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Last week, the Washington Post and Buzzfeed reported on thousands of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci’s emails from early 2020 obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Washington Post, Buzzfeed
Here’s our recent coverage of COVID-19’s origins. The Flip Side
The right criticizes Fauci, arguing that he provided misleading information in order to encourage his preferred policy outcomes.
“‘Attacks on Fauci grow more intense, personal and conspiratorial,’ warns Politico today. Yes, sure, fine, you can find nutty conspiracy theories, personal attacks, and unhinged demonization of Fauci, just as you can find that phenomenon of just about any public figure who has been venerated to the point of prayer candle merchandising. But has it ever crossed the minds of the team at Politico that maybe, just maybe, Fauci has earned some fair criticism?…
“Is it even remotely conceivable that significant swaths of the public are starting to get the sense that Fauci has been shading the truth and tweaking and tailoring his advice, sometimes in the face of well-reasoned opposition, for a long while now? Nothing Fauci’s done earned him some criticism? Not even his reversal on masks? Nothing in his emails, suggesting a symbiotic relationship with adoring reporters? Nothing in his evasive answers about whether U.S. taxpayer money ended up financing gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Nothing in Fauci’s past defenses of gain-of-function research?”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“Anthony Fauci’s email correspondence from the early days of the pandemic have ignited a spate of recriminations over masks and the doctor’s celebrity. But what really matters is that some of the emails raise more questions about the origin of Covid-19…
“From 2014-19, the National Institutes of Health sent $3.4 million to the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance… The NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, and it’s likely the WIV conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious…
“[Dr. Fauci has] said his outfit didn’t fund gain-of-function research; the EcoHealth Alliance funding was meant to go to collecting samples. But ‘I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab, we can’t do that,’ Dr. Fauci said Wednesday in an interview with NewsNation Now. Dr. Fauci also said this week that his emails ‘are really ripe to be taken out of context’ and that ‘you don’t really have the full context.’ That may be true. But it’s all the more reason to investigate the U.S. links to WIV and gain-of-function research. The issue relates to Covid’s origins but also to the future risks and benefits of such research.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Most of Fauci’s biggest whoppers didn’t need to be exposed in his email correspondence. In fact, he openly admitted to lying to the American people on multiple occasions. He told the New York Times that he moved the goal posts on herd immunity because of ‘his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks’. It wasn’t the only noble lie…
“When Sen. Rand Paul suggested the fully-vaccinated Fauci was only wearing a mask as a matter of theater, the doctor vehemently denied the claim. But a few weeks later Fauci told Good Morning America that he had kept wearing a mask because he ‘didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals’. It was all an act, none of it based on science — all of it based on optics.”
Grace Curley, Spectator World
“[Fauci] deceived the public about whether masks were necessary early on to preserve the existing supply for hospitals and he deceived the public again later by deliberately lowballing the threshold of herd immunity we’d need to contain the virus. That wasn’t ‘science.’ That was government disinformation from a bureaucrat who hoped to engineer a particular policy outcome…
“It’s true that in some cases his views have changed as data on COVID has developed. For instance, Fauci supported reopening schools many months ago as it became clearer that children didn’t do much to spread the virus. Some of his ‘reversals’ are good-faith changes of heart in response to new studies. But not all are, and enough attention has been paid to those cases by now that you’d think he’d be more modest in trumpeting the alleged innocence of his approach.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
The left supports Fauci, arguing that he did his best at a time when information about the virus was uncertain.
The left supports Fauci, arguing that he did his best at a time when information about the virus was uncertain.
“The ‘evidence’ of a cover-up is a single email from a researcher who suggested the virus looked ‘engineered’ in January 2020—[this is] being held up to suggest that Trump was failed by public health officials, instead of being the failure himself. In this version, efforts to dismiss the lab leak theory prematurely are touted as proof of the pro-China bias of ‘experts’ like Fauci and the Democratic Party, who are more interested in kowtowing to Beijing than they are in pursuing the truth. (This version of events neglects Trump’s extensive praise of the Chinese response to Covid-19 during the early months of the pandemic.)…
“The emails show nothing like this story being spun… But the right is in need of a scapegoat—and not just for Covid-19. Thus far, Republicans and their media allies have struggled to find a consistently potent line of attack against President Joe Biden. One moment, they’re casting him as a Stalinesque puppetmaster; the next he is a senile, powerless figurehead being manipulated by others behind the scenes. Fauci has, in recent days, arrived as a stand-in: a convenient means of savaging the Biden administration without having to attack Biden himself.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic
“[The same researcher who suggested the virus looked ‘engineered’ in the email in February 2020] concluded several weeks later that the lab leak theory was indeed implausible. ‘Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,’ the study said, while adding that ‘it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.’…
“Fauci certainly cast doubt on the lab leak theory. But he generally couched it as there being no real evidence of it, rather the conclusive evidence to disprove it, and he was doing so at a time in which most other scientists were doing the same thing. There is quite simply no evidence that Fauci was delivered anything amounting to solid evidence of a lab leak.”
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
“Though the lab leak theory has been embraced more on the political right, [Rutgers University biologist Richard] Ebright says it was Republican hawks under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who pushed for the NIH to fund more of the sort of research that could have both health and bioweapons applications — or could be seen as defensive against biological attack. And it was academics on the left who warned this work could endanger our safety in the name of improving it…
“If Fauci owes the public an explanation for anything, it’s why he approved funding for research that potentially made viruses more dangerous — so-called gain of function research. Though Fauci has been unofficially anointed America’s ‘top expert in infectious disease’ by the press, his real job is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In that capacity, he’s not above criticism. He’s approved funding of projects on viruses that other scientists have deemed too risky to be worth doing.”
Faye Flam, Bloomberg
Regarding Fauci’s initial advice not to wear masks, “In February and early March of 2020, anything Covid-19-related was unclear even to health professionals, and a leading line of discourse was that Americans should not wear masks because they weren’t thought to be effective in screening out viral particles shed by others. While that information continues to be believed accurate… it was eventually found that encouraging everyone to wear masks helped to prevent the actively infected from spreading the shed viral particles as easily to others…
“There was also an effort to keep the panic-driven public from buying all available masks and putting health care workers at risk of running out of supplies… During a June 3 CNN interview addressing the emails, Fauci reiterated that if he had all the information he had today, his advice from early in the pandemic would be drastically different, and that masks do in fact work. But it doesn’t look like Fauci’s explanation will ease the backlash.”
Maryam Gamar, Vox
A libertarian's take
“Government health officials should not be immune from criticism simply because they are doctors or scientists. Fauci works for the government and should be subject to the same scrutiny that journalists are supposed to apply to all members of government…
“‘Science’ is not synonymous with Fauci, or the CDC, or any lone source of authority. Scientific experts routinely disagree on various policies. Some epidemiologists continue to urge the public to practice a level of caution that seems unnecessary in light of the vaccines, while others think life can resume as normal. There are legitimate differences of opinion on which pandemic mitigation strategies—lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates—actually worked. Being pro-science does not mean parroting the talking points of the government's chosen spokesperson. Robust debate and challenge are part of the scientific process.”
Robby Soave, Reason
