Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, has become quite the celebrity in America. Even so, as the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, key aspects of Fauci’s career remain largely unknown to the people.
Fauci earned a medical degree at Cornell in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine it was only for a short time. As Raymond S. Greenberg explains at Historynet.com, the mid-1960s were the days of “a compulsory draft of American physicians,” to serve in military hospitals in Vietnam. One of the few alternatives to that service was a position in the Public Health Service. Newly minted physicians could join the clinical associate program at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
These doctors were dubbed “Yellow Berets,” the opposite numbers of the special forces Green Beret troops in Vietnam. The Omens, a Detroit group, even wrote a song about it, “The Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” a parody of “Ballad of the Green Berets” by Sgt. Barry Sadler, a Special Forces medic who also treated the Montagnards and other civilians.
Instead of attending wounded American troops in Vietnam, Fauci joined the entering NIH clinical associate class of 1968. As Fauci told Greenberg, the yellow beret tag was “very much derogatory,” but the NIH recruit didn’t mind. “In general, the spirit on campus was much more a liberal leaning than a conservative leaning because that is generally the case with scientists.”
Fauci contends “most people were against the war,” but not all physicians were against serving in the military hospitals in Vietnam or anywhere else. Those who did regarded the yellow berets askance. As Fauci noted, the physicians who did not go into the service had a “cushy job” at the NIH.
Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology but by 1984 the Yellow Beret was heading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). Back in the 1990s Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), said Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”
As Michael Fumento noted in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Fauci was hopelessly wrong that AIDS would ravage the heterosexual population. As UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg showed in Inventing the AIDS Virus, Fauci was a pioneer of cancel culture, quashing media appearances by better qualified persons of different views. Despite his costly blunders, Fauci remained in his “cushy job” at the head of NIAID, with steadily increasing salary and power.
Millions of Americans got their first dose of Dr. Fauci in early 2020, when he recommended the destructive lockdowns that crushed the powerful Trump economy, infringed on Americans’ constitutional rights, and enabled massive voting by mail. Fauci issued prophecies based on computer models but shied away from hard, scientific data. On the origin of the pandemic, the NIAID boss remains evasive.
“What is your opinion on how COVID became so well adapted to humans?” Margaret Brennan of CBS News asked Fauci on March 28. “You know, Margaret, that’s an argument that goes back and forth,” Fauci said. “A very plausible explanation for this is that this virus jumped from an animal host, a bat to maybe an intermediate host and then to a human.”
The “other theory” is that the virus “accidentally escaped” from “a lab.” As Dr. Fauci concluded, “I think the most likely one that in nature, in the wild, it adapted itself.” No word from the NIAID boss about dangerous “gain of function” research.
According to the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health, gain of function research can “enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs)” and that can raise “biosafety and biosecurity concerns.” In 2012, Fauci cited the risks of such research, wondering, “what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” The NIH banned gain of function research in 2014 but revived it in 2017 with no objection from Fauci.
Fauci’s NIAID also funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Communist China, where gain of function research could be conducted in secret, with no accountability, and which received shipments of deadly pathogens from a lab in Canada. The pathogens included the Nipah virus, able to jump between humans and as Tom Blackwell of Canada’s National Post explained, “a threat to cause a widespread outbreak.”
“Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19,” Fauci’s August 2020 paper, authored with NIAID adviser Dr. David Morens, does not flag gain of function research as a possible contributor to the pandemic. On the other hand, Fauci called for “strengthening the United Nations and its agencies, particularly the World Health Organization.” Like the notion that the COVID-19 virus somehow “adapted itself” to humans, that is not a scientific statement. With Fauci, now 80, it’s always been about politics, power and money.
With a current salary of $417,608, more than the president of the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the highest paid bureaucrat in the federal government. Fauci’s NIAID now boasts a budget of more than $6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent from the previous fiscal year. By all indications the destructive lockdowns that punished millions of Americans affected Dr. Fauci not at all.
In 1968, Anthony Fauci didn’t want to treat wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, so he opted for a cushy job with the NIH. In 2021, after 53 years in government, Fauci remains indifferent to the suffering of Americans, who can’t vote him out of office. Dr. Anthony Fauci may be the nation’s leading white coat supremacist but he still wears that yellow beret with pride.
Kynarion Hellenis says
Thank you for this informative article. I did not know this history.