What Fauci’s emails tell us about his deadly incompetence and mishandling of COVID
Raymond Wolfe
The errors and hypocrisy of America’s most famous bureaucrat were on full display last week with the release of thousands of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails.
The messages, published by The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, and health advocacy group ICAN, exposed Fauci’s previously unknown concerns about the origin of COVID-19 and his close cooperation with Bill Gates and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among other revelations.
The communications of the top presidential COVID-19 adviser and director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) also detailed his flip-flops on masks, fixation with a faulty COVID drug, and fatal misinterpretation of virus mortality data.
Below are a few highlights from what we’ve learned about Dr. Fauci’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis based on his own messages.
‘The mistake that drove all the others’
Emails from early 2020 that were dumped last week shed light on Fauci’s false comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu – errors that ultimately led to global lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing.
In an email dated March 2, 2020, the NIAID chief responded to a reporter with The Wall Street Journal stating that COVID-19 has a roughly 2 percent mortality rate. “For seasonal influenza it is approximately 0.1 percent,” Fauci said. He estimated mortality rate of the virus similarly in other emails, like one to the top medical correspondent of CBS News.
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“On March 2, Fauci estimates a 2% mortality rate from the virus. He’s off by a factor of 10, give or take,” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson commented on Twitter. “This was the mistake that drove all the others.”
Dr. Ronald Brown of the University of Waterloo discussed Fauci’s misreading of COVID-19 data in a paper published last year in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.
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Two weeks after his March 2 email, Fauci reiterated to the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that mortality for the flu was around 0.1 percent. The updated mortality rate of COVID-19, however, was around 1 percent, he claimed. As Dr. Brown remarked, “The conclusion was reported to the House Committee that the coronavirus was 10 times more lethal than seasonal influenza.”
Brown explained that Fauci’s comparison between influenza and COVID-19 mixed up two different metrics: case fatality rate and infection fatality rate. “Confusion between CFRs and IFRs may seem trivial, and it is easy to overlook at first, but this confusion may have ultimately led to an unintentional miscalculation in coronavirus mortality estimation,” Brown said.
“A comparison of coronavirus and seasonal influenza CFRs may have been intended during Congressional testimony, but due to misclassifying an IFR as a CFR, the comparison turned out to be between an adjusted coronavirus CFR of 1% and an influenza IFR of 0.1%,” he said.
Fauci’s mistake thereby “helped launch a campaign of social distancing, organizational and business lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders” based in large part on an error.
COVID-19 restrictions, of course, have devastated the global economy and precipitated untold needless deaths, despite the actual infection fatality rate of COVID-19 hovering around .2 percent to .3 percent, according to research highlighted by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“After Dr. Fauci’s testimony, the ‘10 times more lethal’ line was echoed throughout the media,” Len Cabrera noted in the Rational Ground. “The problem is that the statement was false and Dr. Fauci (and his staff) should have caught it immediately.”
Dr. Fauci: anti-masker
Fauci’s emails also detailed his stunning reversals on mask use and his initial rejection of widespread masking, given what he recognized to be the ineffectiveness of most face masks.
“Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection,” Fauci wrote February 5 to Sylvia Burwell, presumably the Obama-era health secretary and former Gates Foundation executive.
“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” he told Burwell. “I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a vey low risk location.”
Screenshot/ICAN
Responses to a journalist approved by Fauci later that month likewise noted that “(t)he vast majority of people outside of China do not need to wear a mask. A mask is more appropriate for someone who is infected than for people trying to protect against infection.” As Fauci affirmed in a message on February 4, “Most transmissions occur from someone who is symptomatic.”
Fellow NIAID officials appeared to back up their boss’s mask hesitancy, one circulating a “review on masks” dismissing the effectiveness of the measure. “Bottom line: generally there were not differences in ILI/URI/or flu rates when masks were used,” the official summarized.
Screenshot/ICAN
Dr. Fauci continued recommending against mandatory mask policies in his communications throughout the spring, telling a South Carolina professor in April, “I would keep the policy ‘voluntary’ but I would ‘encourage’ employees to wear (masks).”
The NIAID director, of course, later became a leading proponent of universal masking, eventually claiming that face masks should be worn after COVID-19 vaccines and that masking could continue even after coronavirus subsides.
“I think he’s been all over the place on masks,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University, said on The Ingraham Angle last week.
“I think his credibility is entirely shot.”
“Yes, you should change your mind when the science changes,” he continued. “But what is that science that changed that convinced him that masks are the most effective way?”
‘Very surprised’ by DeSantis
While dissuading against mask use and pushing back against the fallacy of asymptomatic spread, Dr. Fauci privately blasted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for not “completely” shutting down entire sectors of the Florida economy early on in the COVID-19 crisis.
“I have pushed hard on PPEs and as you may know the POTUS has involved the Department of Defense to provide 5 million N-95 respirators,” he wrote in March 2020 to a Florida doctor who complained to Fauci about the DeSantis administration.
“Regarding the bars and beaches, I have been screaming on TV 2 to 5 times per night to tell the younger generation to start taking this seriously,” he said. “I am very surprised that Gov. Desantis has not completely closed the bars, even if they serve food.”
“I will bring this up at the Task Force meeting tomorrow,” he said.
COVID-19 therapeutics
Further emails released last week highlighted Dr. Fauci’s aggressive promotion of Gilead’s antiviral medication remdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19. Fauci peddled the now-discredited treatment almost exclusively, regardless of tips from numerous experts about other regimens, his emails revealed.
Even fellow leftist bureaucrats raised concerns about Fauci’s support for the Gilead drug. “I am a bit perplexed by your seeming strong endorsement of remdesivir,” Ezekiel Emanuel, pro-abortion Obama administration official wrote April 30, after Fauci touted remdesivir in a White House briefing.
“Was it just a bit forced?” Emanuel asked. “My reading was the data were weak and in normal times for normal disease it is not enough to to approve. And very unlikely to really impact COVID-19 disease pattern.”
Fauci responded defensively, writing that he “did not ‘strongly’ endorse it.” “I specifically said that it was not a knockout drug and was only a baby step in the direction of developing more and better drugs,” he said. “I do not think I forced anything.”
He had, in fact, given the drug a ringing endorsement the previous day, saying that data showed “that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”
Fauci made the announcement after the publication of two studies, both of which were flawed, and one of which found that remdesivir did not reduce COVID-19 death rates, NBC News reported at the time.
“What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Fauci nevertheless insisted. The WHO ultimately officially recommended against remdesivir in the fall, citing “no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes.”
Other messages show that Fauci was advised by multiple scientists to investigate different treatments in the meantime, though he often seemed to dismiss them. In April, Fauci was informed about an apparently promising “a potent anti-aggregant therapy” by Dr. Paolo Lussa, senior investigator for the Viral Pathogenesis Section at the NIAID.
“I talked with Dr. Viecca this morning who shared additional information about his protocol,” Lussa wrote, adding that “they treated a first group of five critical patients with potent anti-aggregant therapy (tirofiban/Aggrastat) and apparently in all of them the pO2 started to rise within less than 2 hours, they got off the ventilators and went on to full recovery.”
Fauci simply responded, “Thanks, Paolo.”
Scientists also alerted Fauci to possible benefits of hydroxychloroquine, like physicist Erik Nielsen, who pushed the NIAID chief to take ciclesonide into account as well. “Some patients on ventilators who were approaching death have fully recovered after treatment with ciclesonide,” Nielsen told Fauci. The email was “(t)oo long for me to read,” Fauci said.
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