A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths, Part 23: Dr. Anthony Fauci and COVID

Here's what Rockefeller University has to say about Dr. Anthony Fauci M.D.

"Through seven presidential administrations, Dr. Fauci has provided guidance on public health and medical issues to the U.S. population and its presidents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NIAID investigators made critical contributions to development of the safe and effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Dr. Fauci earned the nation’s trust by providing clear, compassionate advice rooted in the available facts through the rapidly evolving pandemic. He is revered for his insistence on the pursuit of truth, and the distinction between what is known and what is not, serving with unwavering dedication despite an extremely challenging political environment."

A brief list of Dr. Fauci's accomplishments as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID pandemic include (copied from Google AI):

• mRNA Research: Supported decades of prior National Institutes of Health (NIH) research that built the foundation for safe, fast mRNA vaccine development.

  Trial Partnerships: Directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to collaborate directly with private companies on vaccine design and clinical testing.

  Financial Risk Strategy: Backed the bold federal strategy to fund large-scale manufacturing concurrent with early clinical trials to save months of pandemic response time.

• Safety Validation: Championed independent data boards and FDA authorization steps to protect scientific integrity.

  Public Advocacy: Publicly credited government-private framework investments for the ultimate success of the accelerated vaccine timeline.

I consider Dr. Fauci one of America's greatest heroes for his leadership in the development and distribution of the COVID vaccine. More than one million Americans died of COVID, and more than 99% of those Americans were unvaccinated. 

However, for reasons I don't entirely understand, last week Dr. Fauci was forced to appear before a Senate hearing led by Senator Rand Paul. Here are the attacks Republicans directed to Dr. Fauci during and after the hearing:

Myth: Under Fauci's leadership, NIAID made a grant to a Chinese lab that ultimately aided that lab in developing and subsequently leaking the 2020 COVID pandemic virus. Dr. Fauci's private diary reveals that he knew that the COVID virus originated from a lab and not from a public "wet market". (This claim is most of the basis for Senator Rand Paul's hearing this week.)

Fact: NIAID did give money to the the US-based EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to look into possible coronaviruses from bats. However, the scientific evidence regarding COVID supports a natural spillover from an infected animal to humans rather than a leak from a lab.

In last week's hearing, Senator Paul focused on a Jan. 26, 2020, diary entry in which Fauci stated that "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." Factcheck.org notes, "This is not the "gotcha" that Paul makes it out to be. Citing this one passage removes critical context for Fauci’s statements and falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market (the Huanan seafood market), that it couldn’t have had a natural origin." "There’s overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID emerged from an animal market in Wuhan, which was miles away from a virology lab," Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us for a previous story."

Myth: Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said that week regarding Dr. Fauci, "We’re going to go after the guy with everything we’ve got because the guy killed, or had something to do with killing, 9 million people," because, Fauci was, "in on the gain-of-function".

Fact: "Gain-of-function" is an attempt to enable an organism to develop new abilities. This can happen in nature, or it can be achieved in a lab, when scientists modify the genetic code or place organisms in different environments, to change them in some way.  From the BBC: "For example, (gain-of-function research) might involve scientists trying to create drought-resistant plants or modify disease vectors in mosquitoes to make them less likely to pass on infections. With viruses that could pose a risk to human health, it means developing viruses that are potentially more transmissible and dangerous." 

The claim here is that the research described in Myth #1 above included gain-of-function and that the research went awry, releasing the deadly COVID virus. From the BBC article linked above, "Dr Fauci told the Senate hearing the research in question "has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain-of-function definition". He also said it was "molecularly impossible" for these viruses to have resulted in the coronavirus." "The NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have also rejected suggestions they supported or funded "gain-of-function" research in China."

Myth: "Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, "this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth." - The Atlantic
Fact: (Also from The Atlantic) "Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times."
In terms of the COVID vaccine causing deaths, a comprehensive scientific literature review published by the National Library of Medicine identified only 38 to 55 deaths globally among the more than 8 billion doses administered by 2022.

Myth: Peter Navarro, who was the Trump White House defense policy coordinator during the pandemic said last week: "I had a million doses of hydroxychloroquine in warehouses as the defense policy coordinator for the DPA that I was trying to distribute to hospitals, and he got the FDA to stop me from doing that. Thousands of people could be here in this country right now alive if I had been able to distribute that, take that to the bank. That's what the science says."
Fact: The scientific community has, with no uncertain terms, rejected hydroxychloroquine as a valid COVID-19 treatment. After reviewing dozens of trials involving more than 10,000 patients, the World Health Organization concluded that hydroxychloroquine:
*Does not reduce deaths.
*Does not reduce the need for mechanical ventilation.
*Does not provide meaningful clinical benefit for treating COVID-19.
*Carries risks, including heart rhythm abnormalities in some patients.
The NIH likewise concluded that it did not improve outcomes in hospitalized patients.

