Tucker: Two-faced Fauci pushed draconian measures despite data
Fauci faces heavy criticism as 3,000 more emails are released
Funny thing about the COVID pandemic. For so long, we knew very little. Now we know an awful lot. It's now clear that in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials in Washington were panicked. At the time, it wasn’t clear what the mortality rate from the virus would turn out to be. But that wasn’t their main concern. Officials in Washington were terrified for themselves. They were afraid of being exposed. They’d used American tax dollars to fund reckless experiments in China that in the end likely created COVID-19. If that fact were to become public, it would be over. They’d be shamed and ridiculed and possibly even indicted. Their professional lives would be done.
So they immediately set to work hiding it in a cover-up. Last winter, a group of well-known scientists publicly dismissed the lab leak theory in a letter to The Lancet as absurd and categorically untrue, and yet at the same time, they wrote emails to each other admitting that the virus looked engineered, by human hand, in a lab. Meanwhile, Tony Fauci worked on censorship. He made certain that the self-appointed fact-checkers who control the flow of information in this country shut down anyone who dared challenge the official story, which we now know was a lie. In the final days of the last administration, the State Department finally began a serious investigation into the origins of COVID, into what was happening at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Almost immediately after the election, Joe Biden canceled it.
In all, the lying went on for a year and a half. We’re just learning how deep it went.
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The Informed Consent Action Network, a group that advocates for transparency on vaccines, has just obtained thousands of new emails to and from Tony Fauci. They show, among other things, that Fauci knew perfectly well his own directives often had no basis whatsoever in science.
For example, in February of last year, Tony Fauci told us, in public, that the COVID outbreak could go one of two ways. It could be a catastrophic pandemic, which is what we were all worried about, or it could turn out to be an unusually bad flu season. Those were the two options.
FAUCI: If it continues to evolve into what we hope it doesn’t – namely a pandemic flu – it will be very much like a really, really bad flu season or a moderately bad pandemic season.
So it could be a pandemic or just a bad flu? Which would it be? At least one reporter asked him, a man called Jon LaPook, who’s the Chief Medical Correspondent at CBS News. On February 16 of last year, LaPook asked Fauci just how dangerous COVID-19 was. What were the numbers on it? At the time, you’ll remember, Fauci was telling the public not to wear masks. He was telling reporters that it was fine to attend packed political rallies. Public gatherings were ok. Fauci responded to LaPook by outlining the conditions that would make him change his mind and demand lockdowns.
"The current mortality of COVID-19 is about two percent. However, there are several folds more cases that are coming to the official attention of health authorities, i.e. asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections. If you count these, the case fatality rate could drop to one percent or even 0.5 percent or less. If that is the case, then this could be a very severe seasonal flu (0.2 percent to 0.4 percent; regular seasonal flu is 0.1 percent) or a typical pandemic like 1957 or 1968 (0.5% - 0.9%). We are not sure where this is going to land."
It's interesting to note that Tony Fauci used the term "case fatality rate" in the email -- that means, the number of deaths divided by confirmed COVID-19 cases. Confirmed meaning people who have gone to the doctor, and usually died in a hospital. But then Fauci starts talking about the infection fatality rate, which includes the total estimated amount of COVID-19 infections in the country, including asymptomatic cases. It’s a far more meaningful number, especially if you’re trying to make health policy for the entire country. You should calculate how many people who have the virus are dying from it. So what is that number? What is the actual death rate from COVID?
At the height of the outbreak, in late May, the CDC's "best estimate" for the fatality rate for people with COVID-19 symptoms was 0.4 percent. That estimate was contained in a CDC document called "COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios," which was intended for hospitals -- it wasn't in a public press release. But Reason Magazine obtained it.
J.P. Morgan looked at the data and came to the same conclusion. Infection fatality rates in spring 2020 -- the height of the pandemic -- were 0.06 percent in Santa Clara, California. They were also 0.06 percent in Los Angeles, 0.18 percent in Miami Dade County.
In other words, by Fauci's own definition, what we were experiencing was effectively a severe seasonal flu season, at the worst. But that's not what Fauci said under oath when he testified at a House oversight hearing in March of last year. In that hearing, Fauci claimed the COVID-19 infection mortality rate was around one percent -- which, Fauci explained, means it’s "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu."
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That’s untrue. It’s a lie, it turns out. It’s hard to think of a more misleading use of numbers. In fact, survival rates for COVID-19 for anyone under the age of 70 turned out to be north of 99.5%. Fauci knew that.
On March 16, someone relayed a question for Fauci that a Fox News host, Steve Hilton, had asked on air.
"Given the relative safety of all but the elderly and those whose immune systems are compromised, why not quarantine only them?"
Fauci's response: "Stay tuned." So we did. And in the next few weeks, Fauci shut the country down. He encouraged closing schools, for example, even though, as he wrote in one February email, "Children have a very low rate of infection." He knew that, but he pushed to close schools anyway.
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Then he told everyone in the country to wear masks, even though he knew they didn’t work. As he explained in another February email, "The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material."
Those drugstore masks don’t work. But Fauci continued to demand that you wear those drugstore masks. He continued to demand the lockdown continue. Why did he do that when he knew, and we know for certain now, we can prove it because we have the emails, he knew those were not recommendations grounded in science. But he pushed them anyway. We can’t say for certain. We do know the effect of his recommendations was a kind of "medical martial law." The country was so miserable and off-balance, for so long, that no one thought to ask where the virus came from. But Fauci knew where it came from. Here he is in 2018, celebrating the end of the federal moratorium on U.S. taxpayer funding for gain-of-function research:
FAUCI: NIH lifts funding pause on gain of function research. So let me explain this a little. Because whenever this comes out, there’s always – the pushing back and forth from the press. So like "NIH now is going to do dangerous research." No. As a matter of fact, it’s exactly the opposite. So a framework has been now established to guide funding decisions on proposed research that might be anticipated to create transfer or use enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.
The NIH is not going to conduct dangerous experiments. That was Fauci’s promise. There’s a framework. That was Fauci’s promise, and in fact, it was half true. The NIH did not conduct dangerous experiments. The NIH, Tony Fauci, paid for the Chinese to do dangerous experiments. There’s no debate about that now. It happened. What are the consequences going to be? What happens if you do something like this and wreck the country? Will Fauci face any consequences? The White House answered that question.
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JEN PSAKI: Well, I think we've spoken to this pretty extensively. From here. Let me just say on Dr. Fauci and his emails: he's also spoken to this many, many times over the last, over the course of the last few days. And we'll let him speak for himself. And he's been an undeniable asset in our country's pandemic response. But it's obviously not that advantageous for me to relitigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.
He can speak for himself. He’s always got a place on Nicole Wallace’s show where she’ll tell him what a great man he is, really kind of a hero. He can speak for himself on MSNBC. So nothing’s going to happen to Tony Fauci. He’s not even going to lose his job, ever, as Biden’s flack explained today, he will never be fired.
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PETER DOOCY: Since you mentioned Dr. Fauci again, can you imagine any circumstance where President Biden would ever fire him?
JEN PSAKI: No.
No. And not only is he never going to be fired, held to account for this, forced to explain, he’s also never going to apologize.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the June 4, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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