Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF (2): Bari Weiss Gives Dr. Fauci a True Trumpscum Sendoff! (8/26)
David Shasha
Bari Weiss Gives Dr. Fauci a True Trumpscum Sendoff!
Two things are true at the same time.
The Zombie Orange Pig, who is an utter ignoramus, does not like Dr. Anthony Fauci, because he knows science much better:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/fauci-trump-wearing-mask-weakness-430114
Fauci is one of the most distinguished scientists working in government service:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci#Awards_and_honors
An excellent New York Times Op-Ed by Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an actual epidemiologist, provides an eloquent coda to Fauci’s distinguished career:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/opinion/fauci-retires.html
The complete article follows this note.
Which would you choose?
Bari Weiss chooses – TRUMP!
https://www.commonsense.news/p/dr-faucis-legacy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The complete article follows this note as well.
Actually, in the standard Tikvah manner, Weiss chooses Trump by choosing Marty Makary, M.D. M.P.H., not an actual epidemiologist:
I addressed the Makary FOX News COVID CHAZERAI in the following SHU posts:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/a6Diln-pGbE/m/Hithm5AmBgAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/d0LRv1yTpkE/m/rxSMjB5EEQAJ
Just to provide some further context, Weiss’ mentor Alana Newhouse, the other Whore of Trump, chose an idiot quack named Norman Doidge:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/norman-doidge
I have addressed the Tikvah Doidge problem many times:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/uZe9DWpcLg8/m/_v3ihPZ7AAAJ
“Everything is Broken” remains one of the great Zalman Bernstein Projections:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/GpmRv_HvRm4/m/6SayA5fLCwAJ
Newhouse and Weiss join Trumpworld in criminally and despicably politicizing COVID:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8577882/
We will recall that the Trump Administration response was led by Idiot Trumpscum Jew Jared Kushner and his Fratboy pals:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4xtqGYaLF8U/m/jQf_3Z4SCgAJ
To this point, government investigation of this malfeasance has been stymied and has not come up with any tangible results:
It would be expected that Biden would punt, after Trump stonewalled:
The House launched a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in April 2020. The bipartisan committee began investigative work last year, but the Trump administration largely refused to cooperate with its probe. The committee issued subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield in December 2020, but those subpoenas were ignored.
Once again, Kushner avoids accountability.
But we know that Trump and his criminal cabal are off-limits to anyone in Tikvahworld, so Weiss allows Trumpscum Makary to have the final say:
Dr. Fauci let basic research questions about the nature of the Covid-19 virus go unanswered. Somehow, despite the NIH’s more than $45 billion budget, only 2 percent of grants went to basic Covid research while billions of federal money was invested in developing vaccines, according to a study conducted by my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I.
The federal government failed to conduct timely studies on the following: masks; the susceptibility of people in nursing homes; natural immunity; wastewater data; vaccine-induced heart injury in young people; and the optimal interval between the first two vaccine doses.
In short, Dr. Fauci didn’t deliver the basic research we needed so that public policy would be shaped by the best science. Because policymakers lacked good evidence to support their dictates, political opinions filled the void. So Covid-19 became a highly politicized health emergency—to all of our detriment.
His debased anti-Fauci article runs through the usual FOX News themes, including attacks on Mask Mandates and the ubiquitous “Natural Immunity”:
And that article promoting vaccines against the “Natural Immunity” Trumpscam is from Makary’s own university.
Tell it to the New Jews for Jesus CEO, who is all in with the Trumpscum:
https://slate.com/business/2021/11/prager-bongino-covid-vaccines-right-wing-radio.html
Makary goes one Trumpscum further, by promoting something called the “Great Barrington Declaration”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration
And guess who supported it?
The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the Great Barrington Declaration "ignores sound public health expertise", and said its approach was more dangerous than other ideas to adjust the balance between protecting public health and the economy. The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Makary is a perfect Trumpstooge, and thus a way for Weiss to support the Lysol Talking Points without any direct mention of Trump himself.
