Fauci Claims He Had ‘Nothing to Do’ With School Closures. His Own Statements Suggest Otherwise

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

The line comes to mind after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci’s interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weeknd. In the interview, Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked whether it was a "mistake" for schools to remain shut down for so long during the pandemic.

"I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on," Fauci explained on Sunday. "We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that."

Fauci is correct that there were serious “deleterious” consequences of school closures. For example, it was recently reported that the class of 2022 saw average ACT scores plummet to the lowest level in more than thirty years, and there’s no reason to believe that younger students didn’t experience similar results. Lost learning is hardly the only “deleterious” consequence, however; the decline of mental health among youths during lockdowns has also been well chronicled.

Some may see Fauci’s response as reasonable, because he’s now acknowledging the collateral damage of these policies. The problem is that Fauci is not actually conceding anything. Nobody—and I mean nobody—ever believed you could shut down schools (and society more broadly) for any meaningful amount of time and not experience some “deleterious” consequences.

But it gets worse. Fauci goes on to claim he had nothing to do with the damaging policy.

“I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I have said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” Fauci told Karl. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it].”

6 Times Fauci Argued for School Closures

Fauci may not have sat on a school board or wielded police power during the pandemic, but his claim that he bears no responsibility for school closing takes chutzpah. It’s undeniable that many schools, cities, and state governments shut down schools precisely because of what the White House’s top medical advisor was saying, and what Fauci was saying was clear.

The journalist Jordan Schachtel has a timeline of Fauci’s statements on school reopenings, and it’s worth examining.

3/12/20:

Fauci calls for a nationwide shutdown of schools.

“The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings and multiple briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what was done when you close the schools is mitigation.”

4/12/20:

The New York Times, America’s paper of record, reports that Fauci ‘gave his blessing’ to Mayor Bill DeBlasio to shut down the New York City school system.

4/13/20:

Fauci slams Ron DeSantis after the Florida governor announced he wanted to get schools open “as soon as possible.”

“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” Fauci stated.

5/12/20:

Fauci has a testy exchange with Sen. Rand Paul, who argued schools should remain open.

Fauci dismissed the idea that schools should be opened back up fully because “we don’t know everything about the virus.”

CNBC reports: Fauci then turned Paul’s own phrasing on him. “You used the word we should be ‘humble’ about what we don’t know. I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really had better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children,” Fauci said. “Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now children presenting with Covid-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome,” Fauci said.

In August and September, Fauci was singing the same tune. Schools could open for instruction—after the virus was under control.

‘I Didn’t Recommend Locking Anything Down’

Fauci’s about-face did not go unnoticed. Other health researchers questioned his attempt to distance himself from school closures.

“Why is he saying he did not encourage, suggest and recommend lockdown and school closure?” asked Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Certainly he didn't make the call by himself, but he used the weight of his reputation in science to advocate for these policies… .”

This is not the first time Fauci has attempted to deflect blame for school closures and lockdowns. In a July interview with Newsweek deputy editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Fauci was asked if he would recommend closing schools again, considering the amount of collateral damage the policies caused.

“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci responded, adding that that was the purview of the CDC.

Fauci was correct that it was the proper purview of the CDC to make specific policy recommendations, not the head of NIAID, whose job was to see that his agency provided sound scientific research to the CDC. Yet this did not seem to stop the doctor from becoming essentially the official spokesman of the federal government’s public health response, conducting literally hundreds of interviews during the pandemic and posing for numerous magazine shoots. (Many public health experts I’ve spoken with say this is precisely why science became so politicized during the pandemic.)

Now that these policies are rightly being criticized for their “deleterious” consequences, Fauci—who grew quite wealthy as a result of all the media attention he received—is claiming he had “nothing to do” with the policies.

Fauci’s claims are almost too hard to believe, but they call to mind a piece of wisdom from economist Thomas Sowell.

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,” Sowell once observed.

The pandemic shows just how right Sowell was.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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The Atrocious Ethics of Fauci’s Lockdown Defense

On February 7, 1968, after American military forces rained rockets, napalm, and bombs on the village of Ben Tre in South Vietnam, killing hundreds of civilians, Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett quoted a military officer’s justification of the event.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” a US major was quoted as saying.

Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who’d go on to become one of the last western journalists in Saigon until its capture in 1975, never revealed the source of the quote, which some US officials doubted was authentic. Nevertheless, the quote—which eventually morphed into the pithier "We had to destroy the village in order to save it”—became a symbol of an absurd military strategy in a failed war.

