Prometheus Shrugged
Dr. Anthony Fauci's COVID-19 Legacy: 'A plague o' both your houses'
Note — My current focus is researching COVID-19’s origins, as part of the D.R.A.S.T.I.C. team of scientists, journalists & researchers. Recent news: D.R.A.S.T.I.C.’s research forms a large portion of the basis for investigations begun by the US Senate, House & National Institutes of Health. Recent appearances and/or discussion on 60 Minutes, The Joe Rogan Exp., Fox News, JRE [again], Bill Maher, CNN and dozens of other programs.
New Note: the 6/1 FOIA release of 3,234 pages of Dr. Fauci’s emails required a re-write of the article I was about to publish, mostly because the assertions I’ve made in this series were proven by a key section of the document [and missed, just as in February, by the media]. What follows is ‘the preponderance of the evidence.’
Prometheus Shrugged
In its ideal formulation, science is a torch that lights the path of progress, and scientists are the philosopher-kings who carry the torch for humanity as we emerge from the darkness of our ignorance. Plato’s ideal Republic required leaders who could selflessly carry the torch without becoming enamored by their own superiority, as only men of extreme wisdom and humility could stand so close to the flame without succumbing to the temptation to use it for their own purposes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the role of scientists in our society, but what we’ve learned is that at present, our scientists aren’t even close to the philosopher kings society has long held them up to be. Instead, they are more like the ‘artists’ in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, holding up the figures that cast shadows on the cave wall, and assuring us that the shadows are reality. The greatest conceit, however, is that many scientists still believe they are on the outside, leading us on behalf of our best interests - when in truth, their greed and dependence on bureaucratic largesse has trapped scientists in the cave with everyone else. Throughout the pandemic, scientists have admonished societies across the globe, and they’ve been struck by the rejection of their mandates. All scientists need to do is take a look behind them to understand our reactions, because even we cave dwellers can see that the shadows cast by scientists don’t look heroic - they look monstrous.
Post-Modern Prometheus
In Ayn Rand’s most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, industrialists of the world conspire to abandon the world in an effort to ctrl+alt+del the system and free its people. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sort of post-modern, real-world distortion of that story - one in which the scientists leading us through this genesis of the technological revolution abandoned the world in an effort to protect themselves - not us. They retreated to the very pedestal we had raised them up upon. As I wrote in part IV:
Against this historic backdrop, it’s not surprising that people across the globe have mixed emotions about the public health response where they live. Faith in the abilities of scientific establishments to protect the rest of us has been rocked by a reality tv show in which almost every decision, projection, recommendation and mandate has been ineffectual or worse. The frequency of these errors has led to questioning of everything, even those things scientists got right. My intuition tells me that the reason for such backlash has less to do with the esteem our societies have bestowed on scientists, and more to do with the esteem they have bestowed on themselves.
It might seem strange or gratuitous to focus on Dr. Anthony Fauci, rather than the host of characters who were more directly tied to the actual research and experiments that are collectively referred to as Gain of Function; after all, Fauci’s role within the scientific establishment is largely bureaucratic. The best explanation for why I’ve chosen him to feature is analogous to the myth of Prometheus: when he learned that Prometheus had stolen fire and given it to mankind, Zeus responded with Pandora - the first and most beautiful woman in the history of mankind. Just as man couldn’t resist her beauty, Pandora couldn’t resist the temptation to open the ‘box’ [jar] and unleash all of the troubles that have plagued mankind ever since. A decade ago, when scientists discovered Pandora’s Box, Fauci enabled Pandora as she approached the box; a year ago, after she opened it, Fauci didn’t attempt to replace the lid; instead, he decided to simply hide the box. No one knew that Dr. Fauci would soon become one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, but he knew that he had been a strong proponent of GOF research.
However, this wasn’t a victimless crime; no one knew that the Wuhan outbreak was about to kill [at least] 4 million people. Fauci led a small group that coordinated the cover-up & censorship of evidence that COVID-19 may have resulted from experimentation in a Chinese lab, and for a year their efforts were disturbingly successful. It is that group [that I’ve nicknamed ‘the 4 Horsemen’] that convened a series of meetings with prominent scientists in the first few days of February; they entered that fateful stretch as skeptics of the Chinese ‘natural origin’ claim, but emerged as its strongest supporters.
My guess is that the group took a hard look in the mirror and didn’t like what was looking back at them. It seems that their response, rather than further self-reflection, was to just embrace becoming vampires instead.
