The Early Advice Fauci is Hiding
On January 21, Fauci was asked the following question to which he gave the following answer in a video published by Newsmax:
Q. What are you thinking in terms of this virus spreading in the United States?
FAUCI: Well those people are probably at a very low risk…. Well, obviously you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But this is not a major threat to the people in the United States. And this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.
On February 18, in a video published by USA Today, Fauci said the following:
FAUCI: No, I don’t think people should be frightened. The risk right now, today, currently, is really relatively low for the American public. But… this could evolve [] into a global pandemic….
So right now, don’t worry about it, be more concerned about influenza, which is going into a second peak for the season, than corona virus…. People wearing masks now is just not relevant. You don’t need to be walking around with a mask right now….
The accompanying text of the February piece in Today quotes Fauci as saying that the danger from the Wuhan virus is “just miniscule” whereas: “We have more kids dying of flu this year at this time than in the last decade or more. The threat is (we have) a pretty bad influenza season, particularly dangerous for our children.”
On Saturday, February 29, Fauci stated as follows on the Today Show:
No, right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change. I’ve said that many times…You gotta watch out, because although the risk is low now—you don’t need to change anything you’re doing—when you start to see community spread, this could change....
So, on February 29, Fauci was still giving assurances on national television that there was no need for Americans to change anything regarding their daily activities. In fact, that was the very day the press reported the first death attributed to purported “community spread” of Wuhan virus in the United States.
On March 9, Fauci told John Roberts of Fox News that “If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship” whereas “if you have…an individual who has an underlying condition, particularly an elderly person who has an underlying condition, I would recommend strongly that they do not go on a cruise ship.”
To sum up, it is undeniable that during the months of January and February of 2020, Fauci minimized the threat of the Wuhan virus. There is not even the glimmer of a suggestion that there be a national lockdown of all Americans to “save lives.”
Even Politico could not refrain from exposing the galling hypocrisy of the media’s glowing portrayal of this self-serving bureaucrat, who joked that he would prefer that Brad Pitt play him on Saturday Night Live. “Today,” writes Politico, “Anthony Fauci is held up by the media as a national hero of the pandemic response and the only reason to listen to a White House coronavirus briefing. Yet, rewind the clock back to January and his public statements essentially mirrored those of the administration.”
Fauci Was Right Only When He Was “Wrong”
But, most ironically, the early advice Fauci now seeks to hide was probably the only correct advice he has given Trump concerning the Wuhan virus. For it is fast becoming apparent that his and Scarf Lady’s models and predictions about death tolls were wildly exaggerated and that in end the only real difference between the Wuhan virus outbreak and a bad flu season will be the obsessive counting of every death attributed (however loosely) to the former.
As the Economist has just observed: “If millions of people were infected weeks ago without dying, the virus must be less deadly than official data suggest.” In support of that assessment, the Economist cites “a new study by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne that used data on influenza-like illness (ili) to show that the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) is now widespread in America. Silverman and Washburne found that the coronavirus mortality rate could be as low as 0.1 percent, ‘similar to that of flu.’”
Which is what The Remnant has been saying all along based on common experience and common sense.
Fauci’s Passive-Aggressive Opposition to Trump
Fauci has been undermining his boss since the moment he became a member of the “Coronavirus Response Task Force.” His passive-aggressive opposition to Trump involves impeding as long as possible the rollback of the unwarranted and massively destructive national shutdown while slyly intimating that Trump is misleading the public and that he failed to act with sufficient promptness. Fauci’s subversion was on full display in an interview with Science magazine on March 22. His remarks about Trump reek of condescension and contempt along with a thinly veiled attempt to accuse him of being unprepared to respond rapidly to the “deadly pandemic” at the very time Fauci himself was declaring to the public that no drastic measures were necessary. The arrogance and audacity of the man is sickening:
Q: … Trump keeps saying that the travel ban for China, which began 2 February, had a big impact on slowing the spread of the virus to the United States and that he wishes China would have told us 3 to 4 months earlier and that they were “very secretive.”… It just doesn’t comport with facts.
A: I know, but what do you want me to do? I mean, seriously Jon, let’s get real, what do you want me to do?... I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.
Q: You have not said China virus….
A: Ever.
Q: And you never will, will you?
A: No.
Q: Big picture: We’ve had all this pandemic preparedness. Why did this fail? What went wrong?
A: I think we’ll have to wait until it is over, and we look back before we can answer that. It’s almost like the fog of war. After the war is over, you then look back and say, “Wow, this plan, as great as it was, didn’t quite work once they started throwing hand grenades at us.” …Why were we not able to mobilize on a broader scale?...
