The authors of this piece, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD and Swedish biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, formerly at Harvard Medical School and currently a member of the FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee were two of the people smeared and slimed by Fauci and friends (also grantees and minions).
Via the Brownstone Institute, February 4:
With millions of Americans getting infected and over 800,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, most people now realize that Washington’s pandemic policies failed. Lockdowns just postponed the inevitable while causing enormous collateral damage on cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, mental health, education and much else.
So, the blame game is in full swing. At a recent Senate hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci did not even attempt to defend his policies. Instead, he insisted that: “Everything that I have said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.”
Dr. Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has worked closely with the two CDC directors, Drs. Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky, throughout the pandemic, but he is now laying the responsibility on them. He did the same with his former boss, shortly after Dr. Francis Collins resigned as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dr. Collins fiercely defended Fauci throughout the pandemic. In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration criticized Fauci’s lockdown strategy, calling for focused protection of high-risk older people while letting children go to school and young adults live near-normal lives. A few days later, Collins—a geneticist with little public health experience—wrote an email to Fauci suggesting a “take down” of the declaration, and characterizing its Harvard, Oxford and Stanford authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci agreed with his boss, but when asked about the incident at the recent Senate hearing, he responded that it “was an email from Dr. Collins to me.”
In other words, Fauci himself was just following orders.
As public health scientists and coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, we have been critical of the pandemic strategy championed by Drs. Collins, Redfield and Walensky. As human beings, we can only feel sympathy for the trio as Dr. Fauci seeks to deflect blame onto them. At the Senate hearing, Dr. Fauci did not engage in a substantive public health discussion to defend the pandemic strategy—as one might have expected from its principal architect and salesman. Understandably, politicians, journalists, academics and the public trusted Dr. Fauci. Why should they now shoulder the blame?
Dr. Fauci also defended himself by saying he has received death threats from “crazies.” It is tragic that scientists have to deal with such threats, a testament to the lack of civil scientific discourse during the pandemic. But Fauci is not alone in that respect. The organized “take down” that he and Collins orchestrated, with their grave mischaracterization of focused protection as a let-it-rip strategy, resulted in death threats and racist attacks against the Great Barrington Declaration authors. As Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco pointed out, the NIH director’s “job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, [Collins] attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.”....
....MUCH MORE
The "I was only following orders" defense, also known as the Nuremberg defense, did not work at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and is not going to work here. Fauci was too front and center in everything to get away with the blameshifting.
Another of those people on the receiving end of these very public professional smears is Sunetra Gupta, PhD, infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. She specializes in the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases.