Background, Sources & Purpose
The previous articles in my ‘Prometheus & Pandora’ series [informally, I call it ‘Requiem for a Steam…..ing Pile of BS’]:
I - Trust the Scientists - Not the Science? [Fauci helped framed the debate]
II - The West must not go gently into a COVID-19 goodnight [The big picture]*
III - The Apocryphal Origins of SARS-CoV-2 [How scientists manipulated research]
IV - Edifice Wrecks [How much are scientists prepared to lose to protect themselves?]
[*Note - for BLUF, click here]
The lack of understanding surrounding this facet of the origin investigation was shocking to me, but what’s become painfully clear is that my idealistic notions of ‘investigative journalism’ don’t bear much resemblance to reality. It’s obvious that the sheer volume of information to process is partially to blame, but when the purpose is to uncover the origins of a pandemic that killed 3.5 million people, there is no excuse for anything less than our best efforts.
My primary research interest within the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was previously centered on various threads within China, not here in the US. When the non-profit investigative group US Right-To-Know published a series of documents they’d obtained through FOIA requests made last summer, I read the articles simply because they detailed how Peter Daszak and other scientists conspired to publish an open letter in the Lancet journal [note: links to most references discussed in this article can be found in a PDF version of the chronology below] that rejected the possibility of the COVID-19 pandemic having resulted from a leak at one of the higher safety-level laboratories in Wuhan.
At the time of publication, I was still working on cutting & cropping a chronological//subject-organized PDF of several hundred emails drawn from relevant sections of 5 FOIA collections. Once complete, that file will be linked to here.
Specifically, these collections include US RTK’s Ralph Baric [x2], Linda Saif and Rita Colwell files [12/1/20 - 2/17/21], as well as Buzzfeed’s Anthony Fauci collection from 6/1/21; together they amount to more than 88,000 pages [at least half of which are repetitious].
I decided to go through all of the Baric emails [83K] in February, because it seemed likely that simple searches of the files could miss all sorts of oddities. My instincts turned out to be right, although most of the juiciest excerpts dealt with the ‘Red Dawn’ cell of expert figures that served as a sounding board for the US government response. Someday, I’ll have time to turn towards a full critique of the HHS & CDC actions, but my desire for justice for pandemic victims makes my work with DRASTIC a higher priority. Just know that my track record in analyzing and forecasting the course of the pandemic in the US, as hinted at below, is more a source of anger than pride - largely because the evidence tells us that we could’ve done better, yet rarely prioritized people over politics.
*I just noticed an error in this tweet - the ‘actual deaths’ line should say 5/1, not 5/14
A Study in Scarlet
What ultimately set me on this collision course with Fauci’s record was the first snippet of curious coincidence I found in the Ralph Baric emails - ironically, in the same set of pages that US Right-to-Know had discovered Peter Daszak and other scientists conspiring amongst each other to squash any discussion of ‘engineering’ within the COVID-origins facet of the pandemic. Having spent my military career in the WMD arena, it was obvious to me that the circumstances surrounding COVID-19’s emergence in Wuhan deserved far greater attention, so the collusion of many connected scientists to suppress that discussion was suspect. Then I noticed Dr. Fauci’s name popping up, a single time, as a recipient of one of the emails within the chain - just before the collusion conversation.
The email included attachments outlining the format of a conference to be held that morning, covering “Rapid Response for Assessment of Data Needs for 2019-nCoV.” It certainly didn’t seem to be related to collusion & cover-ups.
Except - one of the topics to be covered was ‘more effectively respond to the outbreak and resulting information,” which certainly could be relevant to the email’s other recipients. I became curious as to what Fauci’s ‘perspective’ on that issue was, especially after reading the ‘statement of work’ for the meeting.
Interesting. Given Fauci’s history within the Gain-of-Function debate and his role in steering federal research grants/funding, he certainly had a vested interest in the manner of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence. But this also seemed to be his only appearance in any of US RTK’s 85,000 pages of documents.
Then I re-read the conversation that followed, and what stood out to me was the incredible unanimity of opinion regarding COVID’s natural origins. How could they have possibly been so certain, when the genome itself had been available for less than two weeks? Other questions emerged, including “why did K. Droegemeier, the president’s chief science advisor as the head of the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy, send a request letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Mathematics [NASEM] asking for the meeting to be held, dated the same day as the meeting, in which he was a speaker? It seemed like an unnecessary paper shuffle to justify an emergency hearing - unless the point was to make it appear as though he was acting on behalf of the National Security Council and the executive branch at large.
