A thousand pages, a subpoena, 111 invocations of the Fifth, and a senator screaming profanity at an 85-year-old man. Here’s what’s actually true, including the parts you won’t like.
I followed all of and even to this day my one response as an RN is it took over 8 years to find the first medical treatment for AIDS. So get real because this was a major big deal with use of mRNA to develop the vaccine. Now the fools are considering not letting us get a Covid vaccine booster. They don’t understand this is a virus that constantly mutates like Flu and we get flu vaccines every fall.
Yes, there were some aspects of Fauci's statements that led me to scratch my head. NOT that he was a "murderer" or lying, but that rather than acknowledging that science is not perfect, and innocent mistakes are made - and some companies play it too "fast and loose" - it seemed to me (far from proof) that he was overly-defensive, which just invited the crazy-ass criticism.
I have no reason to question Fauci's science or well-meaning. He's a lousy politician - but he's not SUPPOSED to be a politician. By all indications, he helped saved millions of lives, while DJT did not - in the language of the day - give a damn fuck.
I worked in hospitals at the time. The day before my last day (March 6, 2020, in a hospital I was consulting at outside of Boston), the head of Infectious Disease called a meeting of the psychiatrists and told us (as best a direct quote as I can recall) "There's something really bad going on. We will need to shut down your unit until we know more. It's so dangerous, we need to be as careful as possible, but we have no idea how bad it may get."
Yes, there was great cost to the widespread shut downs - but IMHO, the data available at the time, the death rate at the time, LEFT NO OTHER LOGICAL ALTERNATIVE.
Maybe if more were known sooner, the response could have been modified. But from my understanding of medicine (but not being a virologist/ID M.D.), it was the only logical course at the time.
Frankly, I don't know if I'd like Fauci as a friend (which I can say of MANY M.D. colleagues - don't get me started on surgeons...). I think he did make some mistakes. But NOT the mistakes that they are alleging and by all evidence available, not mistakes that caused unnecessary loss of life.
Sadly, he unintentionally set himself up to be a fall guy, and the aholes have taking / are taking full advantage. He may not be perfect, but THEY are the f...ers...
File the date: Wednesday. Note the sequence that preceded it. Not a criminal complaint. A subpoena, followed by the pre-emptive release of eleven hundred pages of a man’s private diary, timed to arrive before he could testify in his own defense. A regime does not need to convict when it can simply let the public read a private journal in the worst possible light and let inference do the work a verdict would otherwise have to do.
Jack is correct that the trap is the story, not the testimony. The pardon’s cutoff sits in January 2025. Everything spoken after that date sits outside its protection, in a hearing run by a chairman who has spent years promising publicly to see the witness imprisoned. Note what that arrangement actually offers a witness: not a chance to clear his name, but a chance to hand his prosecutor new material. Silence was not obstruction. Silence was the only position on the board that did not create fresh exposure.
Note who was in the room asserting the silence carried no protection at all. A senator with a law degree, citing an 1896 case to declare a live and unsettled question closed by fiat. This is worth sitting with, because it is not a mistake anyone trained in the law makes by accident. It is a choice about what the audience needs to believe before the clip ends.
Watch the definitional fight and watch what happens to it under pressure. Federal reviewers examined the funded work and found it did not meet the regulatory standard for the term everyone was shouting in that room. A broader, non-regulatory use of the same term might reach a different conclusion about the same experiments. Both readings can be true simultaneously, because they are answering different questions. A dispute over definition is not evidence of a lie. It becomes evidence of a lie only once someone declares the definition settled, on television, and dares the audience to check.
Here is a detail that belongs in the file, because it clarifies what this fight has always been about. The senator who has spent six years building this case against a scientist for his handling of the pandemic response did not, by his own public statement in 2021, get vaccinated. He has said so on the record, more than once, citing natural immunity as sufficient. Note what that means for the shape of the argument: the case is not being made by someone who followed different guidance and was harmed by it. It is being made by someone who opted out of the guidance entirely and is now the chief prosecutor of the man who gave it. That is not disqualifying on its own. But it tells you the fight was never primarily about the science. It was about who gets to be believed.
Jack is correct that the deliverable, after six years, is a clip of a senator swearing at an eighty-five-year-old man, not a charge. Note what a national accounting of an actual failure would require: an honest count of the dead, an honest look at what was said from the podium, an honest reckoning with why the country that spent the most got so little. All of that is available. None of it requires one man’s face. The fact that six years of investigation produced a diary and a curse word, and not a document, is itself the finding. Ask what it was building toward instead.
