Contagious disease outbreaks are named after their place of origin. There are myriad examples – Lyme Disease, Ebola, Zika, or Marburg virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and so on.

Tradition changed with “COVID-19”, an acronym indicating that this was a coronavirus disease beginning in 2019. Naming this virus after its source location, such as the Chinese Coronavirus or Wuhan Flu is now considered racist, xenophobic, white supremacist, or any other novel woke-ism adjective. Perhaps a new name for COVID virus is in order.

The past weeks have rubbed some of the glitter off Fabulous Fauci, the god of all things COVID. Dr Anthony Fauci has been the face of America’s COVID response, the all-knowing, all-powerful savior of civilization. For the past year, he has graced magazine covers, was nominated as one of the sexiest men alive, and has been a fixture at then President Trump’s daily press briefings and cable news shows.

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Lately, he is not looking so fabulous, with other adjectives coming to mind such as incompetent, corrupt, conniving, and dishonest. As a trove of his email correspondence recently surfaced, COVID could be renamed as the “Fauci Flu.”

I wonder if Dr Fauci anticipated this reversal of fortune, his fall from high atop Mount Establishment? His upcoming book, “Expect the Unexpected” may be more prescient than he realized when writing the book. Did he expect an eventual reckoning over his flip-flops and deceptions?

The remainder of the book title, “Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward” is also ironic. We are learning that COVID “truth” can shift as easily as mask mandates. Who did Dr Fauci “service”? The American people, vaccine makers, the Chinese government, or his book publisher? What was his “way forward”? Locking down the country for more than a year, masking everyone, moving forward from “15 days to flatten the curve” to “15 months to flatten America”?

A trove of Dr Fauci’s old emails has been released under a Freedom of Information request. Did Dr Fauci “expect the unexpected” as in this turn of events? What have we learned in just a few days of investigation regarding the Fauci Flu? Zero Hedge provides a quick summary.

Start with an email from Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, the group alleged to be funding gain of function research at the Wuhan virology lab, which was in turn funded by the NIH under Dr Fauci’s directives.

The original cover story was that the coronavirus emerged naturally from a Chinese wet market. Dr Fauci played ball and pushed the animal origin explanation rather than a lab leak, inadvertent or intentional, as the point of origin. Daszak thanked Dr Fauci in an email,

I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak admitted to manipulating coronaviruses, as in gain of function research. This is the same manipulation that Dr Fauci adamantly denied to Senator Rand Paul at a recent Senate hearing. Fauci may not have personally written a check to the Wuhan lab, but his agency gave money to an organization that in turn wrote the check.

Dr Fauci was just parsing words, in the mold of Bill Clinton arguing over what the meaning of “is” is.

A researcher at the Scripps Research Institute emailed Dr Fauci in January 2020, when few had any inkling of what was ahead, acknowledging of this novel virus that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

Fauci knew and said nothing, allowing Democrats and the media to label the laboratory origin of the virus as kooky “conspiracy theory” from President Trump and his supporters, undermining his every pronouncement regarding the pandemic. If lab origin was nonsense, by that logic so was hydroxychloroquine and other therapeutics, potential vaccines, and anything else Trump said or did.

Speaking of hydroxy, a physicist sent Dr Fauci an email in March 2020 recommending this as a potential therapeutic. Fauci didn’t answer him and instead poo-pooed Trump’s suggestion of hydroxy as potentially useful, staying mum as cranks like Fox News’s Neal Cavuto warned that this 60-year-old drug was lethal.

Perhaps Dr Fauci was too busy emailing back and forth with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, collaborating on a social media propaganda public health campaign which turned into censorship and deplatforming for any dissenting views. Or he was too busy writing his book, undoubtedly with a large advance, as payment for services rendered against President Trump.

Dr Fauci’s virus origin coverup gave the WHO and CDC an excuse to not press the Chinese to allow infectious disease experts to visit and investigate the lab, leaving the Chinese government to shape the narrative, destroy incriminating evidence, and escape any responsibility or accountability.

Also covered up, now known through the email release, is Dr Fauci overestimating COVID mortality by a factor of 10. This number drove lockdowns, school and business closures, wrecking the US economy and the lives of so many Americans.

Dr Fauci also downplayed masks privately while pushing them publicly, from none to one to two then back to one. In February 2020 he admitted in an email,

Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.

Privately he acknowledged what was well known in public health, but publicly he terrorized the US population to the point that fully vaccinated Americans are now afraid to leave their house without two masks and goggles.

Asymptomatic spread, rare in viral illnesses, was another one of Dr Fauci’s pronouncements, leading to countless bankrupted businesses and restaurants, closed schools, and distancing rules. Did he believe what he said? In a February 2000 email, he said otherwise, “most transmissions occur from someone who is symptomatic, not asymptomatic.”

Why did he publicly say what he didn’t believe privately, leaving a swath of destruction in the wake of his misstatements?

Dr Fauci and the insiders knew the truth but chose not to be forthcoming and share it with the people. Instead, they used it as fear porn, hollering about ventilator and ICU bed shortages, leading some governors to send infected patients into nursing home killing fields. One might borrow a popular Democrat phrase from the Bush era, “Fauci lied, people died”.

Such asymptomatic spread was the basis of mail-in voting, and we all know how that turned out. Was that part of the big plan? How convenient.

We will learn more in the days ahead and may find that Dr Fauci’s public pronouncements were far different than what he privately believed and expressed. Imagine how the pandemic would have played out with more honesty from those authority figures leading the American response?

What about the next viral pandemic? According to Rasmussen Reports, 68% of likely US voters believe the Fauci Flu originated in a Chinese lab. One can infer that two-thirds of Americans don’t buy what the government is selling, the narrative from Dr Fauci and others.

When the next virus comes calling, as in the first case of a new strain of Chinese bird flu, and if it’s far more lethal than COVID, will the public heed the words of the next generation of Dr Fauci’s? Or is their credibility blown, like the boy who cried wolf?

If COVID had been treated as any other viral pandemic, without the crushing mandates and regulations which destroyed the US economy and many people’s lives, life in America today might be far different. Was this ever about the virus or about a presidential election, and framing the narrative to defeat Donald Trump regardless of the downstream consequences?

What better way to memorialize Dr Fauci’s role in this pandemic than by renaming the virus the “Fauci Flu.”

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer. He is on sabbatical from social media.

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