thousands of reader comments – most of them hostile to American Thinker and me. The blowback was incredible and included threats of harm that arrived via Twitter and email.

The gist of my article was about how Fauci (and his colleagues in government and private industry, aka Big Pharma) “was an enthusiastic advocate of throwing more federal money at the problem of AIDS.” He oversaw a government “war” on HIV-AIDS that quickly and permanently ballooned into an unprecedented four decades-long boondoggle that has cost taxpayers more than $600 billion. That sum dwarfs the amount spent per death for other major maladies.  The death toll from AIDS in the U.S. over four decades is about 700,000 people – or an average of roughly 16,000 deaths a year. 

I later noted that, according to an NIH Funding document, the totals of federal research in 2019 spent on 292 diseases are listed along with the actual 2017 death toll (the last year available) from each of those conditions. The results are shocking.

• Cancer $6.52 billion 680,869 deaths
• Diabetes $1.09 billion 270,707 deaths
• Heart Disease/Coronary Heart Disease $1.708 billion 1,762,929 deaths
• HIV/AIDS $3.037 billion 7,803 deaths

In 2019, the government spent $3,982.80 in research for every death from AIDS. That same year, only $96.88 was spent for every death from heart disease. That’s 41 times as much funding per death for AIDS as for heart disease – the nation’s #1 killer.

Federal spending on diabetes research is even more out of whack. Only $40.63 was spent in research for each person who died from diabetes

Meanwhile, cancer, which has gotten only slightly more funding than HIV-AIDS during that entire period, has killed around 25 million Americans during that same time frame. The disproportionate spending per death is even more striking considering that the keys to fighting these other diseases were not as obvious as with AIDS: personal responsibility involving the practice of “unsafe sex” and sharing needles to inject illegal drugs.

In my article, I also unearthed emails (leaked in 2016 by Wikileaks) in which Fauci, in 2013, expressed his “love” for Hillary Rodham Clinton in several emails to her top aide after Hillary testified before Congress on Benghazi.

In the year since March 2020, Fauci has gone from being considered “the sexiest man alive” to someone more down to earth and of considerably lesser repute, at least among conservatives and thinking people. On Fox News, for example, Laura Ingraham regularly refers to Fauci now as “Dr. Doom.”

Fauci’s performance during the past year as “the face of the government’s Covid-19 pandemic” has been typical of many other Democrat hacks: self-serving, highly political, inconsistent, and hypocritical, and infatuated with power.

Some highlights of Fauci’s “science based” advice should suffice.

• Don’t wear a mask (March 2020)
• wear a mask (April 2020)
• wear multiple masks (January 2021)
• wear a mask in 2022 (February 2021)

Fauci is no neutral senior bureaucrat, though he has played one to Republican administrations.

His true political colors were shown when he shared the virtual stage on the hate-Trump Atlantic Festival with Hillary Clinton last September. After Biden was elected and inaugurated, Fauci was clearly happy to say in 2021 I work for Joe Biden, (who I not-so-secretly supported in his 2020 campaign.)

In my opinion, if one individual can be blamed for the defeat of Donald Trump in his re-election campaign, it is the sanctimonious but continually influential Dr. Anthony J. Fauci.

Caricature by Donkey Hotey CC BY-2.0 license

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  He also appears in the media, including recently as a contributor to OANN, BBC World News, The Glazov Gang, and Fox News.  Peter's website is http://peter.media.  His YouTube channel is here.  For updates on his work, follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.