Thanks for a rational accounting. I am both a Molecular Biologist and an MD, and I believe this long feud has been pointless because there is no evidence of malicious intent by anyone involved.
It also hasn’t helped improve future responses either, so we will face similar risks next pandemic. We live adjacent to wild viruses, many unknown, and it’s likely another will mutate to allow human transmission. It’s what viruses do: mutate to gain advantage. It’s also likely that fallible humans will make decisions again based on inadequate data. We were very lucky with Covid because the death rate was not as high as with many other viruses. If it were something like MERS, it could have been unbelievably bad.
I hope the conspiracy theorists leave Dr Fauci alone now so he can enjoy his retirement. Personally, my family will always have a stash of N95s and safety glasses next to our first aid kit.
I won’t argue you with a definition about “gain of function” - parsing technical definitions is what people in every field do when they’re tired, unsure, rushed, and a whole host of other reasons. Most are decent individuals who maybe, above everything else, just don’t know how to answer to keep their boss happy without making their boss’s boss very unhappy. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I will put my two cents in about “cold comfort.” Cold comfort sucks no matter the situation: it sucks when a chaplain and officer show up at your front door, it sucks when your loved one has cancer and the doctor tells you there’s nothing more they can do, it sucks when your brother has AIDS and all they can say is we don’t know what it is and he dies. Cold comfort is what happens when life kicks you in the teeth. How you deal with that cold comfort determines what kind of person you are; somebody who whines or somebody who gets back up and keeps moving forward.
I know people who lost a great deal, had special needs children that were set back terribly, and it’s awful what they lost and were set back so far. No argument. Most of them figured it out, worked together to find solutions, and a small few just bitched and complained and are still bitching and complaining. I also have a young woman I love like a daughter, a nurse practitioner, who worked tirelessly trying to care for people who screamed at her, spit on her, and denied they had COVID with their dying breaths. She also contracted long COVID, and has effects to this day. I also know many people who had loved ones die from COVID, try telling them that the mask mandates and closings were wrong. I think the scientists and researchers did the best they could with something they’d never seen before. Did they make mistakes? They did. Were they malicious? No, I don’t believe they were. They were trying to protect people from dying. Had we had a better president, maybe we wouldn’t still be watching a clown circus attack an 85 year old man.
There's another, ancillary, matter concerning these diaries; he wrote about calls with Stephen Miller's wife Katie after she became pregnant. Originally included in Rand Paul's dump of these diaries, much of this has since been redacted, but not before it was noticed.
"“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote on May 9, 2020.
In a separate entry, Fauci wrote that he spoke with the physicians of the couple’s child to talk about the child’s medical care.
On May 6, 2020, he wrote, “katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room.” Elsewhere he labeled her “smart” and “great.”
Some of those entries, published earlier this month by Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, have since been redacted. While Katie Miller’s name pops up 56 times in the original more than 1,100-page document, it only appears 37 times in a revised version, according to a NOTUS analysis."
Thanks Jack!! I was a Covid Long Hauler and I got Covid 4 times during that stretch of time. I got all my vaccinations for it and I had a side effect from one of the shots that paralyzed me on my right side for 48 hours.. the right side of my face drooped.. and my right side wouldn’t function. I was freaking out.. needless to say.. but I recovered. Covid mutates just like a lot of viruses do.. Fauci did his best at a time of this pandemic. I don’t fault him at all.
Pleading the 5th looks bad but necessary. They can’t get another chance to question him without counsel. Of course, it was fine for criminal Trump plead the 5th with good reason. My question is, does Fauci’s philosophy on experimentation to be better prepared have anything to do with the hundreds of thousands of deaths that Trump caused by his inaction and poor, test less have less cases philosophy? Mentioning that he was giving critical equipment to other countries for favors of course.
Let's count how many times Epstein or those named in the files pleaded the Fifth under oath in depositions or Congressional hearings. Or how many times Trump has had very fuzzy recollections around his dealings with Epstein like how he apparently didn't recall the birthday greeting he composed. Les Wexner, Leon Black (who was not questioned under oath), Bill Gates, the Clintons, Darren Indyke... Boy, there sure was a lot of stuff those guys couldn't seem to remember or just didn't want to talk about. But let's definitely focus on Fauci.
You make some good points, Jack. No arguments from me. I personally think this whole charade of a hearing was to blame one person and deflect attention of our knowledge that the president botched up his messaging about the virus to the country. Trump definitely did not help matters when expressing his initial disinterest, giving his standard “two week” timelines, or giving accurate information to calm Americans.
