ByĀ
A politician first, Fauci has always played all sides of the equation because he knows that inspiring fear will always drive public policy in the direction he wants it to go.
In an alarming report issued on September 18, the Centers for Disease Control released a significant new guidance claiming that coronavirus droplets can remain suspended in the air to be later breathed in by others in indoor restaurants, classrooms, and businesses. Worse, the CDC claimed, the airborne particles can travel distances far beyond six feetāinfecting entire indoor environments without good ventilation.
Three days later, theĀ CDC withdrewĀ the advice, saying only that āit had been posted in errorā on the agencyās website.
For nearly four decades, the researchers at the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have been regarded as heroes because of their commitment to public health and welfare. Fauciās leadership in the early days of COVID-19 pandemic was laudableāinspiring confidence that the 15 days to āflatten the curveā would save lives by protecting hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.
In fact, much of Fauciās work and the work of the CDC truly has been heroic. In 1988, when then-Vice President George H. W. Bush was asked during the October 13 presidential debate to name a personal hero, he named Fauci. And when President George W. Bush awarded Fauci theĀ Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008, he reminded us that when AIDS, a āmysterious and terrifying plague began to take the lives of people across the world . . . it had a fierce opponent in Dr. Anthony Fauci.ā
As Randy Shiltsā 1987 book,Ā And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, points out, Fauci was an early hero in his early days as an AIDS clinician at the National Institutes of Health Hospital. But Shilts also devotes several pages of his book to what he saw as a recurring problem with Fauci: that the hero in the AIDS fight wasĀ alsoĀ a political player who was willing to distort research data to try to shape policy in the ways he thought it needed to be shaped.
On May 5, 1983ācontrary to all of the research data at the timeāFauci published an article in theĀ Journal of the American Medical AssociationĀ stating AIDS was transmissible by āroutine close contact.ā Claiming that childrenĀ couldĀ catch the deadly disease of AIDS from their families, Fauci wrote that if routine personal contact among family members in a household is enough to spread the illness, āthen AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension.ā
Fauciās 1983 editorial opened the floodgates of fear about AIDS. According to Michael FumentoāsĀ The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Fauciās article moved AIDS from being āperceived as a gay disease to a āmedia event.āā Fumentoās review of media coverage via the computerized bibliographic news service Nexis revealed that during the second and third quarters of 1983, AIDS news coverage quadrupled to about 700 articles each quarter. And although reassurances were given to contradict Fauciās felonious statements on the ācasual contactā contention, the idea that āanyoneā was vulnerable to contracting AIDS continued for quite a while.
As Fumento wrote, āwhat really appeals to editors is raising the specter that AIDS is about to break out of major risk groups . . . If previously healthy straights were getting a fatal disease for which there was no cure and the number of cases was doubling every seven or eight months or so, the story would be in the papers every day.ā
Refusing to take any responsibility for the panicked response, Fauci blamed a āhysterical mediaā for taking his comments out of context. According to Shilts, Fauci had said,
only that the possibility of household transmission might raise all these scientific implications. The lay public did not understand the language of science, he pleaded. Science always dealt with hypotheticals; this did not mean he was saying that AIDS actually was spread through household contact. Moreover, the chief villain, he would accurately note, was the press office of the American Medical Association which had so shamefully sensationalized the journal article in an effort to draw attention to a journal that always found itself playing second fiddle toĀ ScienceĀ and theĀ New England Journal of Medicine.
No matter who was to blame, Fauciās warnings about casual contact causing AIDS set in motion a wave of hysteria; it also set in motion a wave of government and private funding for research for a cure.
TheĀ New York TimesĀ andĀ USA TodayĀ ran Fauciās flawed press release as did most newspapers in the United States as heterosexuals began to believe that they, too, were vulnerable. The media warned that heterosexuals ājust like you and meā with no risk factors other than heterosexual intercourse could spread AIDS. Claiming that in 1986, the proportion of heterosexual transmission cases had doubled in one year from 2 percent to 4 percent of all cases, Fumento pointed out that the media neglected to ask the āhard questionsā about the real data.
Distortions of Data Then and Now
Blaming the CDC for distorting the numbers of heterosexual cases, Fumento wrote: ānobody was seeing these additional cases, to be sure but they existed on paper, with the trail of paper leading right back to the doors of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.ā
What the media did not tell us about these percentages was that the CDC had included AIDS cases discovered among new arrivals to the United States from Africa and Haiti who were classified as āundeterminedā sexual orientation when they were diagnosed. The CDC later acknowledged that āit was probably an omissionā to fail to state that the undetermined were lumped in with the heterosexuals in compiling the data on new AIDS cases: āIt should have been put in there, but if somebody called weād set them straight.ā
The distortions of data continue today. Although the threat of contracting the coronavirus that can lead to COVID-19 is very real for all of us, he rarely mentions that more than 80 percent of all deaths from the disease are among the elderly. Healthy young people are much more likely to have mild cases of the virus as even the CDC acknowledges that the vast majority of all COVID-19 patientsāyoung and oldārequiring hospitalization had at least one underlying health condition or risk factor, as did those requiring intensive care. Men are significantly more likely to die of COVID-19 than women but no one seems to worry about that.
According to theĀ most recent data, children ages 0 to 19 have a .02 percent risk of dying if infected by the coronavirus. There are almost no cases of the virus causing problems in children under age 10.
Yet, channeling his 1983Ā JAMAĀ warnings, Fauci advised Congress in July that in some parts of the country, āschools should remain closed in the fall.ā Claiming that if states reopen before meeting the criteria set out by the Trump administration, they risk reprisals of the outbreak, Fauci continues today to move the goalposts in reopening the country.
President Trump was correct when he criticized the CDC for demanding schools do āvery impractical thingsā to prepare to reopen. The president is also correct when he says that Fauci āwants to play all sides of the equation.ā
A politician first, Fauci has always played all sides of the equation because he knows that inspiring fear will always drive public policy in the direction he wants it to go. Some lives may be savedābut many more lives may be lost by continuing to keep children locked out of schools, parents locked out of work, and businesses closed.