By no means was the CDC or Fauci perfect in their response to this unprecedented scourge, but when we see the difference between China and Trump’s America, the difference is clear:
https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/covid-death-toll-vs-chinas-puts-us-to-shame/
That is over 1,000,000 American deaths compared to just over 5,000 Chinese deaths, as of June 2022!
Trump is indeed the greatest murderer in American History:
And that article was written in 2021, when there were only 750,000 American deaths.
But you will not read any of that from the BARI WEISS NEWSROOM, which is filled with the usual disgraced suspects.
Weiss continues to embody the shameful Tikvah Trumpscum Gaslight, as she rakes in the Alt-Right Seditionist Substack cash.
David Shasha
Dr. Fauci's Legacy
By: Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H.
Anthony Fauci is ending his long and celebrated government career by being widely lauded for getting so much so very wrong on Covid-19.
Now 81 years old, Dr. Fauci has spent 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. He has been rightly honored for his many contributions over the decades, most notably during the fight against AIDS, for which he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. But to Covid-19 he brought a monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus, whatever the cost—neglecting the damage that can follow when public health loses sight of the public’s health.
As the lead medical authority to two administrations on Covid-19, Dr. Fauci was unwavering in his advocacy for draconian policies. What were the impact of those policies on millions of Americans? And what would the country look like now had our public health experts taken a different approach? As Dr. Fauci is preparing to leave his post, those are a few of the questions worth asking as we consider his various Covid-19 legacies.
On Children:
Very early on in this pandemic, we knew that there was an extremely stratified risk from Covid. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were especially vulnerable, while children were extremely unlikely to get dangerously ill.
Instead of acting on the good news for children—or drawing on the ample experience in Scandinavian and European countries where schools were open and students were without masks—American kids were seen as vectors of disease. Young children were forced to wear masks inside school and out, affecting the language and social development of many. The effects of school closures will play out for decades, but we already know that children suffered major learning loss, and many left school never to return. Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci supported the most oppressive restrictions for children, including school closures and mandatory cloth masking.
Yesterday on Fox Neil Cavuto asked Dr. Fauci whether Covid restrictions “went too far” and if they “forever damaged” the children “who couldn’t go to school except remotely.” Dr. Fauci replied: “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”
Parents know otherwise.
A generation is coping with learning loss, and the impact has been the worst in poor and minority communities. According to the Brookings Institute, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading over the pandemic. Meantime, anxiety and depression have hit record highs among young Americans, and the surgeon general has described a youth mental health crisis. Of all of Dr. Fauci’s legacies, this might be the gravest.
On Research:
Dr. Fauci let basic research questions about the nature of the Covid-19 virus go unanswered. Somehow, despite the NIH’s more than $45 billion budget, only 2 percent of grants went to basic Covid research while billions of federal money was invested in developing vaccines, according to a study conducted by my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I.
The federal government failed to conduct timely studies on the following: masks; the susceptibility of people in nursing homes; natural immunity; wastewater data; vaccine-induced heart injury in young people; and the optimal interval between the first two vaccine doses.
In short, Dr. Fauci didn’t deliver the basic research we needed so that public policy would be shaped by the best science. Because policymakers lacked good evidence to support their dictates, political opinions filled the void. So Covid-19 became a highly politicized health emergency—to all of our detriment.
On Natural Immunity:
One of the most inexplicable decisions by Dr. Fauci and his team was to ignore natural immunity—that is, the immune response generated by contracting Covid-19. As the evidence mounted that having had the virus was as good as—perhaps even better than—a vaccine, Dr. Fauci and his circle ignored it.
When Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Dr. Fauci in the Fall of 2021 on CNN: “As we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say I already had Covid, I’m protected, and now the study says even more protected than the vaccine alone. How do you make the case to them?” Dr. Fauci answered: “I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that.”
Hundreds of studies have now shown that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and that the level of protection vaccines have against severe disease is at the same level of natural immunity alone.
But Dr. Fauci didn’t talk about it.