That seemed unlikely, given that President Trump was beginning to receive intelligence of activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which meant that the intelligence community was far less certain about the situation than these scientists, perhaps the greatest collection of conflicts of interest assembled since the doctors who lobbied against cigarette smoke as a carcinogen for tobacco companies. And the deeper I dug, the more obvious the hypocrisies became.
Other details that seemed to have been missed was that the discussions Daszak, Baric and others engaged in as part of writing a response letter to OSTP [again, one of the speakers at the event, guiding the discussion] were distinct, and actually referred to two separate letters. Among the many comments and edits made to the OSTP draft, Daszak had specifically included precise rejections of a non-natural origin - but the final version [as with the other sources, linked in the PDF mentioned above] was missing each of those statements, presumably cut by one of the individuals in whose name the document was being produced - the 3 heads of the academies that make up NASEM.
It’s important to point out that the speakers on 2/3 were highly influential pillars of the American scientific enterprise: the OSTP head advises the president, NASEM [Pope] is at the top of the system that honors career achievements and publishes Science and other leading journals, the NIH controls federal research funds [Fauci alone playing a major role in doling out $4 billion in annual grants] and works in concert with the HHS to set priorities, enforce relevant doctrine, and influence national policy for advanced research.
Therefore, when a unanimous endorsement in favor of zoonosis was broadcast in the following weeks by the powers-that-be in the scientific community, it became clear that seriously advocating for a non-natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 was tantamount to career suicide; even the senior scientists whose accomplishments gave them some insulation from retribution [including a Nobel Prize winner in Luc Montagnier] had their pro-lab-leak-hypothesis articles rejected for publication, a further signal that interested scientists could look at what ever they wanted, provided they paid for the experiments themselves and were willing to accept that a pre-print server was the final destination.
My continued research into the breadth of censorship [results shown further below] left me with just a few unknown points, which made it the case far more circumstantial than it should’ve been. It was possible, though highly unlikely, that there WAS total certainty among the leaders of American scientific institutions, especially since many had been long-time supporters of GOF research. Therefore, it’s been difficult to find evidence that the purpose of their censorship was something other than honest belief in zoonosis, despite the massive conflicts of interest.
Ultimately, the volume of evidence became so strong that I was willing to push forward anyway - which was the goal of my article that this new version has replaced. I uncovered two more letters, a dozen articles and voluminous email traffic that showed clear, egregious and often anti-scientific actions taken by the same cabal of connections:
How did this impact research into COVID-19’s origins? The highlights in the image below show the stunning output from the researchers either present at the meeting or connected to it; by comparison, there were 0 peer-reviewed articles advocating the possibility of a lab origin before August 12th, out of 23,000 [in total, there’s now been 150,000]. That’s a lot of levers that can be pulled to ensure compliance, and it obviously worked:
By sorting the full spectrum of research, news and commentary over the last 17 months, the disparity becomes even more apparent:
Unlike in China, where a vast surveillance state immediately began destroying evidence of all kinds, a vastly smaller and more targeted campaign of censorship was taking place elsewhere - especially in the United States. That last point is crucial, because American scientists and institutions have driven global research for most of the last 100 years - either through innovation, funding or both. The resilience of the scientific establishment has been impressive, given that the tide turned against a natural origin in other written media a year ago:
As my research into COVID-19 has progressed over the last 14 months, the ‘arc of evidence’ has never bent towards the SARS-CoV-2 virus having emerged via random, natural chance. At the same time, the messaging from the leadership of our scientific institutions has remained fairly constant; the unwillingness to adjust to new evidence or allow open debate on lockdowns, various therapeutics and the continued validity of school closures is now questioned even by former supporters of the strategy.
The 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet introduced the character of Sherlock Holmes to the world; in it, Holmes famously described his work as the methodical uncovering of a full narrative woven discreetly within the noise of everyday experience. In the midst of grand debates about the perils and future of scientific discovery, I’ve only grown more convinced that it’s the mundane details that really tie things together - despite our reliance on flashy statistics or smoking guns to grab the attention of others. It was the accumulation and careful synthesis of such mundane details that made the value of Dr. Fauci’s emails jump out at me on June 1st - and no one has put the puzzle pieces fully together in the interim.
