A brief history of how Anthony Fauci has failed 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 of infectious diseases to fund a new anthrax vaccine effort in response to the anthrax attacks that took place a week after 11 of September.

The millions were only a small part of the $ 1.8 billion that Fauci invested in defending bioterrorist attacks in the previous two years. More than half of these funds went to anthrax and smallpox alone. In 2004, Fauci launched the $ 5.6 billion “Bioshield Project”, the National Institutes of Health’s largest disbursement for a single edition of research so far.

Some microbiology researchers at the time, however, according to the journal Nature, were concerned that Fauci’s actions would “distort priorities in infectious disease research, sucking money from work to understand and combat outbreaks of natural diseases that, ultimately pose a greater threat to public health. “The 2003 Nature article quoted a Stanford University microbiologist as saying” that illnesses like flu and other respiratory tract infections routinely kill many more people than they would die in an attack bioterrorist and therefore deserve a larger share of the NIAID budget “.

The criticism was justified. In 2007, after spending billions on the opposite premise, Fauci admitted that “at the end of the day, you are not going to kill so many people [with an anthrax attack] as you would if you detonated some car bombs in Times Square. ”His anthrax vaccine effort failed, having been” sunk by the lobby “.

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

To ensure that AIDS was his exclusive domain within the federal government, Fauci “started the most important bureaucratic battle in the history of the fight against AIDS”, squeezing more scientifically competent, but less conniving administrators. According to Nussbaum, if Fauci had not won the battle, “many people who died could have survived”.

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

Tony Fauci’s administrative incompetence was costly. In 1987, more than one million Americans were infected with the AlDS virus. Not a single drug treatment came out of the government’s huge biomedical research system. In the end, Fauci barely survived by handing over 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 that came out of the Fauci government’s research system, and only after help from the private sector. In 1988, the playwright and prominent AIDS activist Larry Kramer published an “Open Letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci” in Village Voice, writing, in part:

You admitted that you are an incompetent idiot. In the past four years, $ 374 million has been allocated to AIDS treatment research. You have been tasked with spending a lot of that money. . . . However, after three years, you have established only a system of waste, chaos and worthlessness.

According to “Good Intentions”, “in an attempt to save his reputation, if not his career”, Fauci co-opted Kramer, becoming the main ally of the well-connected activist within the federal government’s public health apparatus. Kramer, meanwhile, was Fauci’s “vector” in elitist American society, perfectly positioning the technocrat for his favorite role as “the type of guy who appears on the front page every day,” according to an anonymous health official. that Nussbaum quotes.

With the AIDS treatment research strategy continuing to face setbacks, Fauci focused on developing an HIV vaccine. This quest, however, offered less and less glory as the 1990s progressed. Beginning in 1995, the private industry began to develop effective drug therapies that would dramatically reduce AIDS mortality in the developed world at the turn of the millennium, making the HIV vaccine much less game-changing. Although the threat of bioterrorism has restored Fauci’s prominence in national politics, neither the threat of bioterrorism nor the vaccine against anthrax has ever materialized.

Things got worse for Fauci before they got better. On February 3, 2020, Science magazine reported that, after nearly four decades, “Fauci’s unsuccessful search for a vaccine that can stop the AIDS virus has brought yet another frustrating defeat.” According to the scientist who leads the study in South Africa, “[t]there is absolutely no evidence of effectiveness ”from the $ 104 million study. “Years of work were required for this. It is a big disappointment. “

Fauci admitted to Science that all those years and millions were spent in an effort that he knew was very unlikely to succeed: “We were fighting for years and years, and then we grabbed the smallest positive effect, a potential immunity correlate, and it seemed interesting. ”Fauci, however, had just become unworkable, with the first US COVID-19 patient diagnosed just a week earlier.

“I was always saying [a respiratory illness like COVID-19] it would be my worst nightmare, ”he said in June. However, just a few months earlier, Fauci was telling Americans that, far from being his greatest fear, the danger of 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 was “sucking money from work to understand and fight outbreaks of natural diseases”.

A March 2020 hagiography published in the Washington Post style section noted how the elegant doctor is, once again today, the type of guy who hits the front page every day, who “seems to transcend time and space, appearing in all media all the time. ”The newspaper quoted majority leader in the Chamber, Steny Hoyer, lamenting:“ It’s a pity that at the first tip we didn’t just say to Tony Fauci: ‘You’re in charge, you have all the power you need, tell us what that needs to be done. ‘”

The first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the US Food and Drug Administration was developed by scientists at Pfizer, which has not received NIAID funding from Fauci. “All investment in R&D and manufacturing was made by Pfizer at risk,” says the company.

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

[T]The best scientists don’t become managers. 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. Considering the mental acuity of the country’s new president and the continuing anxiety among its citizens, it seems that the Fauci government, politically skilled but scientifically inept, will not get anywhere anytime soon.