Post-Faucist America

“Seeking exceptional candidates: NIH posts job ad to replace Fauci,” headlined a November 23 Helio report, which asked “experts” what qualities they would like to see in the person who replaces Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984.

One of the experts was Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez earned a degree in molecular biophysics from Yale, a doctorate in biochemistry from Rockefeller University, and an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College.

Cornell is where Anthony Fauci got his MD, and the professor is a huge fan.

“Replacing Dr. Fauci after so many decades will be daunting,” Dr. Hotez explained, “not only because Tony was a superb administrator and scientist, but also because he helped the U.S. Congress and executive branch understand the importance of infectious disease research to national and global security. Dr. Fauci’s replacement must not only be an important American scientist but also an adept science explainer, convener, and advocate.”

Dr. Fauci is also “a punching bag for the far right since the earliest days of the outbreak,” contended Dr. Hotez in “The Unique Terror of Being a Covid Scientist After January 6.” That June 21, 2021, Daily Beast commentary was subtitled “It’s no coincidence that one of the first guilty pleas in connection with the Capitol riot was of an anti-vaxxer.”

Hotez charges that in 2020 “the Trump White House embarked on a deliberate antiscience disinformation campaign.” The “far-right fringe” mounted “attacks” on Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak who heads the EcoHealth Alliance.

“I agree with Dr. Fauci when he says that these personal attacks represent an assault on American science,” Hotez argued, but there was more to it. “Ultimately, the far-right hunt for biomedical scientists represents an essential element for totalitarian control that goes back almost 100 years. In this context courage and standing up for democratic values demands that the American people throw their full support behind scientists and scientific institutions. To do otherwise is to capitulate to the forces of insurrection.”

That piece is the primary reference for Hotez’s July 28, 2021 paper, “Mounting Anti-science Aggression in the United States,” which leads with: “A band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.” Dr. Hotez perceives a drive toward totalitarianism and cites Hitler, Mussolini, and even Joseph Stalin.

Countries holding “similar views” include Hungary under Viktor Orban and Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Hotez explained. No word about the repressions of China’s Communist dictatorship, and their vast biological warfare apparat. Like Fauci, Hotez is uncritical of China’s totalitarian state, and criticizes Republicans for “pointing fingers at virologists both in the US and China.”

In America, “we should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.” Hotez likes the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021 but “still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections.” (emphasis added). That caught the attention of attorney Jonathan Turley.

Hotez, Turley noted, is “calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists.” Criminalization of dissent is the hallmark of totalitarian states, and Hotez wants to “criminalize” criticism of Fauci. That invites a look at the longtime NIAID boss, in government for more than 50 years.

Like Hotez, Fauci is a medical doctor, earning his MD in 1966 and taking a job with the NIH two years later in 1968. So if Fauci ever practiced medicine, it was only for a short time. Unlike Hotez, Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but the NIH made him NIAID boss in 1984. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis Ph.D., inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was on record that Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was.

Dr. Fauci is on record that “I represent science” and that his critics are therefore attacking science itself. Dr. Hotez agrees with Fauci that “these personal attacks represent an assault on American science.” On the other hand, Hotez shows no interest in probing the facts and realities of Fauci’s policies.

For example, Dr. Fauci told people not to bother with masks, then urged everybody to wear a mask or even two masks. Dr. Hotez doesn’t say which view represents science. As a treatment for AIDS, Fauci promoted azidothymidine, also known as AZT and Zidovudine, a highly toxic DNA chain terminator that neither prevented nor cured AIDS.

Hotez does not pronounce on the science of Fauci’s drug experiments, with multiple casualties among black and Hispanic foster children in New York. In similar style, Fauci recommended COVID vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission, but proved quite profitable for pharmaceutical companies. That marks a departure from the Salk vaccine, 90 percent effective against polio, and which creator Jonas Salk gave away for free. Albert Sabin also declined to patent his very effective polio vaccine.

In June, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci if anybody on the vaccine committee “ever received money from the people who make vaccines?” Fauci failed to answer and claimed that his own royalties averaged less than $200 per year. As Americans might recall, the jury is still out on the long-term effects of the vaccines Fauci wants administered to everyone, including children, the group least vulnerable to COVID. If Hotez has conducted research on vaccine injuries it does not emerge in his paper.

Hotez is aware of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) but his paper fails to mention that Fauci funded that dangerous research then lied about it to Congress. Hotez seems unaware of the supply chain of deadly pathogens to the WIV from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.

