A brief history of how Anthony Fauci has continued to fail since 1984

In 2003, terrorism was a more immediate national danger than infectious diseases. Dr Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had just redirected $ 117 million from infectious diseases to fund a new anthrax vaccination effort in response to the anthrax attacks that occurred a week after September 11th.

Those millions were only a small part of the $ 1.8 billion Fauci had invested in defense against bioterrorist attacks over the previous two years. More than half of these funds were devoted to anthrax and smallpox alone. In 2004, Fauci launched the $ 5.6 billion “Project Bioshield”, the National Institutes of Health’s largest expense on a single research problem to date.

Some microbiology researchers of the time, however, according to the journal Nature, feared that Fauci’s actions “ distort the priorities of infectious disease research, absorbing labor money to understand and counter epidemics. natural diseases which ultimately pose a greater threat to public health. “The 2003 Nature article quoted a Stanford University microbiologist as saying that” diseases such as the flu and other human infections respiratory tract regularly kills far more people than would die in a bioterrorist attack, and therefore deserves a larger share of the NIAID budget.

The criticism proved to be justified. In 2007, after spending billions on the opposite principle, Fauci admitted that “at the end of the day you’re not going to kill that many people. [with an anthrax attack] just like you would if you destroy two car bombs in Times Square. His anthrax vaccination effort had failed, having been “sunk by lobbying”.

The failure of the anthrax vaccine followed in the wake of Fauci’s controversial leadership in the national AIDS response in the 1980s and 1990s. According to “Good Intentions,” a 1990 book by the investigative author and Innovation expert Bruce Nussbaum, Fauci began his career as a “lackluster scientist,” who “found his true calling – empire-building” when he took the reins of NIAID in 1984.

To ensure that AIDS would be his exclusive domain within the federal government, Fauci “launched the most important bureaucratic battle in the history of the fight against AIDS”, ousting more scientifically competent but less complicit administrators. According to Nussbaum, if Fauci had not won the battle, “many dead people could have lived”.

Having won his monopoly on AIDS in the federal government, Fauci, by training an immunologist who focuses on how the body fights infections on its own, favored a vaccine approach in the fight against the then terminal disease. . This understandable professional bias came at the expense of research into antiretroviral drugs that ultimately reduced AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease in remission. As Nussbaum wrote in 1990:

Tony Fauci’s managerial incompetence had cost a lot. In 1987, more than a million Americans were infected with the AlDS virus. Not a single drug treatment has come out of the government’s massive biomedical research system. In the end, Fauci barely survived by relinquishing control of the government’s only AIDS drug testing program. [to a pharmaceutical company].

As a result, a single drug, AZT, was the only AIDS treatment to emerge from the Fauci government research system, and only after help from the private sector. In 1988 playwright and prominent AIDS activist Larry Kramer published an “Open Letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci” in Village Voice, writing in part:

You have admitted that you are an incompetent idiot. Over the past four years, $ 374 million has been allocated to research into the treatment of AIDS. You were responsible for spending a lot of that money. . . . Yet after three years you have only established a system of waste, chaos and uselessness.

According to “Good Intentions,” “in an effort to save his reputation, if not his career,” Fauci co-opted Kramer, becoming the well-connected activist’s main ally in the federal government’s public health apparatus. Kramer, in turn, was Fauci’s “vector” in elitist American society, perfectly positioning the technocrat for his preferred role of “the type of guy who makes the headlines every day,” according to an anonymous health official, Nussbaum quotes.

As the AIDS treatment research strategy continues to face setbacks, Fauci has focused on developing an HIV vaccine. This quest offered less and less glory as the 1990s progressed, however. From 1995, the private sector began to develop effective drug therapies that would dramatically reduce AIDS mortality in developed countries around the turn of the millennium. the HIV vaccine much less likely to be a game-changer. While the threat of bioterrorism restored Fauci’s prominence in national politics, neither the threat of bioterrorism nor the anthrax vaccine ever materialized.

Things got worse for Fauci before they got better. On February 3, 2020, the journal Science reported that after nearly four decades, “Fauci’s failed research to find a vaccine capable of stopping the AIDS virus has delivered another frustrating defeat.” According to the scientist responsible for the study in South Africa, “[t]there is absolutely no evidence of effectiveness ”of the $ 104 million study. “Years of work have gone into this. It is a huge disappointment. “

Fauci admitted to Science that all those years and millions had been spent in an effort that he knew was very unlikely to be successful: “We were struggling for years and years, so we grabbed every positive effect. , a potential correlate of immunity, and it sounded interesting. Fauci, however, had just become tamper-proof, with America’s first COVID-19 patient diagnosed just a week before.

“I always said [a respiratory illness like COVID-19] would be my worst nightmare, ”he said in June. Yet just a few months earlier, Fauci was telling Americans that, far from being his greatest fear, the danger from the Wuhan virus was “just tiny,” so “there is absolutely no reason to wear a mask. . ” The media buried long-standing scientific concerns that Fauci had “sucked money at work to understand and counter epidemics of natural diseases.”

A March 2020 hagiography published in the Style section of the Washington Post noted how the dapper doctor is, once again these days, a type of everyday featured guy, who “seems to transcend time. and space, appearing in all media at all times. The newspaper quoted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer as lamenting: “It’s a shame that at the first sign of this we didn’t just say to Tony Fauci, ‘You’re in charge, you have all the power you need, tell us what you need. be done.'”

The first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was developed by scientists at Pfizer, who took no funding from Fauci’s NIAID. “All R&D and manufacturing investments have been made by Pfizer at risk,” the company says.

Thirty years ago, Nussbaum correctly diagnosed the main cause of Fauci’s many setbacks:

[T]The best scientists don’t become administrators. The best scientists don’t become program coordinators for other scientists in medical schools across the country. The best scientists stay in the labs, they don’t push the paper.

Fauci is an excellent politician who has survived four decades and five presidents – two Democrats and three Republicans. Given the mental acuteness of the country’s new president and the lingering anxiety of its citizens, it looks like the politically competent but scientifically inept Fauci administration is not going anywhere anytime soon.