By some historical accounts, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig bears the distinction of WWI’s worst general.  He rose to Commander of British Expeditionary Forces and led Allied armies during the slaughter and futility at the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele.  Known for his self-confidence and inflexibility, he repeatedly ordered soldiers over the top to “no man’s land” and into the path of German machine guns.  No number of casualties or unachieved objectives could dissuade him from his singular approach to combat.

Nigel Davies, historian and educator, points out that General Haig was emblematic of the chateau general - dictating and directing but far removed from the battlefield:

They were Chateau Generals in approach and in attitude. They drew lines on maps without adequately considering the terrain, issued impossible instructions without looking at the state of the ground, and ran completely inadequate communications that were far from capable of keeping track of, or controlling, a modern battlefield.

In a similar respect, despite his academic and professional accomplishments, Dr. Anthony Fauci has no background or experience in clinical medicine and is ill-equipped to lead the SARS-CoV-2 response.  His purview is that of a research scientist and entrenched bureaucrat, who is far removed from patient contact. 

His career is enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, whose financial ties with federal medical regulatory institutions are well described.  Throughout his career, he has denied patients easily accessible, inexpensive, and effective treatments in lieu of patented medications with high-risk profiles and of dubious efficacy. In 1987 despite overwhelming clinical evidence, he told AIDS activists that the prophylactic use of the common antibiotic Bactrim to treat pneumocystis carinii pneumonia was ineffective and possibly dangerous.  Through private donations, the company Lymphomed circumvented the NIAID and conducted successful clinical trials.  The delay cost the lives of nearly 17,000 immunocompromised patients.

While Haig appealed to justice of cause and sacrifice as an excuse for his actions, Anthony Fauci brandishes science, for which he alone speaks, to justify mandates and neutralize opposing views and stymie intellectual inquiry.  To doubt Anthony Fauci is to be a scientific apostate and an irrelevant contributor to the discussion.  Yet Dr. Fauci demonstrates an arbitrary commitment to the standards of science, whether it deals with his advice on masking or his insistence on vaccinating children despite the high risk-to-benefit ratio.        

In the exposé, The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out from the days of the AIDS epidemic Dr. Fauci employed a trio of tactics that would be resurrected during the COVID crisis - the use of fear to induce panic within the general population, the fixation on vaccines to cure the disease, and a disregard for off label therapeutic interventions. In the 1970s and '80s during my medical school, residency, and early professional career, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease promoted the narrative of the inevitability that large portions of the general population would contract AIDS due to casual contact, the sole solution depended upon the development of a neutralizing vaccine to HIV, and therapeutic options other than those approved by the FDA were unacceptable.  These projections all proved false, but the same strategy reemerged during the COVID-19 crisis. 

From the outset, SARS-CoV-2 was a mass casualty event.  Prudent management called for flexibility, emergency treatment with medications, and accessing opinion and experience for all portions of the medical profession to contain and treat the disease until definitive therapy became available.  There was no time to wait for results of randomized controlled trials - millions of lives were at risk.  It was known from 2002 SARS-CoV-1, a deadly coronavirus with origins in China and genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, that chloroquine is effective in preventing its spread in vitro. Epidemiologists also noted the paucity of SARS-CoV-2 cases in Africa where malaria is endemic and treated with prophylactic hydroxychloroquine.  Dr. Pierre Kory and others developed extensive treatment protocols that demonstrated the success of multi-pronged treatment regimens initiated early in the disease process.  

Rather than exploit this valuable information, the CDC and NIAID adopted a "wait until get sick" approach to the disease, denied patients out-patient treatment, and relied primarily on the hasty development and distribution of vaccines.  As Dr. Peter McCullough pointed out during an interview with Joe Rogan: In a world where medical protocols are the norm, to this day no major U.S. academic medical institution or federal agency has developed a protocol to treat SARS-CoV-2 on an outpatient basis. Dr. McCullough suggests that 85% of deaths attributed to SARS-CoV-2 could have been avoided. 

In his best-selling book, RFK, Jr. painstakingly describes the incestuous connections among Big Pharma, the medical establishment, federal medical regulatory agencies, international health agencies, and politicians.  In no uncertain terms, he describes Fauci as the gray cardinal wielding billions of dollars of grant money for profit and power. He controls all facets of the drug approval process, maintains a group of dependable, private research investigators that can be counted upon to support his agenda, and advocates with a near-religious zeal that vaccines are the preferred treatment of disease to the exclusion of all other options.

Field Marshal Haig maintained a lifelong affinity for horses, both for recreation and on the battlefield.  His advocacy for the use of horses in WWI proved catastrophic, but near the end of his life, in 1926, his remarks warn of dangers when narrow-minded individuals with great influence and stature are willing to blindly sacrifice others due to pride, ignorance, stubbornness, or material gain.

I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.

Image: Library of Congress, via Picryl / public domain