Without his unquestioning followers, Anthony Fauci could have done little harm. People trained in education bought into, and mandated school closures – despite the fact that Covid really wasn’t a threat to children. The problem wasn’t Fauci screwing up – it was several layers of experts between him and our local school boards who accepted his statements blindly – people who claim to be critical thinkers.
We have a tendency to defer to experts – unless those experts have different politics than we hold. It’s a problem. In economics, there are spots where John Maynard Keynes’ theories work – but those are specialized spots. In medicine, there are spots where quarantines are needed – but the survival rates, and the ages of the sick, on cruise ships, showed that Covid was not that aggressive.
Yes – people died from Covid infections. People I knew and liked. But it wasn’t like the Black Death killing half of Europe back in the 14th Century. It wasn’t like Cholera’s death rate in the 19th Century – when Snow removed the handle from the Broad Street pump and began the idea of Public Health. Think about the cruise ships – they were an unplanned, near perfect group of experimental sites – isolated, elderly populations with little medical care or even medical supplies available. And the case fatality rate on the Diamond Princess was around 2.3%. That’s no worse than typhoid.
I’m not an epidemiologist – but in teaching Indians of North America, I gained a lot of insight into Smallpox and Measles and virgin-field epidemics. Measles epidemics killed a quarter to half of the American Indian populations it infected. Smallpox was a bit worse. It was hard to read the old reports and tell the two apart. We have reasons for fearing plagues – whether Bubonic, Smallpox or Measles. The Diamond Princess showed us that Covid was, compared to these past diseases, mild. While Anthony Fauci’s diagnosis was extreme, we had a whole lot of public health officials – theoretically well trained – ignoring the data and blindly accepting Fauci’s recommendations.
Fauci erred. His reasons for erring may have been ego driven, power madness, or just screwing up. The problem isn’t one prominent old man screwing up. The problem is a huge group of public health officials who were incapable of looking at the available data and recognizing that Sweden’s folks were correct.
There is a strong desire to tell other people what to do, to control their lives. Covid wasn’t as large a problem as the public health industry response was. Was it Reagan who said the most frightening words are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”?
The problem wasn’t Fauci – it was a government paid industry composed of people who were incapable of understanding the statistics that the cruise ship experimental subjects provided, and preferred to control people. Fauci will never again be in a position where his blunders can be damaging. But Fauci’s followers are still being paid, and have learned little.
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