The implication is clear: It was Trump who failed to “mobilize on a broader scale.” Yet it was Fauci who said throughout January and February that there was no need to “mobilize on a broader scale.”
The Easter Sunday Betrayal
Fast forward to Easter Sunday, when Jake Tapper invited Fauci to betray Trump on national television and he cooperated. Herewith their exchange with my comments:
TAPPER: “The New York Times reported today that you and other top officials wanted to recommend social distancing and physical distancing guidelines to President Trump as far back as the third week of February, but the administration didn’t announce such guidelines to the American public until March 16, almost a month later. Why?
COMMENT: Note the deceptive wording: “wanted to recommend” to Trump rather than did recommend to Trump. Fauci made no such recommendation to Trump, as shown above. But Fauci played along with the deception:
DR. FAUCI: You know Jake, as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken, sometimes it’s not. But it is what it is. We are where we are right now.
COMMENT: Fauci’s lying implication is that Trump rejected a recommendation from him during the third week of February that there be “social distancing and physical distancing guidelines.” But as we have just seen, on the last day of February Fauci told the nation that no changes in personal behavior were required and on March 9 even declared that young, healthy people could go on cruise ships, veritable incubators of any virus.
TAPPER: Do you think lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures, had started the third week of February instead of mid-March?
COMMENT: Notice how the devious Tapper stealthily inserts “stay-at-home measures” into the already patently false claim by the New York Times that Fauci had recommended “social distancing, physical distancing” measures during the third week in February. The “stay-at-home” orders, as the Times has noted elsewhere, “began in California in mid-March,” were imitated by other Democrat governors and then by numerous Republican governors as a tidal wave of panic swept away reason and a barrage of preposterous commands assailed the several states.
Next, Fauci went along with Tapper’s lying implication that Trump had caused thousands of lives to be lost for not doing what Fauci had never recommended in February:
FAUCI: Obviously you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier you could’ve saved lives, obviously. No-one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But, you’re right: Obviously, if we had right from the beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
COMMENT: The insinuation is that Trump gave Fauci “pushback” about “social distancing, physical distancing, and stay-at-home measures” during the third week of February, when in truth Fauci had not recommend any of these things to Trump at that time. On the contrary, he was declaring publicly that none of those things were needed. As discussed below, Fauci was finally forced to admit this during the press briefing of April 13, when it appeared his job might be in jeopardy following the appearance on Tapper’s show.
In short, during his Easter Sunday appearance on Fake News CNN Fauci—a Bill Gates retainer who wants to vaccinate the whole world—assisted Jake Tapper in crucifying Trump on national television. And the lying media loved it: “Fauci Downloads on Trump, Lives Could Have Been Saved if Shut Down Earlier: Battle to Reopen,” screamed a blood-red headline on the Drudge Report, echoed of course by Fake News CNN and the rest of the lying media, which now includes most of Fox News.
But the betrayal did not end there. Later on Easter Sunday, during an exchange with Al Sharpton on Fake News MSNBC, Fauci falsely claimed that it was “probably toward the middle or end of January” when “it became clear that there was community spread… then it became clear that we are in real trouble.”
As already noted, the first reported case of community spread, in Washington State, was not until February 29, a month later, the same date on which Fauci declared to the American people “you don’t need to change anything you’re doing…”
Next came a series of deceitful implications in response to Sharpton’s leading question:
SHARPTON: And what, did you begin advising the administration and those authorities that we were in fact seeing something different here and this could be a major problem at that time [mid- to late January]?
FAUCI: You bet. And that’s when [mid- to late January] it became clear that there are a couple of ways of addressing that. You could either prevent or try and block the influx of new cases into the country. And already cases had come in from China. To try and say that’s it, we gotta stop that, because now we already have cases here.
And then it switched to Europe. And when Italy had their outbreak it became clear that that became a danger. So that’s when cases were cut off from coming in from Europe and then ultimately from the UK. But by that time, we had enough cases in our own country [the middle or end of January] that the ability to do the containment slipped then into the need for mitigation. And we saw what happened.
Fauci falsified the timeline of actual events to make himself look good and Trump look bad, even though Trump was following Fauci’s advice to America in mid- to late January. Here are the false implications in Fauci’s response to Sharpton:
- FALSE: Trump’s travel ban on people entering from China at the end of January was too late because “already cases had come in from China.”