Americans had circulating antibodies against the virus, but they were antibodies that Dr. Fauci seemed to ignore. The upshot was that thousands of Americans lost their jobs for their choice not to get vaccinated. Some of those Americans were nurses, pilots, truck drivers, and dock workers central to the American supply chain of food, medication, and other essential products. This summer, more than 60,000 National Guard and Reserve soldiers who refused the Covid-19 vaccine were not allowed to participate in their military duties and lost pay and benefits. All of these people should have their jobs reinstated.
On Dissent:
Any physician who has met Dr. Fauci will agree that he is one of the kindest, most charming human beings you will ever meet. That’s why it was so jarring to witness the way that he and Dr. Francis Collins, his close friend and former director of the NIH, denigrated dissent on Covid-19.
Just ask the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—the open letter published in October 2020 that called for focused protection of the most vulnerable instead of blanket shutdowns of schools and businesses. It was authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard, and it was signed by tens of thousands of doctors and scientists.
Drs. Fauci and Collins never talked to these prominent authors to discuss their differing points of view. Instead, they criticized them.
Four days after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, Dr. Collins sent an email to Dr. Fauci in which he called the authors “fringe epidemiologists.” “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “I don’t see anything like that on line yet—is it underway?” Dr. Fauci replied: “Francis: I am pasting in below a piece from Wired that debunks this theory.” Soon after, big tech platforms like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing their ideas and falsely deeming them “misinformation.”
The ultimate irony is that federal officials are now endorsing many of the policies the Great Barrington Declaration authors suggested, insisting schools stay open and quietly ending isolation and quarantine requirements. In the end, Sweden, which adopted many principles in the Great Barrington Declaration, had roughly half the Covid deaths as Michigan, despite having the same population, percent of elderly, and climate.
If dissent had been welcomed from the start—which is what science demands—a lot of suffering could have been avoided.
On Science:
Here’s what Dr. Fauci and other public health authorities could have been saying from the start: We strive to provide you with the best information and recommendations, but in the face of an emergency we will surely make mistakes. We will sometimes change our minds. We may even reverse our guidance. But we will always own up to our mistakes, explain our policy changes and strive to do better. Instead, Dr. Fauci admitted to telling noble lies.
Covid brought us the concept of “The Science.” Dr. Fauci famously said last year: “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” But no person embodies science. To suggest as much betrays a cast of mind that is entirely at odds with science itself.
On Leadership:
George Washington was onto something when he decided to limit his presidency to two terms. New leaders don’t just avoid the risk of too much power concentrated in the hands of one person or group, they also bring new ideas. New perspectives are especially important to accelerating scientific inquiry by challenging deeply held assumptions. In his long tenure, Dr. Fauci made tremendous contributions, but during this crisis we needed someone at the top who took a broad view of how to fight a novel virus, and made recommendations based on weighing the direct and indirect consequences to society.
How to Regain Trust:
We now face the threat of a future pandemic in a country in which a large number of people no longer trust public health authorities. What happens when we have a novel, highly contagious, airborne virus with a much higher fatality rate than that of Covid-19?
We desperately need to rebuild public trust now. That begins by having public health officials apologize for being dogmatic in their pronouncements, when the correct answer should have been: “We don’t know.” One lesson we should all learn from Covid-19 is that we should not put our entire faith and trust in one physician.
Dr. Marty Makary is a public health expert, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of the bestselling book The Price We Pay.
His last piece for Common Sense was about top doctors and scientists at the NIH, FDA and CDC who are alarmed at the direction of those institutions. Read it here.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, August 24, 2022
Anthony Fauci’s Retirement Marks the End of an Era
By: Gregg Gonsalves
AIDS. SARS. H1N1 influenza. Ebola. Covid-19. Monkeypox. Infectious disease outbreaks often come and go, though some persist over the long haul, much like the man who has occupied the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984: Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci.
