Follow the Science by Sharyl Attkisson

Author:Sharyl Attkisson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

2. Fauci’s Follies

Did Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have some diabolical intent behind his many misstatements and falsehoods? Was he beholden to unseen masters due to conflicts of interest? Or was he simply utterly befuddled? Whatever the case, he became one of the most important disinformationists of the pandemic, yet was never held accountable.

The die was cast against Dr. Fauci’s credibility as early as March 2020, in the first weeks of America’s pandemic, when I heard him tell one of his biggest whoppers under oath.

As director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the lead Covid advisor to the White House, Dr. Fauci repeatedly cited jarring and scary figures in public. On March 11, 2020, while testifying to Congress, he stated that Covid-19 was “ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” The alarming testimony generated international headlines that blared across the Internet and television news, and remains frequently cited today.

I was skeptical. I’d read far more conservative assessments from some of Dr. Fauci’s learned colleagues in academia and even, as it turns out, from Fauci himself!

“[T]he case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%,” Dr. Fauci wrote in an article two weeks later, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on March 26, 2020. “This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Why was Dr. Fauci contradicting his own public testimony and giving a far softer take on Covid’s potential to kill, when writing in a scientific journal? Here he was saying Covid’s death rate was like a bad flu season, not ten times deadlier as he’d just claimed to Congress.

To confuse matters further, just one day after the NEJM article, I found Dr. Fauci back to repeating the higher fatality number rather than “considerably less than 1%.”

“The mortality of [COVID-19] is about 10 times [flu],” Dr. Fauci tells Comedy Central host Trevor Noah on March 27, 2020.

Though Dr. Fauci was never shy about granting television interviews, from local news and the networks, to CNN and Fox, he wouldn’t agree to an interview with me for my Sunday television news program Full Measure. So I posed the simple questions to his office via email: Which of his accounts was accurate? Was Covid’s death rate similar to that of the flu, or ten times deadlier?

Dr. Fauci didn’t answer. And among members of Congress or journalists who were able to get close to him, I never heard the questions asked. Nor was the bizarre discrepancy in Dr. Fauci’s accounts widely scrutinized in the press.

There are many other examples of Dr. Fauci making conflicting claims. One that received some media attention was his flip-flop on masking to prevent the spread of Covid.

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