Jay Bhattacharya, writing in Reason, reviews Anthony Fauci’s new memoirs. Four slices:
As a young medical student, I admired Tony Fauci. I bought and read Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, a vital textbook that Fauci co-edited. In reading his new memoir, On Call, I remembered why I admired him. His concern about his patients’ plights, especially HIV patients, comes through clearly.
Unfortunately, Fauci’s memoir omits vital details about his failures as an administrator, an adviser to politicians, and a key figure in America’s public health response to infectious disease threats over the past 40 years. His life story is a Greek tragedy. Fauci’s evident intelligence and diligence are why the country and the world expected so much of him, but his hubris caused his failure as a public servant.
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By contrast, his treatment of scientific critics is harsh, crossing lines that federal science bureaucrats should not cross. In 1991, when University of California, Berkeley, professor and wunderkind cancer biologist Peter Duesberg put forward a (false) hypothesis that the virus, HIV, is not the cause of AIDS, Fauci did everything in his power to destroy him. In his memoir, Fauci writes about debating Duesberg, writing papers, and giving talks to counter his ideas. But Fauci did more, isolating Duesberg, destroying his reputation in the press, and making him a pariah in the scientific community. Though Fauci was right and Duesberg wrong about the scientific question, the scientific community learned it was dangerous to cross Fauci.
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By any measure, the American COVID response was a catastrophic failure. More than 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to COVID itself, and deaths from all causes have stayed high long after the number of COVID deaths themselves diminished. In many states, particularly blue states, children were kept out of school for a year and a half or longer, with devastating effects on their learning and future health and prosperity.
Coercive policy regarding COVID vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries. To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the U.S. government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?
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All this background makes his discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration all the more galling. The Declaration is a short policy document I wrote along with Martin Kulldorff (then of Harvard University) and Sunetra Gupta (of the University of Oxford) in October 2020. Motivated by recognizing that the lethality and hospitalization risk from COVID was 1,000 times lower in younger populations than in older, the document had two recommendations: (1) focused protection of vulnerable older populations, and (2) lifting lockdowns and reopening schools. It balanced the harms of the lockdowns against the risks of the disease in a way that recognized that COVID was not the only threat to human well-being and that the lockdowns themselves did considerable harm.
Fauci denigrates the Great Barrington Declaration as being filled with “fake signatures,” though FOIAed emails from the era make it clear he knew tens of thousands of prominent scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists had co-signed it. In his memoir, he repeats a propaganda talking point about the Declaration, falsely claiming the document called for letting the virus “rip.” In reality, it called for better protection of vulnerable elderly people.
Fauci asserted it was impossible to “sequester to protect the vulnerable” while simultaneously calling for the whole world to sequester for his lockdowns. His rhetoric about the Great Barrington Declaration poisoned the well of scientific consideration of our ideas. With brass-knuckle tactics, he won the policy fight, and many states locked down in late 2020 and into 2021.
The virus spread anyway.
Paul Best reports on “the paradox of protectionism.” Two slices:
In total, US businesses have paid $242.07 billion in additional taxes due to tariffs since 2018—costs that are either absorbed by those American businesses or, more likely, passed on to consumers. For example, General Motors and Ford said in 2018 that steel and aluminum tariffs would increase their costs by $1 billion each, translating to about a $700 jump in production costs for every vehicle made in North America. Similarly, tariffs on washing machines caused a 12 percent increase in consumer prices, which equates to an $86 increase per machine.
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Since then, despite criticizing tariffs ahead of the 2020 election, President Biden has maintained and even expanded on Trump’s protectionist agenda, issuing a new round of tariffs on Chinese goods earlier this year. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, said in 2019 that she “is not a protectionist Democrat” but also hasn’t indicated that she would meaningfully change the Biden administration’s course on trade.
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on protectionism, promising to put a “ring around the country” in the form of a 10 percent tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese imports. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R‑OH), represents a clean break from the GOP’s free-market tradition, embracing tariffs, higher minimum-wage laws, and industrial policy.
The unintended consequences of this new protectionism consensus will surely lead to calls for more state intervention, as when Trump handed billions in subsidies to farmers affected by his trade war.
America’s distillers will be harmed by Trumpian tariffs. (HT Phil Magness)
Elizabeth Nolan Brown reflects on Kamala Harris’s opportunistic flip-flopping on public policy. A slice:
While running for president last time, Harris said there was “no question” that she was in “in favor of banning fracking,” an oil and gas extraction method that has helped lower natural gas prices and reduced reliance on coal but troubled environmentalists over concerns about potential ill effects. In July, Harris’ campaign told The Hill that a President Harris would not seek a ban on fracking.
As part of the Green New Deal Harris supported, the federal government would have “guarantee[d] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” The Harris ’24 campaign has since said she does not support a federal job guarantee.
During her previous presidential bid, Harris said she was open to expanding the Supreme Court. In July, her campaign told The Hill she does not support this proposal.
What motivates the DC staffer?
Here’s George Will on how the FBI copes with mounting threats. A slice:
The blessings of life in the digital age are inseparable from dangerous potentialities. In 1995, a rogue trader at Barings Bank, then London’s oldest merchant bank (founded in 1762), inadvertently demonstrated how fragility can be an aspect of connectedness: He brought about his employer’s collapse with reckless keystrokes. Israel’s audacious ingenuity last month with Hezbollah’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies demonstrated how connectedness can be weaponized.
Harold Black asks if kidney transplants are racist. Here’s his conclusion:
The algorithm once used to determine whether a patient went on the transplant list was found to understate the severity of kidney disease amongst blacks. That algorithm has since been changed to more accurately reflect the extent of kidney disease for black patients. This means that the real degree of kidney disease has been understated for blacks and the waiting lists for patients will grow. This further points to the necessity of finding more black living donors. If anyone at HHS is listening, please initiate a pilot program to offer monetary incentives to the family members of transplant patients. In order to make it sound race neutral, the incentives can be scaled acording to income.
The Administration has also stipulated hiring preferences for “underrepresented” groups, including “aging individuals,” prisoners, racial, religious and ethnic minorities, “Indigenous and Native American persons,” “LGBTQI+ persons,” and “persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.”
Good luck trying to find “underrepresented” hard-hats in Montana. An official overseeing Montana’s program told Congress last month that the Administration has given “conflicting or even new and changed guidance after submitting our plans” and is “slowing states down and second-guessing good-faith efforts.”
It’s hard not to roll your eyes at warnings that Donald Trump would use his power as president to punish opponents while special counsel Jack Smith pursues him with the zeal of Captain Ahab. Meantime, the press ignores how President Biden’s appointees target their business enemies.
The Federal Trade Commission last week whaled Hess CEO John Hess, a shale-fracking pioneer who has lambasted the administration’s energy policies. The message to other execs: Put up and shut up.
After Chevron last autumn announced plans to acquire Mr. Hess’s company, Democrats demanded that the FTC intervene. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted the deal “would give Big Oil more fuel to raise gas prices,” never mind that the combined company would constitute a tiny fraction of global oil production.
Nonetheless, the FTC’s three Democratic commissioners contrived a fictitious narrative about Mr. Hess being in league with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. They used this to scapegoat Mr. Hess for rising gasoline prices under Mr. Biden and as justification to bar him from Chevron’s board. Their claims are a lot of bark but no bite.
Fiona Harrigan exposes a recent fabricated claim by Trump about immigrants.
