COVID King (and Queen) Remembered

From the nation’s capital to coastal villages in California, protesters cry “no kings!” Similar protests did not break out while the nation was under rule by the closest thing to a monarch since King George. 

When the COVID virus showed up in 2020, the people found themselves taking orders from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. Dr. Fauci ordered massive lockdowns of schools and workplaces, causing vast suffering and loss for millions of Americans.

Under Dr. Fauci’s rules, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sent aging patients back into nursing homes where thousands perished. When challenged by CNN, Dr. Fauci declined to discuss the matter. The NIAID boss warned of new and more powerful COVID “variants,” such as Omicron, able to appear out of nowhere.

Dr. Fauci told people to wear no mask, one mask, then two masks. The six-foot distancing rule, he later admitted, “sort of just appeared” and had nothing to do with science. He cautioned people not to visit relatives at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Dr. Fauci recommended untested vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission of COVID, which the fully boosted Dr. Fauci verified by testing positive. The NIAID boss backed a mandate for vaccinating children, the least vulnerable group. Members of the military who refused vaccination faced discipline or dismissal.

Dr. Fauci said the COVID virus emerged naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. On the other hand, Dr. Fauci funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. When challenged, Dr. Fauci claimed “I represent science,” and charged that his critics were only rejecting science.

As Monty Python’s King Arthur (Graham Chapman) noted, “you don’t vote for kings,” and as the peasant Dennis (Michael Palin) explained, supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses. Dr. Fauci wielded executive-level power without ever facing the voters. (As the people should know, there’s also a strong case that this autocrat never should have had the NIAID job in the first place.)

In 1968, two years after he earned his medical degree, Dr. Fauci hired on with the National Institutes of Health. His bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, but in 1984, the NIH made him head of NIAID. According to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, Dr. Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was.

Dr. Fauci was never held accountable, and his white coat supremacy touched off no protests on the scale of the “no kings” events. On his last day in the White House, Joe Biden pardoned Fauci, without specifying any crime he had committed. The record suggests some possibilities. 

Dr. Jonathan Fishbein was fired by the NIH after exposing misconduct in one of Dr. Fauci’s drug trials. As Fishbein told The Real Anthony Fauci author Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime. 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.”

He was just like a king, and there was also someone on the queen’s side. White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, a longtime collaborator with Fauci, contended that those with no symptoms were important spreaders of COVID.” Dr. Birx promoted forced testing of the asymptomatic and cautioned people not to visit relatives during holidays, a warning she violated.

For all their restrictions on the rights of the people, the unelected Fauci and Birx drew no widespread protests like the “no kings” events now going on. At this point, a better course would be a thorough investigation, perhaps with the DOJ involved. In the meantime, to adapt Milan Kundera, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.