“A high-stakes docu-thriller” is a P.R. caption for the ironically named Jenner Furst documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci.  No Thanks, Dr. Fauci or Goodbye, Doc would be a more straightforward title.  After all, if a large number of the right people were to view the film, it would change Anthony Fauci’s public reputation from the courageous voice of science to a mendacious bureaucrat whose reckless obsession with genetically altered vaccines paved the way for a devastating pandemic.  But as Furst implies, the likelihood of that reversal of fortune is slim, since the same tech, pharma, and political powers that successfully squashed the truth about the COVID lab leak and COVID vaccines continue to exert outsized control of the media.       

Far from offering a series of talking heads, Furst’s fast-paced film does a good job of integrating the statements of scientists and other professionals with eye-catching visuals and Furst’s narrative.  There’s no sense here of listening to a boring lecture.  Moreover, despite the work’s “thriller” pacing, viewers aren’t left confused about chronology or what commentators said about the Wuhan lab leak; the danger posed by gain-of-function research; and, most importantly, the role Dr. Fauci and his associates played in misleading the public about the pandemic’s origin.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC at the time of the pandemic’s outbreak, occupied the highest public health position in the Trump administration.  He sets the stage for the entire documentary with critical observations about the disease’s origin and spread.  Redfield then notes that he was “iced out” of behind-the-scenes meetings conducted by Fauci and then bluntly explains the reason: “I’m honest.”  In other words, Redfield’s belief (echoed by his Chinese CDC counterpart, George Gao) that the 2019 coronavirus outbreak was the result of a lab leak made him, in Fauci’s eyes, as dangerous as the genetically altered virus itself.

In addition to Dr. Redfield, Furst’s commentators make clear their opposition to gain-of-function research.  But this dangerous technique was an integral part of Fauci’s lifelong goal — namely, the creation of vaccines through genetic manipulation to treat potentially devastating viruses (like HIV and Ebola) that might emerge from nature.  To achieve this historic breakthrough, however, one must first create in the lab the dangerous virus itself, an undertaking that Fauci (the “poster boy” for such research, according to Redfield) believed was a risk worth taking.  But as Furst’s documentary suggests, one such devastating virus (Ebola) likely escaped from a lab in West Africa in 2014.  

Furst also devotes significant time to exposing Fauci’s promotion of the natural-origin explanation (via bats) for the Wuhan coronavirus — an exposé that features prominent scientists like Dr. Peter Daszak, a Fauci colleague with significant Wuhan and likely intelligence connections.  This P.R. campaign involved submitting a blizzard of natural-origin papers to science outlets, dozens of which were authored by Fauci’s insider group.  Redfield judged the most prominent of these papers “very sloppy science.”  Another Fauci critic termed the submissions “propaganda.”  In addition to this information blitz, a prominent article (Proudan et al., 01/31/2020) that explained in detail the characteristics of this apparently lab-created virus was quickly withdrawn from both publication and the internet.  Soon thereafter, The Lancet (02/19/2020) published a Daszak-composed statement signed by over twenty prominent scientists that dismissed all lab-based explanations as conspiracies.

Other points of interest in Furst’s film concern Fauci’s position as an insider to bio-weapons research with “billions of dollars to fund the riskiest research in the world with no oversight” — research in which Daszak was likely involved at Wuhan.  In that regard, the documentary discusses Daszak’s DEFUSE proposal (which the DOD officially rejected) that sought to create a virus just like COVID a year before the pandemic’s outbreak.  In short, the film suggests that Fauci, Daszak, and others hoped to create (or make use of) deadly bio-weapons in order to potentially destroy them.

Toward the end of the film, Furst delves into Fauci’s financial status: a $434,000 annual salary, a net worth that ballooned from seven to twelve million dollars after the pandemic, and 690 million royalty dollars that pharmaceutical companies like Moderna sent to Fauci’s NIAID Institute.  Curiously, the founder of Openthebooks.com, Adam Andrzejewski, an otherwise healthy 55-year-old man and marathon-runner who uncovered information about those huge royalty payments, died in his sleep of a “sudden illness“ soon afterward.

Furst’s last five minutes include a series of trenchant criticisms directed at Fauci and gain-of-function research by, among others, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Dr. Marty Makary, and Dr. Redfield.  Dr. Richard Ebright’s comment sums up what could be seen as the upshot of Thank You, Dr. Fauci: “We had willful, deliberate misfeasance that likely caused a pandemic, killed 20 million, and cost 25 trillion dollars.  Against that context it is unsurprising that individuals would prefer a lie.”

This cinematic investigation seems to have disabused Furst, a lifelong leftist, of his political allegiance, but don’t expect any kind words directed toward conservatives in this film, which conveniently transforms “right vs. wrong” judgments into power-based wrestling matches if the former label is associated with conservative representatives or journalists.

Furst’s documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, is currently available to subscribers of Tucker Carlson’s Network (TCN) and can also be accessed via other streaming services.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is available on Kindle.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.