Myth: Prior to last week's hearing, Senator Paul suggested that natural immunity gained from contracting COVID is more effective in protecting a person's health that getting vaccinated, writing, "Remember: Anthony Fauci was all about 'following the science,' until it came to vaccines. He was all about forcing you into compliance, even though we all knew infection was the best protection."
Fact: A 2021 CDC study, "found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated.  The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection."

Note: There is strong evidence that Senator Rand Paul has been vaccinated against COVID.

In conclusion, Dr. Fauci offered no testimony during the Senate hearing, other than to offer a brief initial statement, in which he referred to Chairman Rand Paul’s "unhinged obsession" with slandering his reputation and putting him in prison. I think that sums up this entire witch hunt quite well.

 

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Senator Rand Paul, This Week's King of Idiot America and Why Republicans Hate the Press

One of the positive things to come out of the Trump years was that much of the mainstream media found a backbone when it came to covering the President and his constant lying. Let's hope it's not a temporary phenomenon. Republicans of course are not happy about journalists practicing journalism instead of just providing a microphone for lies and disproven conspiracy theories, now that Republicans make their own reality and rely on "alternative facts". As Stephen Colbert once observed, it seems reality has a well-known liberal bias.

This week Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC. It did not go well. This exchange between the two regarding the 2020 election speaks volumes about what's wrong with this country:
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STEPHANOPOULOS: The Department of Justice led by William Barr said there's no widespread evidence of fraud. Can’t you just say the words, this election --

PAUL: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- was not stolen?

PAUL: Well, what I would suggest is -- what I would suggest is that if we want greater confidence in our elections, and 75 percent of Republicans agree with me, is that we do need to look at election integrity and we need to see if we can restore confidence in the elections.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, 75 percent of Republicans agree with you because they were fed a big lie by President Trump and his supporters to say the election was stolen. Why can't you say --

PAUL: Well, I think --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- President Biden won a legitimate, fair election --

PAUL: -- I think where you make a mistake in -- hey, George. George. George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything's a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything.

Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t.
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Let me first offer some very on-point commentary on the above from Steve Bennen of MSNBC:

"After a contentious back and forth, Stephanopoulos eventually reminded his guest, "I'm standing by facts. There are not two sides to facts.... It is a lie to say it was stolen."

It was an enlightening exchange because it shed light on a pernicious strategy. Rand Paul wants not only to peddle nonsense, he also wants independent news organizations to present his nonsense to the public as if it has merit.

In the Republican's vision, journalists have a responsibility to present the public with both lies and facts. Media professionals who alert the electorate to the truth, in Paul's vision, are doing the public a disservice. Real journalism, according to the hapless senator, means giving equal weight to garbage and reality.

Only "the liberal side" disagrees.

To be sure, in more instances than anyone could possibly count, this both-sides approach was -- and in some circles, is -- a popular approach to reporting the news. But thankfully, Rand Paul is not a news director or an editor, and responsible media professionals are telling the public the truth: the election was not stolen. The Republicans' Big Lie has no basis in fact."

I'm reminded of the excellent 2009 book from journalist Charles P. Pierce entitled, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Pierce looked at recent events in America, such as the Terri Schiavo debacle, the opening of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, and most of the work of the George W. Bush administration, and determined that that in the U.S., "fact" is merely what enough people believe, and "truth" lies only in how fervently they believe it. 

According to Pierce, "The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites...although both of these things are part of it. The rise of idiot America reflects -for profit, mainly, but also, more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power- the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.  

This is how idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist.""

Conservatives of course hated real jounalism a long time before the rise of Idiot America. Richard Nixon famously went to war with the press just because he didn't like the way they covered him. From John Avlon of The Daily Beast:

"The heated domestic debates over Vietnam had overturned decades of deference in press coverage of the president. The new technology of television broke down barriers that brought the reality of war into America’s living rooms, upending their assumption that journalists would almost uncritically support the president in times of war.

In the legion of great newspaper reporters who earned their stripes covering the war in Vietnam – David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Marguerite Higgins and Sydney Schanberg among them – the White House recognized that television correspondents had disproportionate power in the fight for hearts and minds at home."

Nixon would have loved Twitter and other social media vehicles for the same reason that Trump loved them: Twitter allowed Trump to deliver his message to his audience without a filter, without any fact-checking, without any follow-up questions and without any commentary.

How Republicans would like the mainstream media to function was summarized neatly by Sharron Angle, the GOP's 2010 nominee for Senate in Nevada. From Eric Kleefeld of Business Insider:

"Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle has further expounded on her strategy of courting conservative media and avoiding more mainstream sources -- it's not just about money, as she's said before, but also about only being asked the questions she wants.

"We needed to have the press be our friend," Angle said in an interview that aired on Fox over the weekend.

"Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend?" said a disbelieving Carl Cameron. Before Angle could fully answer, he added: "That sounds naive." Apparently this was too much for even him.

"Well, no," said Angle. "We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."

Angle continued: "And when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.""

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