That’s lying by a half-truth. Even if some unknown cases of infection had come in from China by that date—cases unknown to Fauci as well—Trump prevented many more from coming in. And no one, Fauci included, knew that the virus was being transmitted in this country until February 29, when the first death due to the virus in the United States occurred, on which date Fauci declared that Americans had no need to modify their activities.
- FALSE: By mid- to late January, the spread of the virus had “switched to Europe” and that “when Italy had their outbreak it became clear that that became a danger.”
There was no sign of an outbreak in Europe until the first European death attributed to the virus, which occurred in France on February 15, the victim being an 80-year-old Chinese tourist.
Note well: Following Trump’s lead on January 31, nations all over the world began banning travel from China and neighboring counties, so that as of today “approximately 3 billion people [are] residing in countries enforcing complete border closures to foreigners,” as even the Fake News New York Times admitted on April 7.
FALSE: By mid- to late January, Fauci knew that “the ability to do the containment slipped then into the need to for mitigation. And we saw what happened.”
As already shown, Fauci knew nothing of the kind in mid- to late January, but rather was telling the American people a month later on national television that the threat from the virus was low, that they need not change anything in their daily routines, and that young and healthy people were safe on cruise ships.
Finally, recall that, as I noted here, in a co-authored article in the New England Journal of Medicine published on February 28, Fauci opined 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%)…” Nothing we have seen thus far contradicts that opinion, despite the hysterical hour-by-hour reporting of every death attributed in any way to the Wuhan virus.
What is Fauci Up To?
It should be obvious that Fauci has been none-too-subtly performing the function of a Deep State mole in the Trump camp. He has consistently aligned his public statements during media appearances with the Democrats’ “blame Trump” narrative.
Fauci has even lent support to the Democrats’ absurd demand for “mail-in balloting”—that is, systematic vote fraud—in the November election on the pretext that the same virus that permits trips to the supermarket and the liquor store today will somehow make a trip to the polls too dangerous seven months from today. During the same Easter Sunday appearance on Fake News CNN, Tapper asked the following question to which Fauci gave the following answer:
TAPPER: “Do you think it will be safe in November for voters to physically go to vote at the polls?”
FAUCI: “I hope so, Jake. I can’t guarantee it….
Fauci’s Cunning Mea Culpa
Trump’s retweet of the post with a #firefauci hashtag the day after Fauci’s Easter Sunday betrayal induced yet another frenzy among media jackals already driven mad by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump must not dare to fire Fauci. Fauci has become another Robert Mueller, along with Roberta Mueller in the person of Scarf Lady—unbearable yet untouchable.
But not quite. Sensing that his position is precarious, even if Trump is forced to retain him in some pro forma capacity, Fauci was forced to do something Mueller never did: offer a mea culpa. During the press briefing on April 13, he was at pains to let the media to know that Trump actually did follow his recommendations when he actually got around to making them:
The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the President to actually have a quote “shutdown” in the sense of—not really shutdown but to have really strong mitigation… the President listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.
The next, second time, that I went with Dr. Birx into the President and said “fifteen days are not enough, we need to go thirty days,” obviously there are people who had a problem because of the potential secondary effects. Nonetheless, the President at that time went with the health recommendations and we extended it another thirty days.
So, I can only tell you what I know and what my recommendations were. But clearly as happens all the time, there were interpretations of that response to a hypothetical question [by Tapper] that I just thought it would be very nice for me to clarify because I didn’t have the chance to clarify it.
The media jackals in the press room were aghast at this disappointing about-face, which contradicted everything Fauci had so deceptively implied before with their cooperation. An incredulous bottle blond in the press room asked Fauci: “Are you doing this voluntarily?” to which Fauci replied indignantly: “Everything I do is voluntary. Please, don’t even imply that.”
And then from another reporter the critical question: “When was the date? The date?” That is, when did Fauci and Birx make their first recommendations to Trump? Was it in January or February as Fauci had falsely been implying before? Or was it in March, in which case Trump can hardly be faulted for following advice he was never given before then.
On this crucial point Fauci suddenly developed amnesia: “You know, to be honest with you, I don’t even remember what the date was. I can just tell you that the first and only time that I went in and said that we should do mitigation strongly the response was ‘Yes, we’ll do it.’”
