Dr. Fauci declares himself the Pope of Science, or at least the High Priest

In a disturbing interview, Dr. Fauci reveals a warped view of the world where he is above criticism and debate, completely unaccountable for any of his actions and decisions, more religious icon than scientist even as he continues to cover for China and push the failed policies of the pandemic.

In many Western religions, God speaks through representatives on Earth.  These unique individuals translate an immortal voice into the mortal world.  For example, the Catholic Church defined the role of the Pope during the first Vatican Council on July 18, 1870.  “The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when carrying out the duty of the pastor and teacher of all Christians by his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, through the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, operates with that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wished that His church be instructed in defining doctrine on faith and morals; and so such definitions of the Roman Pontiff from himself, but not from the consensus of the Church, are unalterable.”  In other words, the Pope represents God on this Earth, he speaks with the voice of God and, in this regard, he is infallible.

In contrast, science and its conduct across thousands of universities and research centers is supposed to take a completely different, diametrically opposed approach, at least since Galileo began testing theory against facts almost 500 years ago.  The world of science is built on the assumption that humans are essentially fallible and no single person is the final arbiter of the truth or the sole source of special knowledge.  This is achieved by accepting that most, if not all, theories will ultimately be proven wrong, either in whole or in part.  Theories, therefore, are valid so long as they are supported by constant experimentation, the purpose of which is to continually test prevailing theories against any and all available evidence, trying to prove them wrong at every turn.  In other words, no one “represents” science.  Rather, science is the process of continually proposing ideas and testing them against repeated experiments.  The latest scientific knowledge is the sum total of ideas that have not yet been proven false, and that total changes all the time as the results of new experiments come in.

The coronavirus pandemic has, unfortunately, revealed that many people, including those that should definitely know better, remain completely unaware of how this process works in the real world and what the ramifications are.  Instead, the media and many, mostly-Democrat politicians have decreed that certain, special people are “the experts” and, because they are anointed such, their opinion is “science” regardless of whether or not it is borne out by the evidence.  These experts have the power, it seems, to decide what constitutes evidence itself.  This past weekend, the good doctor Anthony Fauci took this concept to its logical end in an interview with Face the Nation’s Marge Brennan, when he brushed off criticism of his current and past policies and positions by saying “Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this [criticism]. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize, there’s a person there.  So it’s easy to criticize.”  He continued, claiming the mantle of scientific oracle for himself and himself alone. “But they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

Rarely has someone who claims to be a scientist gotten so much so wrong in a single, meandering statement, one might say it was dangerously wrong.  Dr. Fauci was responding to repeated claims from Senator and Dr. Rand Paul that the National Institutes of Health, the government organization of which he is a part, funded so-called gain-of-function research at labs in China like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which many (if not most) people now believe the coronavirus escaped sometime last fall.  Dr. Fauci himself has taken almost every possible position on both matters over the past twenty months.  In January and February 2020, he was privately speaking to other scientists about the disturbing possibility that the virus escaped from a lab.  By March, he was promoting highly suspect papers claiming it arose naturally while failing to disclose his relationship with the author, Kristian Andersen, even though Dr. Andersen himself had also said in private the evidence suggested the virus escaped from the lab.  Dr. Fauci has never explained either the obvious conflict of interest, why he promoted the paper claiming it didn’t escape from the lab, or how the paper itself satisfied the concerns Dr. Andersen voiced barely a month earlier.

The scientific process, however, requires him to do precisely that.  Instead, Dr. Fauci has acted like the entire episode never happened, claiming that it might have arisen naturally or been released from a lab.  He doesn’t know, nor does he seem to particularly care.  In fact, he’s suddenly returned to pushing the natural origin story without any evidence.  To her credit, Ms. Brennan actually teed up a question on this, saying “Beijing acknowledges now that they don’t think it originated in that market.”  For reasons that defy explanation, Dr. Fauci’s response was almost nonsensical, saying, “Well, it may not have originated in the market, but it certainly could have.” Even more incredibly, this statement was made after he gently chided China for being “opaque,” “You know it was very tough what was going on in China.  You know, it’s kind of opaque,” as if it should be some surprise that a notoriously secretive, autocratic Communist regime lacked transparency. This makes it all the more surprising that Dr. Fauci refuses to understand why Senator Paul and others want to know why we were funding any kind of research in China in the first place. The question isn’t purely scientific either.  Politically, why would we fund a global adversary with a bad track record on both transparency and safety?  Scientifically, why would we fund research that could result in a global pandemic?

At first, Dr. Fauci and his boss, Dr. Francis Collins, both adamantly denied that the NIH funded any gain-of-function research in China, saying flat out that it never happened.  Evidence then mounted that they were using dollars to develop mutant, chimera viruses that sounded an awful lot like gain-of-function.   He was livid, literally shaking, when Senator Paul asked if he wanted to retract the initial claim based on this new evidence.  “Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”  Yes, according to the experts, building viruses in a lab that combine traits from other viruses and don’t exist in the natural world doesn’t fit the definition of “gain-of-function,” possibly the world record for distinctions without differences.  Dr. Fauci wasn’t finished either.  He went on to insist that a fellow doctor had no idea what he was talking about, as in “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially, you do not know what you are talking about.”