While the reasoning is absurd—destroying a town is no way to save it—the ethics that underpin the quote are surprisingly common and convey a simple and popular idea: a wrong, evil, or unjust action can be morally justifiable because it ultimately brings about a greater good.

‘You Have to Do Something Draconian’

The latest public official to employ such reasoning is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently offered this justification for the government’s pandemic response, which included lockdowns, widespread business closures, and other “draconian” public policies.

"You have to do something that's rather draconian, and sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences," the National Institutes of Health director explained. “Just like when you shut things down, even temporarily, it does have deleterious consequences on the economy, on the school children, you have to make a balance.”

Fauci, who in August announced his intention to retire before the end of the year, continued:

“We know the only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try to shut things down. If you shut things down just for the sake of it, that’s bad. But if you do it for the purpose to regroup and open up in a safe way, that’s the way to do it.”

Fauci’s phrasing in this last part—that lockdowns are the only way “to stop something cold in its tracks”—is odd because it’s clear that lockdowns did no such thing. The official data plainly show the virus circulated and people died regardless of the presence of lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Not only was the virus not stopped “cold in its tracks,” an abundance of research shows lockdowns do little to reduce virus spread and Covid mortality.

But let’s put aside the empirical results of lockdowns and analyze the ethics Fauci uses to justify them, particularly his use of the word “draconian,” which means “excessively harsh and severe.”

The word traces back to the Greek legislator Draco (or Drakon) who in about 621 B.C. laid out the very first written Athenian constitution. As you can probably guess, these laws were quite harsh. Those who fell into debt were forced into slavery to their creditors, for example (unless one was of noble birth), while those caught stealing were sentenced to death, even if it was something as simple as a head of cabbage from the marketplace.

“It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offenses, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones,” the historian Plutarch wrote.

One can see how Draco earned title to an adjective that means “excessively harsh and severe,” which is what makes Fauci’s invocation of this term so troubling. Draco’s treatment of petty criminals was harsh and excessive, but at least punishment was meted out against people convicted of crimes.

Fauci, on the other hand, is defending “draconian” public policies that harm innocent people. During the pandemic, people were arrested for leaving their homes, driving their cars, paddling a boat, or going to a park. Moreover, Fauci admits these draconian policies also had other “deleterious consequences.” These included mental health deterioration, record drug overdoses, systemic fraud of taxpayers, millions of jobs lost, increased self-harm (especially among teenage girls), and more.

Despite these consequences, Dr. Fauci has consistently defended lockdowns, insisting that the draconian policies served a greater good.

The Danger of Pursuing ‘the Greater Good’

Justifying actions not on their morality but on their potential outcomes is a dangerous philosophy for individuals, because it allows humans to rationalize their actions—even evil ones. The great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrates this well in his classic novel Crime and Punishment, which centers on a young idealist named Raskolnikov who justifies killing an unprincipled old woman who works as a pawnbroker because it would lift him from poverty and allow him to become a great man, and perform great deeds for humanity.

While pursuing a greater good instead of acting ethically is dangerous individual philosophy, history shows it’s far more dangerous collectively.

“Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some 'noble' goal,” noted the great thinker and FEE founder Leonard Read.

Read was right, and the examples are ubiquitous.

When Franklin Rooseveltt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-American men, women, and children, virtually everyone conceded it violated the Bill of Rights, including FDR’s own Attorney General Francis Biddle. The order was carried out anyway, however, because it was seen as serving a greater good: winning World War II.

Forced sterilization policies and government experiments on prisoners and unsuspecting subjects, including the notorious MKUltra Project and the Tuskegee Study, were also clearly ethically bankrupt, but they were carried out nevertheless because each served a “greater purpose”—scientific progress and the creation of “purer” gene pools.

It’s an objective truth that many of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century—from Hitler’s Final Solution to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the Killing Fields of Cambodia—were ushered in by governments violating the individual rights of civilians for a greater good: a better collective society.

This is precisely why Read said one of the greatest philosophical mistakes people make is to judge the ends they seek, not the means they use.

"Ends, goals, aims are but the hope for things to come…They are not a part of the reality,” Read explained in Let Freedom Reign. "Examine carefully the means employed, judging them in terms of right and wrong, and the end will take care of itself."

This is the great and grave mistake made by Dr. Fauci. He failed to distinguish ends from means. Like the Army major who told Peter Arnett it was necessary “to destroy the town to save it,” Fauci rationalized a draconian action to pursue a greater good—and caused irreparable harm to the American people and Constitution as a result.

