Dr. Anthony Fauci has an impressive resume but nothing in it meant that he was qualified to be the ultimate decision-maker for a contagious disease, especially one that his actions helped create. It’s high time his wings are clipped before more Americans die.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is brilliant. At least according to his fawning Wikipedia entry, which says he graduated number one in his medical school class at Cornell, and then did two years of internal medicine residency at their prestigious hospital, following which he was invited to train and work at the NIH (unfairly, in my opinion, called a yellow beret.)

Understanding Fauci’s career there requires some backstory. The U.S. Public Health Service (“USPHS”) evolved from the medical branch of the Coast Guard Marines, which was eventually placed under the aegis of the Revenue Marine Service forerunner to the Coast Guard. Its head, called the Surgeon General of the United States is a naval officer. Important people serving in various parts of the USPHS (NIH, CDC, FDA) are officers, for they are in one of eight “uniform services” of the US government. The NIH, one subsidiary, does specialized medical research and, in some cases, provides healthcare for patients who are of research interest.

Before 1973, all male physicians, regardless of age, served in one of the uniform services of the federal government. Most were drafted into the Army, with a smaller number into the other armed forces. However, physicians could fulfill their Selective Service obligations by joining the NIH. Understandably these positions were very highly sought after in the late 60s, during the Vietnam war. Only the top 1% were invited to join. A slot at the NIH ordinarily led to a career in research or in medical academia. Many, like Tony, trained and then stayed at NIH for their careers.

I treated gonorrhea in Vietnam for the U.S. Army. Tony did a fellowship in Immunology at the NIH. Immunology is a subspecialty of internal medicine dealing with autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus; allergic disorders like asthma; and in Tony’s case, vaccine development.

When the HIV-AIDS virus was discovered in 1984, Tony started to work on a vaccine against that virus. (I’d guess that he has pompously continued to advise on that failing project for over 35 years.) I don’t remember ever reading anything that Tony authored but I read more general clinical studies for my practice.

Most researchers’ careers shrivel in their 40s. Tony heard the dirge and gradually shifted to administration. He took over the helm of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”), a subdivision of the NIH, where he has ruled for 37 years.

The NIH doles out $41 billion to 300,000 researchers around the country. Tony’s NIAID division does some research in-house at the main NIH campus in Bethesda but gives nearly $5.9 billion to outside researchers, including to virology laboratories in Wuhan, China. Tony, with these 5.9 billion friends, is loved and honored. He became a member of the Infectious Diseases Society among many others without earning much in the way of credentials.

Despite this impressive CV, I contend that Tony is not suitable to be the public health coxswain running the Covid 19 muddle. Tony was selected for that position by the media and political nabobs for only two reasons: First, the NIH and Tony are conveniently headquartered near Washington. The CDC, which might have more appropriate contagious diseases pretensions, languishes in Marietta in the far-off hills and hollows of northern Georgia.

Second, our self-styled cognoscenti confused “infectious diseases” (an internal medicine subspecialty that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of infections in patients) with “contagious diseases.” They then conferred near-dictatorial authority on an immunologist, who was incidentally the political head of an NIH division with “Infectious Diseases” in its title.

A real infectious diseases consultant would have had practical experience interacting with the public health-contagious diseases crowd. That hands-on knowledge would have led to very different recommendations from those that Tony provided.

Infectious diseases doctors usually serve on hospital infection control committees -- the in-patient equivalent of public health cadres. Worn-out nurses, trained on the job, usually run the committees. They are terrified of making mistakes.

Forty years ago, they put anyone with a possible infection into isolation. It was ridiculous. In 1980 about one-in-four occupied adult hospital beds had an isolation cart and signs by the door stating the nature of the isolation. Patients in isolation were known to get substandard care because no one wanted to don gown, gloves, facemask, hoody, and cover for shoes to care for them. I, seeing infected patients, had to put up with more than the usual share of this crap.

Then, in the early eighties, we were slammed with the AIDS epidemic. Lots of young men were hospitalized and dying. The signs outside their rooms said “strict isolation.” The gay community did not want to be stigmatized and it had power. Hospital infection control committees folded and dropped the entire isolation charade, along with its “personal protective equipment,” instead replacing it with “universal precautions,” meaning that we washed our hands between patients and avoided contact with most bodily fluids. The incidence of transmission of infection among patients and to medical staff did not change. All of that “PPE” was for naught.

Incidentally, British surgeons did not wear masks way back when. A 1991 well-done study showed a much lower wound infection rate when surgeons did not wear facemasks. This information was whispered among infectious diseases doctors in group meetings, but no one wanted to annoy the surgeons who sent us so many patients.

Tony knew none of this. Working in immunology, he must have known, as I have pointed out in publications elsewhere, that vaccines cannot be declared safe and effective after a few months of testing, especially ones using this radical new mRNA technology. Tony as a “scientist” knows the nature of testing with its appended sensitivity, specificity, and the Bayesian constraints, yet I was the first to point out the high incidence of false-positive results.

Tony has done his administrative chores, lobbied for more money, and played at laboratory medicine. He grabbed at the opportunity to pontificate on the “pandemic” like a shark seeing a human foot in the water. He almost certainly had to call public health experts for advice to help him answer questions about the epidemiology, transmissibility, mortality, and measures that a government might take. Last year, no one else had any idea about how this virus spread or its clinical evolution (or maybe an intelligent design in Wuhan?), so everyone was flying by the seat of their pants.

A clinical maxim is that “If you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do nothing,” but Tony never heard that cliche. The public heard a lot of nonsense based on his hunches. His public utterances changed with each phone call. They were often incoherent.

Tony terrified the public by intimating that a plague was attacking them. People were more than willing to follow this Pied Piper who promised to drive the virus away and save people from the epidemic. In the original Hamlin story, the town’s people got screwed. The mayor had promised the piper 1000 guilder to get rid of the rats. When the mayor reneged on his contract the piper piped all their children out of town. They disappeared.

Our government has vested its public face and credibility in Tony. We have not seen the end of Tony’s compositions. He will continue to pipe. Look for yet more morbidity. And mortality.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Surgeon General is an officer in the Coast Guard. We have corrected that error and clarified the USPHS's relationship to the Coast Guard.

Erwin Haas MD MBA, an Infectious Diseases consultant, served as a flight surgeon in Vietnam and as a city commissioner in Kentwood, Michigan. He is a policy advisor at the Heartland Institute, has published 12 articles in peer reviewed scientific medical journals, also in the American Thinker, Liberty Magazine, Lew Rockwell, and Medical Economics and wrote several books including “A Brewery Worker’s Boy in Vietnam.” AnneMarie Schieber from Heartland helped with some references.

IMAGE: Caricature of Anthony Fauci by DonkeyHotey. CC BY 2.0.

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