OPINION:
Anthony Fauci, retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a PBS interview that touched on his ever-flipping, ever-flopping face mask guidance that he didn’t flip, he didn’t flop, he simply changed his mind and his recommendations to reflect the changing science, and moreover, he’d be “happy to debate that anywhere, any place, with anybody.”
OK. Then here’s the open invite: Anthony Fauci is hereby invited to “debate that” with yours truly on the “Bold and Blunt” podcast at The Washington Times. Let’s see if he takes. My email box stands at the ready to receive. So, too, my cellphone.
But really, the smart bet’s on a no-show.
This is just Fauci’s latest lie, no doubt. It’s just his next lie, in a long, long list of obfuscations, the softer sister of shockingly blatant lies. For a guy who claimed himself to be “science,” this is no way to act.
“Scientists Faking Data Use Puzzling Jargon to Cover Their Tracks,” Science Alert wrote in a November 2015 headline.
The story tails a study from Stanford University that found scientists who have something to hide more often than not turn to obfuscation to mask their fake findings. That is to say: Fauci is not the only one. It happens so frequently in the field that Stanford developed a test that rates the level of obfuscation in scientists’ work. They call it the obfuscation index.
“We believe the underlying idea behind obfuscation is to muddle the truth,” said David Markowitz, one of the Stanford researchers who developed the index, in Science Alert. “Scientists faking data know that they are committing a misconduct and do not want to get caught. Therefore, one strategy to evade this may be to obscure parts of [their] paper[s]. We suggest that language can be one of many variables to differentiate between fraudulent and genuine science.”
So Fauci may not be alone in this.
But he’s certainly perfected the skill.
His particular brand of obfuscation is not so much big words as it is to equivocate. He’s a master at floating recommendations that all lead to the same action — the government seizure of individual liberties — all the while masking these recommendations as “science;” all the while pretending he’s a hands-off guy when it comes to policy; all the while professing he’s non-political, above the fray of politics, completely uninvolved in the things of politicians.
He’s king of the “perhaps” science; the “potential” outcomes; the “could happen” warnings. He’s the blue ribbon recipient of the shoulda, coulda, woulda type of guidance, verbiage he slides in slyly in between flips and flops on publicly issued recommendations and orders.
“Americans should wear face masks as a way to help stifle the spread of COVID-19, said Dr. Anthony Fauci,” wrote PBS, in April 2020.
Fauci’s exact words back then?
“If everybody does that, we’re each protecting each other,” he said.
That was April 2020.
That was after emails obtained by The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News by the Freedom of Information Act revealed Fauci wrote, in a Feb. 5, 2020, message to Sylvia Burwell, the secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, that “masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting unaffected people from acquiring infection,” as Newsweek reported.
Fauci also wrote in this email: “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [the] virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep[ing] out gross droplets if someone cough or sneezes on you,”
And Fauci also wrote this in the same email: “I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”
That’s different from what he said a month earlier.
On March 8, 2020, Fauci said this, during an interview on “60 Minutes” on CBS: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
Then April rolled around and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised wearing face masks in public, especially in places where social distancing was impossible.
It wasn’t long after Fauci again changed tune.
“Fauci Backs ‘Double-Masking’ In Coronavirus Fights, Says ‘Likely More Effective,’” Fox News wrote in January 2021.
“Dr. Fauci: Double Mask During Covid Makes Common Sense, More Effective,” CNBC wrote that same month.
Then there was that whole back-and-forth, flip-and-flop about vaccines, vaccine efficacy, and the power of the vaccine to stop the spread of the coronavirus — and whether vaccinated should wear face masks.
“Fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks outside, Fauci says,” CNBC wrote on May 13, 2021.
“Fauci flip flops, says vaccinated should wear masks in parts of US,” the New York Post wrote on July 4, 2021.
“Fauci says pushback against ‘easy-to-understand’ COVID-19 protection measures like mask-wearing and vaccination is ‘very disturbing,’” Business Insider wrote in a headline on Jan. 17, 2022.
That story reported on Fauci’s comments to the World Economic Forum — comments that went, in part, like this: “It’s very disturbing. I believe to all of us as public health officials and scientists, such a degree of pushback against regular, normal, easy-to-understand public health measures. Reluctance to wear masks, reluctance to promote vaccination, reluctance to do kinds of public health measures. You make the virus have an advantage when you don’t implement, in a unified way, all the very well-recognized public health measures — particularly the vaccines.”
Easy to understand?
Not just Fauci, but all the public health bureaucrats issued such ever-changing, whimsical and non-scientific based advisements for over three years of the COVID-19 crazy that the only clear guidance was this: Do as I say. Do it when I say. And don’t question what I say.
The scientists wanted the people to jump when they said jump.
Here’s an example of Fauci issuing his clear, easy-to-understand guidance. On vaccine effectiveness, Fauci said this in December of 2021, as Yahoo reported: “Let’s look at what we know and what we don’t know first with regard to transmission. … What about vaccine effectiveness [on Omicron]? Now, obviously there’s significant reductions in that neutralizing titers are possible. And we say that because the mutations suggest immune evasion. But remember as with other variants, although partial immune escape may occur, vaccines and particularly boosters give a level of antibody that even with variants, like Delta, give you a degree of prose protection, particularly against severe disease. So there’s every reason to believe as we talk about boosters, when you get a level high enough that you were going to get at least some degree of cross protection, particularly against severe disease.”
Say what?
Americans don’t want to hear about “neutralizing titers.” They just wanted to hear if the shot worked — meaning, if the shot stopped them from getting the virus.
Americans just wanted to know if the face masks worked — meaning, if the wearing of face masks stopped them from getting or giving the virus.
We now know neither face masks nor shots stopped the spread of the coronavirus.
Fauci and all the bureaucrats who told us to wear face masks and get shots can’t admit that because they used these fears to justify the government’s seizure of individual liberties for three years.
So the lie continues.
The deceptions go on.
Fauci, king of obfuscations, keeps on with his obfuscations and lies and deceptions — including the ones he now tells to cover for the ones he told the last three years.
“So this idea about going back and saying, well, you said you shouldn’t wear masks,” Fauci said in a segment of the PBS “American Masters” that was released and reported on Breitbart. “What we did is that, at the moment you ask a question, you’ve got to look at what scientific data were available at that time. And there were things that we know, which weren’t a lot, and things that we didn’t know. We didn’t know what it meant to have one or two people infected in a society that already doesn’t like to wear masks. How would you like to say, we have two cases now, everybody wear a mask and guess what, we have a shortage of masks and we didn’t even know masks work? No chance in the world that anyone would want to do that. Did you flip-flop? No, you got additional information that made you change what you’re saying. And I’d be happy to debate that anywhere, any place, with anybody.”
OK.
The invite stands.
Let’s see which way Fauci’s winds blow.
Again: Smart money’s betting he’s lying.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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