The Hindu Chronicle

Fauci, Grand Monarch of anti-science dogmas, claims to be Mr. Science

Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID Director

Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID Director (Photo courtesy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons)

Louis XIV (1638-1715) ruled France for 72 years till his death. Embodying the age of absolute monarchy, he was also called Louis the Great, Louis the Grand Monarch, or the Sun King. He is attributed the quote, “I am the state.” Real or apocryphal, it suited him. Anthony Fauci—as medical adviser to the US President and the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has enjoyed a similarly absolute control in his remit. Perhaps, this gives him the impudence to assert, almost like the Grand Monarch, that he is, well, hold your breath… science incarnate.

Talking to a news channel this week, Fauci said, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science. All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.” I am science, you dumbos.

The guy is more conceited than Louis XIV. Notice the title of his 80-page book, Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward, which will be released in November. All he has done during the Covid crisis is obscure the truth about the origin of the novel coronavirus and served his own and his cronies’ and China’s interests—and yet he has the temerity to lecture on truth and service!

During his Senate testimony on May 11, he asserted more than once that the $600,000 in US money that the NIH sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through an NGO EcoHealth Alliance, was not used to finance the dangerous gain-of-function research. Such research genetically modifies pathogens to make them more lethal, transmissible, and capable of infecting humans.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” he told an incredulous Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Fauci’s lie was exposed shortly after his deposition when his emails were unearthed, showing that was warned as early as January last year about the “unusual features” of the coronavirus that “[potentially] look engineered” in a laboratory.

Yet, Fauci and his buddies strove to dismiss any lab-leak possibility as a conspiracy theory. His friend Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, planned and drafted a letter that they got published in the prominent medical journal Lancet on February 19 last year, which claimed that the origin of the novel coronavirus was natural. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said, which was signed by a number of prominent virologists and others.

The prominent science journalist Nicholar Wade recently wrote an exhaustive article in the prestigious magazine The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, exposing Fauci, Daszak, and co (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/). Wade pointed out that at that time “it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened.” Yet, the scientists “overwhelmingly conclude[d] that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”

Fauci is one person whose agenda-oriented counsel not just did immense damage to the fight against Covid-19; his entire approach has been unscientific, indeed anti-scientific. And yet he claims to be Mr. Science. Mendacity dons the mantle of veracity and crookedness of saintliness in this postmodern age.