*“Trust the Science, Not the Scientists”*
My confidence arises from the inertia of the evidence I’ve compiled; it certainly highlights how dependent people have become on media sources we trust to analyze evidence for us. My guess is that this reliance extends to the media themselves, which should make us wonder what the actual abilities and sources of our ‘fact-checkers’ are. Because a full accounting of the many arguments would take me two more weeks to write, I will conclude with a few short examples of what the Fauci emails actually tell us.
There has been a significant focus on largely irrelevant aspects of his communications last year - I was literally stunned to discover that neither the Washington Post nor Buzzfeed really touched on any of the controversial findings; both pieces were laudatory, in fact. It makes me wonder why they even bothered to request the FOIA documents at all, and certainly whether they actually read all of it. By June 1st, I’d had plenty of practice in traversing FOIA email documents, and it didn’t hurt that a 1/3 of them [at least] had been read within the Baric files. I’d covered at least 70% of the Fauci files by the time I posted my first commentary later on the 1st, and only yesterday did I see a commentator actually mention a connection with the Baric emails.
1) Knowledge of and credibility given to the possibility of a lab-leak hypothesis.
Here, Kristian Andersen admits that he, Eddie Holmes and others harbor serious doubts about a ‘natural origin,’ even though he publicly rejects it days later, and privately works with Peter Daszak, Baric and others to put together the OSTP letter, the Lancet letter and the seminal letter in Nature that has earned a place in history. In the last few days, Andersen has come out and publicly explained that he hadn’t yet weighed the evidence of the announced closest ancestor virus, RaTG13, which had just been published at that time. However, the pre-print had been available for more than a week, and during the period from 1/31 - 2/4, he spent hours a day communicating with Fauci et al, and specifically two meetings described in the emails, in which the available evidence was mulled over and taken seriously throughout. The literal purpose of both meetings centered on the importance of determining how to approach the topic, and in particular, the OSTP meeting was designed to produce a statement that could be used by the government to signal how scientists should handle the debate [they were supposed to ignore it]. Or are we supposed to believe that Andersen, amongst the likes of Fauci and Francis Collins, was late to the party, had missed the pre-print evidence, but saw enough within the significantly flawed RaTG13 genome to unequivocally conclude that his prior assessment had been wrong? He certainly seemed to take the theory seriously enough to ensure that the OSTP letter left no margin for interpretation - just like everyone else who ‘converted’ between 2/1 & 2/4.
2) They understood what the big picture was:
There was no doubt amongst the co-conspirators that Baric’s 2015 experiments with Zheng-Li Shi were an important catalyst in the WIV’s progression to higher-quality chimaeric CoV production - exactly the skills needed to make a successful ‘dual-use’ pathogen. Fauci’s assistant Auchincloss needed no interpretation before verifying the details of the related grant, or to determine what it was that Fauci needed him to do. Perhaps we should follow the example of his assistant. Given that Fauci testified last week before Congress that funds hadn’t even been provided to the WIV laboratory, or for GOF, what was he concerned about here?
After the 2/2 meeting, the tone of the participants didn’t sound like everyone had become a skeptic of a non-natural origin. It sounded like they needed to make a decision.
3) It’s important keep glancing at the chronology I posted above, as you read through the various elements and arguments. Almost immediately, the entire group of scientists began furiously publishing articles rejecting the possibility of manipulation. It would’ve been stunning for the existing or emerging evidence to have pushed scientists away from a lab-escape scenario, since the biggest revelation after its genome was published for scientists other than Shi to discover was that someone had found a furin cleavage site (FCS) within the genome - which no virologist would’ve held up at first glance as evidence that it came from nature. In part 2, I embedded a video of a portion of a conference discussing GOF shortly before it went into effect. The FCS featured prominently in those discussions, which isn’t surprising when one considers that it is widely used in such research. Therefore, the fact that ZL-Shi ‘skipped’ it in her seminal paper, and the notion that the discovery of the FCS apparently didn’t make Andersen more suspicious, is insulting.
4) NASEM wouldn’t defend the statements Daszak tried to add to their statement on 2/4. They deleted them because they couldn’t substantiate such sweeping statements.
