Robert Kennedy Jr. Talks 'The Real Anthony Fauci'
“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”
—John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms.
Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.
Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating.
American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.
Standing in the center of all the mayhem, with his confident hand on the helm, was one dominating figure. As the trusted public face of the United States government response to COVID, Dr. Anthony Fauci set this perilous course and sold the American public on a new destination for our democracy.
This book is a product of my own struggle to understand how the idealistic institutions our country built to safeguard both public health and democracy suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence. I am a lifelong Democrat, whose family has had eighty years of deep engagement with America’s public health bureaucracy and long friendships with key federal regulators, including Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Robert Gallo. Members of my family wrote many of the statutes under which these men govern, nurtured the growth of equitable and effective public health policies, and defended that regulatory bulwark against ferocious attacks funded by industry—and often executed by Republican-controlled congressional committees intent on defunding and defanging these agencies to make them more “industry friendly.” I built alliances with these individuals and their agencies during my years of environmental and public health advocacy. I watched them, often with admiration. But I also watched how the industry, supposedly being regulated, used its indentured servants on Capitol Hill to systematically hollow out those agencies beginning in 1980, disabling their regulatory functions and transforming them, finally, into sock-puppets for the very industry Congress charged them with regulating.
My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of “regulatory capture,” the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate. I spent four decades suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other environmental agencies to expose and remedy the corrupt sweetheart relationship that so often put regulators in bed with the polluting industries they regulated. Among the hundreds of lawsuits I filed, perhaps a quarter were against regulatory officials making illegal concessions to Big Oil, King Coal, and the chemical and agricultural polluters that had captured their loyalties. I thought I knew everything about regulatory capture and that I had armored myself with an appropriate shield of cynicism.
But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents[1]
and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.[2][3] NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.[4] The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”[5] When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!
Today many of my liberal chums are still crouched in a knee jerk posture defending “our” agencies against Republican slanders and budget cuts, never quite realizing how thoroughly the decades of attacks succeeded in transforming those agencies into subsidiaries of Big Pharma.
In this book, I track the rise of Anthony Fauci from his start as a young public health researcher and physician through his metamorphosis into the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy. I explore the carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that has left American health ailing and its democracy shattered. I chronicle the troubling role of the dangerous concentrated mainstream media, Big Tech robber barons, the military and intelligence communities and their deep historical alliances with Big Pharma and public health agencies. The disturbing story that unfolds here has never been told, and many in power have worked hard to prevent the public from learning it. The main character is Anthony Fauci.
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci, who turned 80 that year, occupied center stage in a global drama unprecedented in human history. At the contagion’s beginnings, the US still enjoyed its reputation as the universal standard-bearer in public health. As the world’s faith in American leadership dwindled during the Trump era, the singular US institutions that were seemingly immune from international disillusionment were our public health regulators; HHS—and its subsidiary agencies CDC, FDA, and NIH—persisted as role models for global health policies and gold standard scientific research. Other nations looked to Dr. Fauci, America’s most powerful and enduring public health bureaucrat, to competently direct US health policies, and rapidly develop countermeasures that would serve as state-of-the-art templates for the rest of the world.
Dr. Anthony Fauci spent half a century as America’s reigning health commissar, ever preparing for his final role as Commander of history’s biggest war against a global pandemic. Beginning in 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), serving as that agency’s Director since November 1984.[6] His $417,608 annual salary makes him the highest paid of all four million federal employees, including the President.[7]
His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.
During the epidemic’s early months, Dr. Fauci’s calm, authoritative, and avuncular manner was Prozac for Americans besieged by two existential crises: the Trump Presidency, and COVID-19. Democrats and idealistic liberals around the globe, traumatized by President Trump’s chaotic governing style, took heart from Dr. Fauci’s serene, solid presence on the White House stage. He seemed to offer a rational, straight-talking, science-based counterweight to President Trump’s desultory, narcissistic bombast. Navigating the hazardous waters between an erratic President and a deadly contagion, Dr. Fauci initially cut a heroic figure, like Homer’s Ulysses steering his ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Turning their backs to the foreboding horizon, trusting Americans manned the oars and blindly obeyed his commands—little realizing they were propelling our country toward the desolate destination where democracy goes to die.
Throughout the first year of the crisis, Dr. Fauci’s personal charisma and authoritative voice inspired confidence in his prescriptions and won him substantial—though not universal—affection. Many Americans, dutifully locked in their homes in compliance with Dr. Fauci’s quarantine, took consolation in their capacity to join a Tony Fauci fan club, chillax on an “I heart Fauci” throw pillow, sip from an “In Fauci We Trust” coffee mug, warm cold feet in Fauci socks and booties, gorge on Fauci donuts, post a “Honk for Dr. Fauci” yard sign, or genuflect before a Dr. Fauci prayer candle. Fauci aficionados could choose from a variety of Fauci browser games and a squadron of Fauci action figures and bobbleheads, and could read his hagiography to their offspring from a worshipful children’s book. At the height of the lockdown, Brad Pitt performed a reverential homage to Dr. Fauci on Saturday Night Live,[8] and Barbara Streisand surprised him with a recorded message during a live Zoom birthday party in his honor.[9]
The New Yorker dubbed him “America’s Doctor.”[10]
Dr. Fauci encouraged his own canonization and the disturbing inquisition against his blasphemous critics. In a June 9, 2021 je suis l’état interview, he pronounced that Americans who questioned his statements were, per se, anti-science. “Attacks on me,” he explained, “quite frankly, are attacks on science.”[11]
The sentiment he expressed reminds us that blind faith in authority is a function of religion, not science. Science, like democracy, flourishes on skepticism toward official orthodoxies. Dr. Fauci’s schoolboy scorn for citation and his acknowledgement to the New York Times that he had twice lied to Americans to promote his agendas—on masks and herd immunity—raised the prospect that some of his other “scientific” assertions were, likewise, noble lies to a credulous public he believes is unworthy of self-determination.[12]
[13]
In August 2021, Dr. Fauci’s acolyte—CNN’s television doctor, Peter Hotez—published an article in a scientific journal calling for legislation to “expand federal hate crime protections” to make criticism of Dr. Fauci a felony.[14]
In declaring that he had no conflicts, Dr. Hotez, who says that vaccine skeptics should be snuffed out,[15]
evidently forgot the millions of dollars in grants he has taken from Dr. Fauci’s NIAID since 1993,[16]
and more than $15 million from Dr. Fauci’s partner, Bill Gates, for his Baylor University Tropical Medicine Institute.[17]
[18]
As we shall see, Dr. Fauci’s direct and indirect control—through NIH, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust of some 57 percent of global biomedical research funding[19]—guarantees him this sort of obsequious homage from leading medical researchers, allows him to craft and perpetuate the reigning global medical narratives, and can fortify the canon that he, himself, is science incarnate.
High-visibility henchmen like Hotez—and Pharma’s financial control over the media through advertising dollars—have made Dr. Fauci’s pronouncements impervious to debate and endowed the NIAID Director with personal virtues and medical gravitas supported by neither science nor his public health record. By the latter metric, his 50-year regime has been calamitous for public health and for democracy. His administration of the COVID pandemic was, likewise, a disaster.
As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet. Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year. The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths. By September 30, 2021, mortality rates in the US had climbed to 2,107/1,000,000, compared to 139/1,000,000 in Japan.