Fauci maintains that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild. This is speculation, not science, which requires observation, testing, and replication. Dr. Hotez replicates Fauci’s view and ignores mounting evidence of a laboratory origin. When former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin he got death threats.

That threat seems to have escaped Hotez’s notice, who also ignores Fauci’s attacks on the medical scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration. They include Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford, and Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

They took issue with Fauci’s draconian lockdown policy, but rather than engage them in debate on the facts, Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins called for “a quick and devastating published takedown,” of the Barrington scientists. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff told the story in “The Collins and Fauci Attack on Traditional Public Health.”

Hotez would have these scientists charged with a hate crime for daring to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci. And remember, Hotez agrees with Fauci’s claim that Fauci represents science. He doesn’t, and it’s not even close.

This megalomaniac Lysenko figure is the closest the United States of America has come to totalitarian rule. For a different comparison, see Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, Director of the NIH Office for Policy in Clinical Research Operations, fired after flagging misconduct in Fauci’s trial of nevirapine to treat AIDS.

“Dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime,” Fishbein told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Real Anthony Fauci. “He’s like the godfather. He has connections everywhere. He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way, that he gets what he wants. These connections give him the ultimate power to fix everything, control every narrative, escape all consequences, and sweep all the dirt and all the bodies under the carpet and to terrorize and destroy anyone who crosses him.”

To cross Fauci is to challenge him on scientific grounds. Consider the experience of Peter Duesberg, who earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963. As Jeanne Lenzer noted in Discover Magazine, the next year Duesberg arrived at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow “hoping to unlock the secrets of cancer.” At the age of 33, Duesberg was the first scientist to discover a cancer gene (oncogene), which he isolated from a virus.

At 36, Duesberg earned tenure at UC Berkeley, where he served as professor of molecular and cell biology. In 1986, at age 49, Duesberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and awarded a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, as Lenzer noted, “one of the most prestigious and coveted grants.”

Professor Duesberg knew that retroviruses don’t kill the host cells they infect, so he was skeptical when NIAID boss Anthony Fauci proclaimed HIV to be the cause of AIDS, with no scientific study making the case. In March of 1987, in the journal Cancer Research, Duesberg published “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” questioning the role of HIV as the cause of AIDS. As Lenzer noted, the man colleagues might once have regarded as the “Einstein of biology” was then smeared as an “AIDS denier.”

For the previous 23 years, Duesberg had never had an application for public funding turned down. That funding began to disappear under NIAID boss Fauci, who controlled both AIDS policy and spending on medical research. Fauci also contrived to cancel Duesberg’s media appearances, and his cancer research took a hit.

His laboratory once boasted two secretaries and was teeming with graduate students and postdocs, but by 2008 the only occupants were Duesberg and a single graduate student. Had Dr. Fauci been shown the door, and had Duesberg received the funding his research deserved, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand.

When they investigate Fauci, the new Congress should get testimony from Duesberg and Dr. Fishbein. And maybe the erudite Dr. Hotez can testify how Dr. Fauci represents science.

All things considered, it’s hard to overestimate the damage Fauci has done. The sycophantic Dr. Hotez suppresses the truth, slanders Fauci’s critics, and seeks to criminalize those who oppose him.

After Fauci officially steps down, NIAID will likely appoint an interim director, and NIH is accepting applications for the job through January 17. Under the Biden Junta, the primary qualifications will be fidelity to the Delaware Democrat and replication of Dr. Fauci. The obscurantist Hotez is doubtless a primary contender, as with that appointment Fauci would retain a strategic ally in the system.

Dr. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is head of bioethics for the National Institutes of Health, which oversees NIAID. By all indications, Grady had no ethical problems with anything Fauci imposed on the people, or his connections with Big Pharma. The bioethics boss will doubtless give her husband’s successor a free pass.

The NIAID boss leads a $6.3 billion institute, with a staff of 5,300, and research efforts in more than 100 countries. That is far too much power for any individual, especially a non-practicing physician who first does harm, has no use for informed consent, and declines to debate more qualified scientists on the facts. That all must change and Bhattacharya and Kulldorff show the way ahead.

“In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities,” they write. “If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.”

Those functions should be permanently separated. The new NIAID boss should be under a five-year contract, renewable only once, subject to review, and fireable by the president. Without these commonsense reforms, white coat supremacy will hasten the fundamental transformation of America from a free constitutional republic to a dreary Soviet Covidistan.