CHAPTER 1
MISMANAGING A PANDEMIC
“My friend, have you ever been in a quarantined city? Then you cannot realize what you are asking me to do. To place such a curse on San Francisco would be worse than a hundred fires and earthquakes and I love this city too well to do her such a frightful hurt.”
—Rupert Blue, Public Health Service Officer in charge of dealing with the 1907 plague outbreak. Blue subsequently served as fourth Surgeon General of the US and President of the American Medical Association.
I: ARBITRARY DECREES: SCIENCE-FREE MEDICINE
Dr. Fauci’s strategy for managing the COVID-19 pandemic was to suppress viral spread by mandatory masking, social distancing, quarantining the healthy (also known as lockdowns), while instructing COVID patients to return home and do nothing—receive no treatment whatsoever—until difficulties breathing sent them back to the hospital to submit to intravenous remdesivir and ventilation. This approach to ending an infectious disease contagion had no public health precedent and anemic scientific support. Predictably, it was grossly ineffective; America racked up the world’s highest body counts.
Medicines were available against COVID—inexpensive, safe medicines—that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country. But Dr. Fauci and his Pharma collaborators deliberately suppressed those treatments in service to their single-minded objective—making America await salvation from their novel, multi-billion dollar vaccines. Americans’ native idealism will make them reluctant to believe that their government’s COVID policies were so grotesquely ill-conceived, so unfounded in science, so tethered to financial interests, that they caused hundreds of thousands of wholly unnecessary deaths. But, as you will see below, the evidence speaks for itself.
Peer-reviewed science offered anemic if any support for masking, quarantines, and social distancing, and Dr. Fauci offered no citations or justifications to support his diktats. Both common sense and the weight of scientific evidence suggest that all these strategies, and unquestionably shutting down the global economy, caused far more injuries and deaths than they averted.
Dr. Fauci was clearly aware that his mask decrees were contrary to overwhelming science. In July 2020, after switching course to recommend national mask mandates, Dr. Fauci told Norah O’Donnell with InStyle magazine that his earlier dismissal of mask efficacy was correct “in the context of the time in which I said it,” and that he intended to prevent a consumer run on masks that might jeopardize their availability for front-line responders.1 But Dr. Fauci’s emails reveal that he was giving the same advice privately. Moreover, his detailed explanations to the public and to high-level health regulators indicate he genuinely believed that ordinary masks had little to no efficacy against viral infection. In a February 5, 2020 email, for example, he advised his putative former boss, President Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Sylvia Burwell, on the futility of masking the healthy.2 On February 17, he invoked the same rationale in an interview with USA Today:
A mask is much more appropriate for someone who is infected and you’re trying to prevent them from infecting other people than it is in protecting you against infection. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you. Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.3
During a January 28 speech to HHS regulators, he explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people.
The one thing historically people need to realize, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.4
Consistent with Dr. Fauci’s earlier statements, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has steadfastly refused to support masking the healthy as an effective barrier to viral spread, and Dr. Fauci offered a citation to justify his change of heart. A December 2020 comprehensive study of 10 million Wuhan residents confirmed Fauci’s January 28, 2020 assertion that asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is infinitesimally rare.5 Furthermore, some 52 studies—all available on NIH’s website—find that ordinary masking (using less than an N95 respirator) doesn’t reduce viral infection rates, even—surprisingly—in institutional settings like hospitals and surgical theaters.6,7 Moreover, some 25 additional studies attribute to masking a grim retinue of harms, including respiratory and immune system illnesses, as well as dermatological, dental, gastrointestinal, and psychological injuries.8 Fourteen of these studies are randomized, peer-reviewed placebo studies. There is no well-constructed study that persuasively suggests masks have convincing efficacy against COVID-19 that would justify accepting the harms associated with masks. Finally, retrospective studies on Dr. Fauci’s mask mandates confirm that they were bootless. “Regional analysis in the United States does not show that [mask] mandates had any effect on case rates, despite 93 percent compliance. Moreover, according to CDC data, 85 percent of people who contracted COVID-19 reported wearing a mask,”9 according to Gutentag.
Dr. Fauci observed in March 2020 that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better.”10 Perhaps he recognized that what masking lacked in efficacy against contagion, it compensated for with powerful psychological effects. These symbolic powers demonstrated strategic benefits for the larger enterprise of encouraging public compliance with draconian medical mandates. Dr. Fauci’s switch to endorsing masks after first recommending against them came at a time of increasing political polarization, and masks quickly became important tribal badges—signals of rectitude for those who embraced Dr. Fauci, and the stigmata of blind obedience to undeserving authority among those who balked. Moreover, masking, by amplifying everyone’s fear, helped inoculate the public against critical thinking. By serving as persistent reminders that each of our fellow citizens was a potentially dangerous and germ-infected threat to us, masks increased social isolation and fostered divisions and fractionalization—thereby impeding organized political resistance. The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F. Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis.” By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in appropriations.
Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gotleib admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr. Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science backed. The process for making that policy choice, Gotleib continued, “Is a perfect example of the lack of rigor around how CDC made recommendations.”11,12
Finally, the lockdowns of the healthy were so unprecedented that WHO’s official pandemic protocols recommended against them. Some WHO officials were passionate on the topic, among them Professor David Nabarro, Senior Envoy on COVID-19, a position reporting to the Director General. On October 8, 2020, he said:
We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of controlling this virus. We may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We’ll have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe, actually, and so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method . . . lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle—and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.13
As discussed above, Dr. Fauci and other officials made no inquiry or claims as to whether lockdowns would cause more harm and death than they averted. Subsequent studies have strongly suggested that lockdowns had no impact in reducing infection rates. There is no convincing difference in COVID infections and deaths between laissez-faire jurisdictions a...