Dr. Fauci concluded by asserting without any evidence whatsoever that it’s “molecularly impossible” for the coronavirus to have been developed in this manner, but how could we ever know that given China’s “opaque” behavior, which included the destruction of any and all data about the origins of the virus?  Dr. Fauci himself admitted to this in the Face the Nation interview, “the people who were reporting it, who investigated what they did, is they cleaned out the markets as soon as it turned out that there were clusters coming from the market.”  Dr. Fauci also freely admits that something about this particular virus appears to make it incredibly effective in infecting humans.  He started by comparing it to an earlier strain that affects humans as well, “Why isn’t it just assumed that it’s SARS CoV-1, which means it doesn’t transmit very well and it’s going to get controlled by public health measures.”  Then, he continued to note that the new, pandemic inducing virus is “very, very different” and “it is transmitted spectacularly efficiently from person to person.”

Ms. Brennan had the temerity to wonder why. How is this virus uniquely adapted to be so horrible in the human body compared to every other strain we have recently encountered?  Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci offered nothing more than meaningless jargon in response. “Well, it evolves in animals, it evolves in humans, and it could just, you know, sometimes viruses jump into humans and they take off and run right away.”  The statement was so incoherent that Ms. Brennan interjected, saying that something must’ve been between A and B, prompting Fauci to blather even more. “It was very likely in a host — what the Chinese did, I don’t have first hand knowledge of that.”  Consider how truly incredible and ridiculous this is two years after the virus emerged:  The world’s leading expert on the subject still has no idea whatsoever why this particular coronavirus, unlike other strains, spreads like wildfire among humans, almost as if it was designed to do so.

Except, we do have some idea, a very specific one, in fact.  Late this summer, The Intercept released copies of government grants suggesting that the research the NIH was funding included projects that intentionally maximized a coronavirus’ ability to bind to human cells, conducted through tests on engineered mice.  “This is a road map to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” explained Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group investigating the origins of Covid-19.  The goal was to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to affect humans,and test them on “humanized mice.”  The grants also describe how they would use “mutant” viruses, “We will do this by sequencing the spike (or other receptor binding/fusion) protein genes from all our bat-CoVs, creating mutants to identify how significantly each would need to evolve to use ACE2, CD26/DPP4 (MERS-CoV receptor) or other potential CoV receptors.”  Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University explains, “The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell.”

In other words, the NIH was funding precisely the sort of research that might lead to a coronavirus far more effective in spreading among humans. We should note that whether or not this specific funding went to research on the specific pandemic inducing virus is irrelevant: Money is fungible, any dollars we spent towards these goals would have aided any other projects China was undertaking, and one would assume they were funding similar research themselves. This is about more than the origin of the virus as well. Dr. Fauci was instrumental in pushing destructive lockdowns that resulted in massive economic and emotional damage to the entire country.  He still believes they are a potential option in the future, but on Face the Nation, he said specifically that the experts originally assumed the pandemic causing virus was similar to previous strains and could be controlled with public health measures. This means lockdowns, social distancing, masking and more, but then admitted this strain is nothing like earlier versions and, therefore those strategies weren’t effective.  Why then do we keep talking about these restrictive strategies if our leading expert is tacitly admitting they don’t work?  Why did Fauci himself want the lockdowns to continue long past the original 45 days to slow the spread?  Who is to blame for a policy with such dismal results and massive collateral damage?

The lockdowns are not all either.  Last summer, Dr. Fauci was fighting to keep schools closed and he still supports forcing a five year old to wear masks all day.  Why, when we know these measures are simply not effective in dealing with this virus?  Likewise, he remains obsessed with vaccination and boosters, even advocating a change to vaccination rules that would require three shots instead of two.  This change would render tens of millions of Americans like myself no longer fully vaccinated, forcing us to get another shot to work at most jobs, enjoy restaurants in many cities, attend a concert, travel, and more.  Dr. Fauci has done all this while denying the importance of natural immunity, which has been documented as orders of magnitude more effective in multiple studies.  Earlier this year, Dr. Fauci dismissed an Israel study, “The one thing that paper from Israel didn’t tell you is whether or not — as high as the protection is with natural infection — what’s the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine?”  Well, what’s the durability of the vaccine when they promptly started promoting and are soon to require boosters less than six months later?

These are all scientific questions that the self-proclaimed representative of science should certainly answer.  Instead, he remains completely unaccountable to anyone, a secular Pope promoting his own genius at the expense of our freedoms and potentially our lives.  These are not moot questions when the Omicron variant is on the rise and the government is pushing to broaden its powers into never-before-attempted nationwide vaccine mandates managed through your employer.  Our future response to the continuing pandemic depends on getting the science right, not proclaiming that one man represents science itself and attacks on him are literally attacks on reason.  I’ll end by quoting Rand Paul in response to Dr. Fauci’s latest display of insane hubris, “When a government bureaucrat has the audacity and the arrogance to say they represent all of science, we should be running the other way. It conjures up images of the Medieval Church and their repression of science. Science has nothing to do with having obedience to any kind of government dogma.” Well said, Senator, well said.