Come, now. Despite his mea culpa, the man is obviously still prevaricating. The whole country knows that it was only after the governors had shut down their respective states in mid- to late March that Trump declared his wish to “reopen the country” by Easter Sunday, and that it was only after Trump’s declaration to that effect on March 24 that Fauci and Birx, whom Trump famously called “two very smart people,” persuaded him “You have to shut it down” for at least thirty days, meaning until April 30, or else up to 2.2 million people would die. As Fauci boasted to the world on March 30: “We [Fauci and Birx] felt that if we prematurely pulled back, we would only form [sic] an acceleration or rebound of something, which would put you behind where you were before, and that’s a reason why we argued strongly with the president that he not withdraw those guidelines.”
The problem for Fauci is that if he admitted it was not until at least mid-March that he advised Trump not to “open up the country” by Easter then it would be clear that everything he had implied during his previous media interviews about Trump’s failure to act promptly in January and February was a lie and that, in truth, during those months Trump was merely following Fauci’s own advice that no drastic measures were necessary. Hence Fauci’s convenient memory lapse about a date he could not possibly have forgotten.
Another prevarication: During the April 13 briefing Fauci suggested that it was he, not Trump, who had seen the need for a ban on travel from China and then the EU and the UK, and that each time he suggested travel bans to Trump “the answer was Yes.” Trump later rebuffed that claim: “I think I took my own advice on the ban, I don’t know.” Indeed, as noted above, in his Science magazine interview, Fauci pooh-pooed the China travel ban as ineffective.
Asked about his reference during the Tapper interview to “a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then”—thereby falsely implying that it was Trump who had pushed back against a national shutdown in February—Fauci now said this “was the wrong choice of words. You know what it was? When people discuss, not necessarily in front of the President, when people discuss they say ‘Well, you know this is maybe gonna have a harmful effect on this or on that. So, it was a poor choice of words. It wasn’t anybody saying ‘No, you shouldn’t do that.’”
So, according to Fauci on April 13, when he said “a lot of pushback” to Tapper the day before on Easter Sunday, falsely implying pushback from Trump that prevented early action, what he really meant was no opposition from anyone, Trump included.
What a tangled web Fauci has woven for himself.
A clearly infuriated press corps pressed Fauci to resume his passive-aggressive dog-whistling that Trump has made “mistakes.” One cunning reporter, who thought his question had been cleverly framed to compel the desired response, watched the question backfire explosively as Fauci, in a moment of candor, said that it was he who had been mistaken:
Q. With the benefit of hindsight, with that caveat, what could have been done better? [Read: Come on, tell us what Trump did wrong. You can do it!]:
Fauci: Well, I can’t comment on something out of my own field. But the thing when I think back on, was evolving in my mind, was something that was a virus that was much worse than what I had thought it was gonna be based on what we had learned early on…
When I question myself—I’m not perfect—maybe I, I wouldn’t say made mistakes, I should really have tried to delve into that a bit more about what was going on…. You know: Is that a mistake? Maybe I should have been able to realize that more—earlier. I’m not sure it was a mistake….
Fauci’s mea culpa ought not to salvage his position as a trusted advisor to Trump. He never was trustworthy, and even on April 13 he continued to exhibit passive-aggressive resistance to any release of the nation from its Democrat-engineered social and economic strangulation.
For example, when another reporter clumsily demanded that Fauci be willing to speak out against any decision by Trump to “reopen” the country, he yet again undermined the President while pretending not to:
Q: So when the President stands up here, whether—whatever day it is, May 1st, whatever—and outlines his plan, are you willing to stand up here after him and tell us all, tell the American public, what you had recommended he do if there is a difference?
Fauci: You know, I have to think about that, because you know when have conversations with the President, sometimes they really should be confidential, and what you have given him, because he’s going to have to make his own choice. Um, I’ll have to think about that.
Q: So that we would know whether he is actually listening to the health advice you provided.
Fauci: He is. I can tell you one thing: he’ll listen. What’s gonna happen, I don’t know for sure, is that he will get input from a number of individuals, representing a number of aspects of society. One them will be health. The only thing that I can tell you is that I will give him the advice based on evidence, my observation of what the best public health approach would be.
The implications are staggering: Fauci will “think about” whether to contradict Trump by leaking his privileged conversations with the Chief Executive after decisions have been made about reviving an entire nation’s social life and economy! And, unlike the other advisors, Fauci’s advice will be based on evidence about “the best public health approach”—meaning saving lives, as he claims he has been doing, versus mere dollars and cents.
So it is evident that Fauci, along with Scarf Lady, still thinks he is in the driver’s seat on the question of when the increasingly devastating, Democrat-enabling national lockdown will end and exactly how it will end. As Fauci put it during the April 10 press briefing: “Don’t let anyone get any false ideas that when we decide at a proper time when we’re going to be relaxing some of the restrictions, there’s no doubt you're going to see cases, I would be so surprised if we didn’t see cases. The question is how you respond to them.”
