Dr Fauci again claimed that anyone criticizing him for his COVID-19 ‘flip-flopping’ are actually condemning science itself.
Fauci got a bit upset in an upcoming New York Times podcast interview, where he claimed any changes in his recommendations were solely based on evolving data as the COVID crisis continued.
Fauci said: ‘It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves…
‘And that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science.
‘[T]he people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, “Ah, Fauci misled us. First he said no masks, then he said masks.”
‘Well, let me give you a flash. That’s the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time.’
There’s the thing…
Fauci initially told Americans not to worry about wearing face masks early in the COVID crisis in spring 2020. He later became a big advocate for public masking, and claimed his early dismissal of face coverings had been to try and conserve then-tight supplies for medical staff.
People buying masks wasn’t the problem.
In one email, he told a woman who was traveling in late February 2020 that she does not need to wear a mask.
‘Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected, rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection,’ he wrote in the leaked email.
‘The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.’
‘I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location.’
It’s hard to keep up with the guy.
Then there’s Fauci and the Wuhan lab leak theory.
April 2020: Fauci repeatedly made public statements suggesting that that COVID was the result of an ‘unusual human-animal interface’ in a Chinese ‘wet market’ and that ‘the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.’
May 2020: Still adamant that he didn’t believe the coronavirus was man-made. ‘If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,’ he told National Geographic in an exclusive interview published May 4, 2020. ‘Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.’
Late May 2021 to early June 2021: During an event called ‘United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking,’ Fauci was asked if was ‘still confident’ that the virus evolved naturally.
‘No, actually … I am not convinced about that. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,’ Fauci said. ‘Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out.’
He added: ‘So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.’
Fauci has also come under scrutiny for a $830,000 grant the NIAID gave the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans.
Fauci defended the grant in a congressional hearing last month, saying the money was meant to be used to ‘study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of’ infecting humans.
He cited comments made by Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, who said that the American tax dollars that went to the Wuhan lab – where many officials now believe COVID-19 originated – was not approved for gain-of-function research, which is research that involves modifying a virus to make it more infectious among humans.
But, Collins said, the National Institute of Health would not be aware of other experiments being done at the lab.
In one of the leaked emails, it appeared Fauci was warned as early as January 31 by another infectious disease expert, Kristian G. Andersen, that the virus could have leaked from the lab and been altered.
In the email, Andersen referenced a Science magazine article about how researchers around the world were racing to share ‘full sequences of the virus from patients’ to understand how it related to viruses found in animals.
‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,’ he wrote.
At the time, the lab leak hypothesis was largely dismissed and anyone reporting on such a theory (like us) was labelled a conspiracy theorist. Social media sites were censoring anyone who made mention of it.
No so much anymore.