5) It’s almost impossible to isolate the number of questions within a blog, so many points must necessarily be left for others to discuss. However, there is still a gold mine of of potential issues within them. One curious appearance was Ron Klain, the current and former chief of staff for now-president Biden. His interest in pandemics is certainly genuine, but having a senior campaign official so actively connected to Dr. Fauci makes one wonder what the scope of interactions were between them, especially during the push for vaccines in the fall, a particular area of expertise and curiosity for Mr. Klain. One could simply point out the sheer volume of redactions, many of which are not likely to buttress the image currently being projected by many journalists.
The Best -Laid Plans of Mice & Men
2 simple observations arise from having researched this alternate, messy view of reality beyond has been force-fed to the public for a year and a half:
1) We [citizens] can handle the truth. We definitely handle truth better if we’re told before everyone is dead - at a minimum, before the annual memorials begin.
2) Science should focus on leadership, not censorship.
Imagine how differently events might have played out had any major figure [not retired] had dared to state the obvious in a way that couldn’t be silenced by censorship. Anthony Fauci has led the NIAID since shortly after my 1st birthday - but being in the perfect position and possessing the requisite experience to make bold decisions makes his deliberate actions to suppress research even more offensive.
As this article has sought to reinforce, a lack of context has plagued almost every aspect of this pandemic, but rarely has context been so obscured by those whom we trust the most to provide it - and given my extensive experience learning about the past, I don’t feel any need to reference a secondary source in defense of that claim.
It almost doesn’t even matter what reasons Fauci had for acting as he did, because impacts speak louder than words. His willingness to prevent broad inquiry into GOF helped enable the Chinese to stall an investigation almost to the point of allowing them to escape further scrutiny once the WHO report was published [just picture the earlier image of peer-reviewed papers for & against the zoonotic hypothesis]. I named my origin reference project “The arc of inquiry bends towards enlightenment” because the volume of research in any subject naturally correlates with the tendency for efforts to cluster in the direction that’s most promising. The statistics clearly show that zoonosis is not that direction in the COVID-19 origin debate.
Fauci’s decision to double down on the same mitigation tactics last winter produced a predictable result [so predictable that I actually did predict it] - an epidemic curve that tracked very closely to the H1N1 novel pandemic in 2009. In every case, his moves were more safe-sided than the politicians who were actually running for re-election, and they did little to prevent the spread of the disease. Many observers have been asking why the protective measures he advocated for failed so miserably, but I recommend that we shift our perspective; a better question would be to ask ourselves what he was so driven to protect [if not the American people] during the twilight of his incredible career, with all worldly accolades already earned, and the ability to speak and have leaders listen.
Whatever that legacy is, it is in the midst of leading our public trust in science over a cliff, in a bus that’s already on fire, with no brakes, and with no attempt to change course. Dr. Fauci understands all of this, of course, and continues undeterred.
Therefore, it’s important to respond in a blunt manner that he understands:
-We must demand that ‘The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” be immediately retracted by Nature - preferably via a written request from Fauci himself.
-A full congressional investigation must be formed, and immediately begin issuing subpoenas and compiling testimony under oath. This includes the leaders of any federal institution that participated in the censorship of lab-leak origin research. For many individuals, the intensity of their efforts is the equivalent of obstructing justice.
Obstructing justice in defense of a potential crime against humanity might be the true legacy of Dr. Fauci. Whatever it is, however, it’s obviously not in our best interest.
C. H. Rixey
Epilogue
The 21st century has seen the continued acceleration of technological advancement [most effectively predicted by Ray Kurzweil], along with the attendant dichotomy of remarkable progress towards the elimination of global poverty (down 90% in recent decades) and increasing social turmoil sparked [in part] by the disorienting impact of so much rapid change in so many aspects of daily human life.
The COVID-19 pandemic is, in many ways, as much a symptom of humanity’s growing pains as it is a consequence of the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Because of the stunning impact COVID-19 has had upon human civilization, superficial analyses of the pandemic’s origins are not just unsuitable - they could dangerously obscure the fundamental lessons humanity should be learning from this shared tragedy.
The Best -Laid Plans of Mice & Men
But, I would argue that staying silent would be far worse - because if it ultimately emerges that COVID-19 is the result of science experiments that went wrong, then the Ivory Tower that has been built around scientists will crumble to dust, just as humanity comes face-to-face with exponential technological and societal upheaval. COVID-19 is likely the first tremor of the coming biotech revolution, and our loss would be China’s gain. Now that sounds like a Greek tragedy.
~[My ‘living and breathing’ list of 520+ lab-leak sources, which served as the basis for the censorship statistics discussed above, is readily available in the ‘projects section of my ResearchGate profile]