Fauci continued to wave the scepter of authority on April 13: “So, as we discuss and consider the public health aspects, it like will be something that I referred to as a rolling reentry. It’s not gonna be one size fits all…. We will give the honest public health recommendation”—meaning that Trump would dishonest if he does not do what “Tony and Deborah” tell him to do, no matter how many business leaders he assembles for his Economic Coronavirus Council.
What to Do About “Tony and Deborah”
Despite Fauci’s belated and equivocal mea culpa, it is crystal clear that Fauci and Scarf Lady, his student and friend, can never be trusted not to undermine Trump again and delay America’s recovery from the disaster they themselves helped provoke and now plainly seek to perpetuate. The social, economic and psychological damage these two have caused with their incompetent, if not designedly subversive, advice is beyond human calculation. The models and projections “Tony and Deborah” have touted since mid-March have all been wrong. Their novel claims about “mitigation” by means of a catastrophically damaging and utterly absurd attempt to quarantine 330 million people lack any empirical foundation in past experience with pandemics; they are simply making up the “mitigation” narrative as they go along. Scarf Lady even claimed during one of last week’s press briefings that deaths attributed to the virus are declining because people have followed her advice to do grocery shopping only once a week. This lady is a joke.
It is incredible that these two characters are still held out as key Presidential advisors with authority over the fate of the nation. Americans should not have to suffer their ruinous fake-science one moment longer. Granted, Trump has to let them hang around to avoid another attack by enraged media jackals tearing at his flesh, but there are ways of removing incompetents from positions of authority while allowing them to retain impressive titles. One way is to crowd them off the stage they have dominated far too long by filling it with other experts to discuss subjects besides “mitigation” and “flattening the curve” of a virus that has already shown its worst and, even in the “hotspot” of New York, is on the decline.
That is exactly what Trump did during the press briefing of April 15: Fauci was not present in the Rose Garden and Scarf Lady, flaunting her scarf of the day, was confined to a chair with no further droning on from the podium about graphs and curves and “mitigation.” Advisors on matters economic spoke instead, and Trump himself made it clear that he intends to start rolling back the national shutdown by May 1, if not sooner, with the cooperation of at least 29 state governors, presumably almost all them Republicans (there being 26 Republican governors).
Meanwhile, Fauci, despite his mea culpa the day before, immediately resumed his passive-aggressive opposition to Trump, telling the Associated Press that the May 1 date to “reopen the country” is “a bit overly optimistic” and that there can be no full return to normal without “something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet.” By “there” he means, according to AP, an entire infrastructure to “rapidly test for the virus, isolate any new cases and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with.” That is, if Fauci has his way, Trump cannot fully reopen the country until literally everyone in America is tested for the Wuhan virus and anyone testing positive is immediately isolated along with all of his contacts. In other words: never.
There is no precedent in the history of the world for subjecting an entire national population to a de facto quarantine under which the people must take a test to prove that they are not infected with a virus before normal social and economic life can fully resume. What Fauci proposes is lunacy. As Trump must surely know by now, Fauci is a dangerous quack from the Bill Gates stable of quacks whose intent is to prevent an expeditious restoration of what Fauci’s own advice helped to destroy.
Conclusion
As Governor Cuomo admitted yesterday, April 14, when there had not been a single new reported case of the Wuhan virus in his state:
The president’s projection [i.e. “Tony’s and Deborah’s” projection], Peter Navarro’s projection, CDC’s projection, White House Coronavirus task force projection [i.e., “Tony’s and Deborah’s” projection], then the Gates model, Columbia model, Cornell model. They were all wrong, and it’s good news, because we changed the trajectory of the virus. And we’ve proven something when I say the worst is over.
The models were indeed all wrong, but Andrew Cuomo did not “change the trajectory of the virus” and neither did his statewide quarantine theatre. Nor did the recommendations of “Tony and Deborah” concerning “mitigation,” for whose effectiveness they have no argument beyond an unprovable, gratuitous post hoc claim that “mitigation worked.”
Pray that Trump finds the courage to follow through on what must be done now to revive a devastated economy and restore civil liberties in the virtual police state that has arisen on the pretext of a viral illness that is passing away like all the others. That mighty work cannot begin until Trump removes Tony Fauci from any decisive role in this process, along with Deborah Birx and her entire collection of scarves.
