Anatomy of total failure

What America saw in the Senate hearing of Anthony Fauci on is the end state of the toxic paternalism of an incompetent bureaucracy.

The numerous discrepancies between Fauci’s diary entries and his public pronouncements over the Covid-19 pandemic were not just self-protection coverup of his earlier disastrous decisions. They reflect the standard model of public health administration: we know better than you how to manage a pandemic, and in fact we know it so well that we refuse to discuss any of it and instead use censorship and smear of contrary expertise and coercion rather than persuasion to effect our policies.

In 2006, Thomas Inglesby, Jennifer Nuzzo, Tara O’Toole and the great D. A. Henderson published the state of the art of public health respiratory infection epidemic management: “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.” They described, “There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza.”

They observed, “Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective.” In the first SARS outbreak, they stated that Canadian health authorities found screening of inbound or outbound passengers from SARS-affected areas was ineffective, and in the US, “that screening individuals on domestic interstate flights for symptoms of flu…would not be effective and would have serious adverse consequences.” They noted that prohibitions of social gatherings would not have “any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic.”

They stated that school closures for extended periods would not have “any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic.” With regard to face mask wearing, they said that “studies have shown that the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus.” Also, “there are few data available to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks outside a healthcare setting.”

And yet, every one of these protocols was enforced by public health agencies in the opposite direction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The totality of these bad policies failed to control the pandemic–the CDC reported that by the end of 2023, in spite of all of these policies and in spite of the massive population vaccination by the Covid-19 vaccines, more than 87% of American adults had been infected anyway.

That fact is the proof that the public health institutional response for Covid-19 pandemic management was a failure. And still, Fauci and the rest of the public health infrastructure maintain the utter conceit that they know how to do their job.

That is the message of Fauci’s hearing. An incompetent bureaucracy, granted tremendous power by the state, with little accountability for their catastrophic actions.