As I've said before, Jack, this is all they've Got. I'm holding my breath for the upcoming elections 😖 Thanks for your insight and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
Thank you for this analysis. The Rs need to take a long hard look in the mirror and see what we see, a bunch of pathetic, power-hungry, damned fools.
We lost family members to Covid. We didn't lose more of them, and we didn't lose our ability to recognize true commitment to science or true stupidity. #HoldingFast
Okay. Not a scientist. Not a college graduate. So I searched for what gain in function means.
"Gain of function refers to research that genetically modifies an organism to enhance or add new biological abilities it did not previously have.
Definition and Purpose
Gain-of-function (GoF) research involves deliberately altering an organism’s genes to increase its capabilities, such as its transmissibility, virulence, host range, or resistance to treatments
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
+2
. The goal is not necessarily to make organisms more dangerous, but to understand how genetic changes affect function, which can help predict disease evolution, develop vaccines, and design therapeutics
. For example, introducing a mutation in influenza B to allow it to infect rabbits, when it previously could not, is considered a gain-of-function experiment
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
So the grant had a narrower meaning? A specific change. I think I understand.
I don't know if research caused the mutation of Covid. I certainly does a fine job of mutating all on its own.
trump said it was not a pandemic. But it was.
trump could have used President Obama's plans for fighting a pandemic, but trump threw that away. The CDC told the citizenry to stock up on essentials in February. The CDC site had that information, a shopping list. I read it. I followed it. But trump had removed it from the site before March. Dr Fauci could have called trump a liar when trump said it wasn't going to infect America, and when he said there were only fifteen cases and they would be okay, or when he said it would be over by Easter, or when he told CDC to stop testing, or when he wanted people to use unproven drugs, bleach or bright lights. Fauci did his best to keep us informed regarding the rapidly changing disease but the MAGA only believed trump, no matter how many lies he told them.
So then came the blame game. China did it. Poor Dr Fauci. Since trump can never be blamed for anything, Dr Fauci was placed under the microscope for six years. And now we all know that he is guilty of liking Barbara Streisand. Don't Republicons realize how stupid they look?
I followed all of and even to this day my one response as an RN is it took over 8 years to find the first medical treatment for AIDS. So get real because this was a major big deal with use of mRNA to develop the vaccine. Now the fools are considering not letting us get a Covid vaccine booster. They don’t understand this is a virus that constantly mutates like Flu and we get flu vaccines every fall.
#HOLDFAST
Teri
Excellent, objective analysis, Jack.
Virology is FAR outside of my expertise.
Yes, there were some aspects of Fauci's statements that led me to scratch my head. NOT that he was a "murderer" or lying, but that rather than acknowledging that science is not perfect, and innocent mistakes are made - and some companies play it too "fast and loose" - it seemed to me (far from proof) that he was overly-defensive, which just invited the crazy-ass criticism.
I have no reason to question Fauci's science or well-meaning. He's a lousy politician - but he's not SUPPOSED to be a politician. By all indications, he helped saved millions of lives, while DJT did not - in the language of the day - give a damn fuck.
I worked in hospitals at the time. The day before my last day (March 6, 2020, in a hospital I was consulting at outside of Boston), the head of Infectious Disease called a meeting of the psychiatrists and told us (as best a direct quote as I can recall) "There's something really bad going on. We will need to shut down your unit until we know more. It's so dangerous, we need to be as careful as possible, but we have no idea how bad it may get."
Yes, there was great cost to the widespread shut downs - but IMHO, the data available at the time, the death rate at the time, LEFT NO OTHER LOGICAL ALTERNATIVE.
Maybe if more were known sooner, the response could have been modified. But from my understanding of medicine (but not being a virologist/ID M.D.), it was the only logical course at the time.
Frankly, I don't know if I'd like Fauci as a friend (which I can say of MANY M.D. colleagues - don't get me started on surgeons...). I think he did make some mistakes. But NOT the mistakes that they are alleging and by all evidence available, not mistakes that caused unnecessary loss of life.
Sadly, he unintentionally set himself up to be a fall guy, and the aholes have taking / are taking full advantage. He may not be perfect, but THEY are the f...ers...
FWIW,
Dave
File the date: Wednesday. Note the sequence that preceded it. Not a criminal complaint. A subpoena, followed by the pre-emptive release of eleven hundred pages of a man’s private diary, timed to arrive before he could testify in his own defense. A regime does not need to convict when it can simply let the public read a private journal in the worst possible light and let inference do the work a verdict would otherwise have to do.
Jack is correct that the trap is the story, not the testimony. The pardon’s cutoff sits in January 2025. Everything spoken after that date sits outside its protection, in a hearing run by a chairman who has spent years promising publicly to see the witness imprisoned. Note what that arrangement actually offers a witness: not a chance to clear his name, but a chance to hand his prosecutor new material. Silence was not obstruction. Silence was the only position on the board that did not create fresh exposure.
Note who was in the room asserting the silence carried no protection at all. A senator with a law degree, citing an 1896 case to declare a live and unsettled question closed by fiat. This is worth sitting with, because it is not a mistake anyone trained in the law makes by accident. It is a choice about what the audience needs to believe before the clip ends.
Watch the definitional fight and watch what happens to it under pressure. Federal reviewers examined the funded work and found it did not meet the regulatory standard for the term everyone was shouting in that room. A broader, non-regulatory use of the same term might reach a different conclusion about the same experiments. Both readings can be true simultaneously, because they are answering different questions. A dispute over definition is not evidence of a lie. It becomes evidence of a lie only once someone declares the definition settled, on television, and dares the audience to check.
Here is a detail that belongs in the file, because it clarifies what this fight has always been about. The senator who has spent six years building this case against a scientist for his handling of the pandemic response did not, by his own public statement in 2021, get vaccinated. He has said so on the record, more than once, citing natural immunity as sufficient. Note what that means for the shape of the argument: the case is not being made by someone who followed different guidance and was harmed by it. It is being made by someone who opted out of the guidance entirely and is now the chief prosecutor of the man who gave it. That is not disqualifying on its own. But it tells you the fight was never primarily about the science. It was about who gets to be believed.
Jack is correct that the deliverable, after six years, is a clip of a senator swearing at an eighty-five-year-old man, not a charge. Note what a national accounting of an actual failure would require: an honest count of the dead, an honest look at what was said from the podium, an honest reckoning with why the country that spent the most got so little. All of that is available. None of it requires one man’s face. The fact that six years of investigation produced a diary and a curse word, and not a document, is itself the finding. Ask what it was building toward instead.
#HOLDFAST
Jack,
Thanks for a rational accounting. I am both a Molecular Biologist and an MD, and I believe this long feud has been pointless because there is no evidence of malicious intent by anyone involved.
It also hasn’t helped improve future responses either, so we will face similar risks next pandemic. We live adjacent to wild viruses, many unknown, and it’s likely another will mutate to allow human transmission. It’s what viruses do: mutate to gain advantage. It’s also likely that fallible humans will make decisions again based on inadequate data. We were very lucky with Covid because the death rate was not as high as with many other viruses. If it were something like MERS, it could have been unbelievably bad.
I hope the conspiracy theorists leave Dr Fauci alone now so he can enjoy his retirement. Personally, my family will always have a stash of N95s and safety glasses next to our first aid kit.
Bruce
I won’t argue you with a definition about “gain of function” - parsing technical definitions is what people in every field do when they’re tired, unsure, rushed, and a whole host of other reasons. Most are decent individuals who maybe, above everything else, just don’t know how to answer to keep their boss happy without making their boss’s boss very unhappy. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I will put my two cents in about “cold comfort.” Cold comfort sucks no matter the situation: it sucks when a chaplain and officer show up at your front door, it sucks when your loved one has cancer and the doctor tells you there’s nothing more they can do, it sucks when your brother has AIDS and all they can say is we don’t know what it is and he dies. Cold comfort is what happens when life kicks you in the teeth. How you deal with that cold comfort determines what kind of person you are; somebody who whines or somebody who gets back up and keeps moving forward.
I know people who lost a great deal, had special needs children that were set back terribly, and it’s awful what they lost and were set back so far. No argument. Most of them figured it out, worked together to find solutions, and a small few just bitched and complained and are still bitching and complaining. I also have a young woman I love like a daughter, a nurse practitioner, who worked tirelessly trying to care for people who screamed at her, spit on her, and denied they had COVID with their dying breaths. She also contracted long COVID, and has effects to this day. I also know many people who had loved ones die from COVID, try telling them that the mask mandates and closings were wrong. I think the scientists and researchers did the best they could with something they’d never seen before. Did they make mistakes? They did. Were they malicious? No, I don’t believe they were. They were trying to protect people from dying. Had we had a better president, maybe we wouldn’t still be watching a clown circus attack an 85 year old man.
There's another, ancillary, matter concerning these diaries; he wrote about calls with Stephen Miller's wife Katie after she became pregnant. Originally included in Rand Paul's dump of these diaries, much of this has since been redacted, but not before it was noticed.
"“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote on May 9, 2020.
In a separate entry, Fauci wrote that he spoke with the physicians of the couple’s child to talk about the child’s medical care.
On May 6, 2020, he wrote, “katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room.” Elsewhere he labeled her “smart” and “great.”
Some of those entries, published earlier this month by Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, have since been redacted. While Katie Miller’s name pops up 56 times in the original more than 1,100-page document, it only appears 37 times in a revised version, according to a NOTUS analysis."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/fauci-diary-stephen-miller-covid-b3024550.html
Thanks Jack!! I was a Covid Long Hauler and I got Covid 4 times during that stretch of time. I got all my vaccinations for it and I had a side effect from one of the shots that paralyzed me on my right side for 48 hours.. the right side of my face drooped.. and my right side wouldn’t function. I was freaking out.. needless to say.. but I recovered. Covid mutates just like a lot of viruses do.. Fauci did his best at a time of this pandemic. I don’t fault him at all.
Pleading the 5th looks bad but necessary. They can’t get another chance to question him without counsel. Of course, it was fine for criminal Trump plead the 5th with good reason. My question is, does Fauci’s philosophy on experimentation to be better prepared have anything to do with the hundreds of thousands of deaths that Trump caused by his inaction and poor, test less have less cases philosophy? Mentioning that he was giving critical equipment to other countries for favors of course.
Let's count how many times Epstein or those named in the files pleaded the Fifth under oath in depositions or Congressional hearings. Or how many times Trump has had very fuzzy recollections around his dealings with Epstein like how he apparently didn't recall the birthday greeting he composed. Les Wexner, Leon Black (who was not questioned under oath), Bill Gates, the Clintons, Darren Indyke... Boy, there sure was a lot of stuff those guys couldn't seem to remember or just didn't want to talk about. But let's definitely focus on Fauci.
You make some good points, Jack. No arguments from me. I personally think this whole charade of a hearing was to blame one person and deflect attention of our knowledge that the president botched up his messaging about the virus to the country. Trump definitely did not help matters when expressing his initial disinterest, giving his standard “two week” timelines, or giving accurate information to calm Americans.
#HOLDFAST #OUTLAST #STANDFAST
As I've said before, Jack, this is all they've Got. I'm holding my breath for the upcoming elections 😖 Thanks for your insight and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
Thank you for this analysis. The Rs need to take a long hard look in the mirror and see what we see, a bunch of pathetic, power-hungry, damned fools.
We lost family members to Covid. We didn't lose more of them, and we didn't lose our ability to recognize true commitment to science or true stupidity. #HoldingFast
Okay. Not a scientist. Not a college graduate. So I searched for what gain in function means.
"Gain of function refers to research that genetically modifies an organism to enhance or add new biological abilities it did not previously have.
Definition and Purpose
Gain-of-function (GoF) research involves deliberately altering an organism’s genes to increase its capabilities, such as its transmissibility, virulence, host range, or resistance to treatments
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
+2
. The goal is not necessarily to make organisms more dangerous, but to understand how genetic changes affect function, which can help predict disease evolution, develop vaccines, and design therapeutics
biologyinsights.com
biologyinsights.com
+1
. For example, introducing a mutation in influenza B to allow it to infect rabbits, when it previously could not, is considered a gain-of-function experiment
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
So the grant had a narrower meaning? A specific change. I think I understand.
I don't know if research caused the mutation of Covid. I certainly does a fine job of mutating all on its own.
trump said it was not a pandemic. But it was.
trump could have used President Obama's plans for fighting a pandemic, but trump threw that away. The CDC told the citizenry to stock up on essentials in February. The CDC site had that information, a shopping list. I read it. I followed it. But trump had removed it from the site before March. Dr Fauci could have called trump a liar when trump said it wasn't going to infect America, and when he said there were only fifteen cases and they would be okay, or when he said it would be over by Easter, or when he told CDC to stop testing, or when he wanted people to use unproven drugs, bleach or bright lights. Fauci did his best to keep us informed regarding the rapidly changing disease but the MAGA only believed trump, no matter how many lies he told them.
So then came the blame game. China did it. Poor Dr Fauci. Since trump can never be blamed for anything, Dr Fauci was placed under the microscope for six years. And now we all know that he is guilty of liking Barbara Streisand. Don't Republicons realize how stupid they look?
#HoldFast Dr Fauci.
Sue
I'm sorry Jack, I don't think I understand what 'gain-of-function' means legally. Can you help me please?