I came of age in the 1980s — the age of AIDS — but in a way, this was the beginning of the age of Tony, as many call him, because he’d be there through all of it, for each and every one of the nation’s adventures with infectious diseases. The telegenic, calm guide with the unmistakably Brooklyn accent took heat from AIDS activists as they descended on the National Institutes of Health’s Building 31 in 1990. He hugged Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse, in front of cameras after she recovered from Ebola, to soothe a nation’s fears about the virus in 2014. He was a deadpan presence in the background of President Donald Trump’s news conferences on Covid-19. He advised presidents since Ronald Reagan on what to do in the face of these scourges.
As the Yale historian Frank Snowden has noted, from the middle of the 20th century until the advent of AIDS — during what he called “an age of hubris” — scientists had largely declared mission accomplished in terms of the battle against infectious diseases, as antibiotics put microbial threats distinctly into the past. If AIDS was the comeuppance for our arrogance as scientists, over the years, rightly or wrongly, Dr. Fauci gave the impression that science could handle these challenges, eventually, through the methodological, step-by-step work of research and the application of what we learned expeditiously into the clinic, into the field.
This wasn’t the Pollyannaish scientism of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — a notion that science would conquer infectious diseases once and for all — but the idea that at least there could be progress. When protease inhibitors arrived in the mid-1990s to change the course of the AIDS epidemic, giving life to many people who faced certain death, this optimism seemed borne out, at least to many of my friends and colleagues who had watched a generation perish to the disease.
As Dr. Fauci prepares to retire at the end of this year, one has to wonder if this is the end of an era as well. Don’t get me wrong: No one I know thinks that our gains on AIDS and the progress we’ve made in other areas of infectious disease control — particularly on vaccine-preventable diseases — are trivial accomplishments.
But with Covid-19, something has changed. It tested a fundamental equilibrium among science, public health and politics in America. Most administrations, I argue, simply don’t care much about science and public health; it’s not a priority for them. On AIDS, Mr. Reagan ignored it, and Bill Clinton paid lip service to it. George W. Bush came the closest to making it a priority, with the establishment of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, but by the time of Barack Obama, activists were protesting again about an administration’s neglect.
But Covid-19 caught the attention of politicians, and not in a good way. For decades, Dr. Fauci and other scientists could advise presidents, even sway them for good on occasion, because so little was at stake politically for these leaders. But with Mr. Trump and President Biden, too much was riding on their short-term political fortunes to indulge scientific and public health evidence and advice too much or for too long.
I’ll never forget an email I sent to Dr. Fauci and other health leaders during the Trump administration at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, begging them to speak up and provide scientific leadership in the chaos and mismanagement that scientists and the public saw happening around us. But there was little the good doctor could do, and he even acknowledged this was a unique situation.
With the election of Mr. Biden, many in public health had hoped for someone to lead with the science, but soon pollsters were urging his administration to take the win over Covid-19, declare the crisis over, stop talking about mitigation efforts and get people to understand that Covid-19 would simply be with us for a long time.
If the age of Dr. Fauci was one in which we looked forward to progress, even if always piecemeal, the current era is the age of “We have the tools.” It is a distinct new pessimism of spirit, cynicism of the will, born of the hubris of some physicians but mostly of the political calculations of others that doing more on this pandemic is untenable. The sound you hear is the thud of resignation in the face of the suffering of so many over the past two and a half years and a summer in which we add hundreds to the dead every day in the United States.
In the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Fauci never gave up. We didn’t sit with the mounting dead and our pitiful armamentarium of weak drugs and suggest we had the tools. We fought, and we argued, for sure, but we moved ahead together, never satisfied with the status quo. If he weren’t retiring in December, I’d imagine him working to his very last breath until there was a cure for AIDS.
We should all have his resolve and commitment, even if Dr. Fauci lives in a world of dire constraints, of the men and women of politics, who dream small and think about the next election always, rather than the nature and qualities of their legacies, of which Dr. Fauci’s is assuredly great.
Dr. Gonsalves is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, a longtime AIDS activist and a 2018 MacArthur fellow.
From The New York Times, August 24, 2022