It’s never too late to learn from a mistake, however.

Indeed, even the people of Ancient Greece saw that Draco’s constitution was deeply flawed, and most of his laws were repealed by the Athenian statesman Solon (630–560 B.C.) the following century.

Let us hope Americans learn a similar lesson.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Atrocious Ethics of Fauci’s Lockdown Defense

Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics)

Last summer in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he had no regrets over advising Americans against wearing masks in public spaces early in the pandemic, even though his recommendations changed months later.

“I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,” said Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease advisor. “We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people.”

Fauci was referring to comments he made on 60 Minutes in March 2020. During that interview, Fauci said “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” noting they should be used only for sick people as source control.

“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” said Fauci. “And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Fauci’s about-face on masks was not without controversy, but it had some excuse given its context. A public health official lying to the public he is responsible for protecting (for whatever the reason) is no small matter. But one could also see Fauci’s explanation as a “noble lie” designed to make sure the people who needed masks most would get them.

Newly released emails, however, suggest that when Fauci said in March that there was no reason for healthy individuals to wear masks, it wasn’t to prevent a mask shortage—it was because he believed it.

Privately, Fauci Also Advised Against Masks

This week the Washington Post and BuzzFeed News released hundreds of pages of Fauci's emails, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails contain many revelations. Among them is an email reply Fauci sent to one Sylvia Burwell, presumably the same Sylvia Burwell who served under President Barack Obama as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Burwell, who was slated to travel, had asked Dr. Fauci for his advice on the use of face masks. Fauci's reply, dated February 5, 2020, is included in its entirety below.

"Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location."

The email is important because it shows Fauci was saying privately in February 2020 precisely what he was saying publicly in March 2020. The fact that Fauci was sharing this information privately with Burwell undermines his claim that his recommendation to not wear masks was motivated by fear of causing a mask-purchasing stampede.

In other words, there’s every reason to believe that Fauci was simply sharing his genuine medical opinion, which corresponded with the scientific consensus and the World Health Organization at the time, that masks (particularly cloth ones purchased at retail stores) are ineffective at keeping the virus out and may cause riskier behavior by giving wearers a false sense of protection.

A Model of Public Choice Theory

The obvious question, of course, is what would prompt Fauci to change his medical opinion on masks. The answer can perhaps be found in basic economics.

Public Choice Theory, a field pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan, applies economic theories and methods to the analysis of political behavior. As Buchanan saw it, public choice is “politics without romance.” It questions the widely accepted notion that those engaged in public service are motivated primarily by “the common good.” This is not to say Buchanan was suggesting that public officials are uniquely malevolent. On the contrary, public choice theory rests on the assumption political actors are pretty much like everyone else in that their decisions are shaped by self-interest and incentives.

Geoffrey Brennan, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina and a professor of political science at Duke University, notes there’s a misguided tendency to see public agents as “benevolent despots” instead of regular people.

“When you ask what should government do, you also imply that those in government are motivated to try to choose the very best policies for the public good,” said Brennan in a 2020 discussion on public choice theory. “When it comes to political agents it’s surely a mistake simply to assume that what motivates a person exclusively is their desire to do good.”

He continued:

“After all, the winning assumption in economics is that ordinary folk operating in markets are motivated predominately by self interest. Why should we assume politicians and bureaucrats are motivated any differently than anyone else?”

Both publicly and privately, early in 2020 Fauci said masks were an ineffective, unhelpful way for individuals to protect themselves from COVID-19. His public opinion on the matter changed, and it changed at a time when masks became bitterly divisive (as they were a century ago during the Spanish Flu).

Masks became so politically polarizing that even top government officials could be hit with a social media ban for posting that masks were unhelpful. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to Dr. Scott Atlas, who at the time was a top member of the White House coronavirus task force. In that environment, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Fauci flip-flopped to “fall in line” for the sake of his political career.

To be clear, we don’t know for certain what motivated Fauci’s decisions. It's certainly possible he became convinced (or convinced himself) masks were necessary because asymptomatic spread was a greater risk than he previously believed. (Though research shows asymptomatic spread cases are rare and are unlikely to contribute to the spread of the virus in a meaningful way.) 

What we do know is that public choice theory can help us better understand what motives besides public health may have helped Fauci change his mind (consciously or subconsciously).

It shows how political incentives can often be at odds, not only with the public good, but with truth itself.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics)