You wouldn’t know it from local media, or even from much of the mainstream Mainland news, but Dr. Anthony Fauci is back in the spotlight, six years after his Icarus flight into the sun of international media attention during Covid-19.
The last article at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about Anthony Fauci is from April 3, 2020. It’s an Associated Press wire story, “Dr. Fauci’s face will soon be on a bobblehead.”
How appropriate. It would hilariously ironic, if it weren’t for the needless panic and suffering that man caused as he reveled in his Covid-era fame.
In April, Hawaiʻi News Now did carry an AP story earlier this year, “Former Fauci adviser indicted for allegedly concealing communications related to COVID-19 research.” It was a small glimpse into an overdue reckoning.
The last article on Fauci at Hawai‘i Public Radio was from Jan. 23, 2021, “Fauci Relishes A ‘Hallelujah’ Moment.”
The gist of that piece is that Fauci was thrilled to be working for former President Joe Biden — as well he should be, since Biden, or his autopen, would go on to grant Fauci a preemptive pardon on January 19, 2025.
The text of the pardon itself reads: “For any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”
Why would he need such a thing?
We might soon find out. On Wednesday, July 29, Sen. Rand Paul will be grilling Fauci in front of Congress. In advance of that hearing, Paul has been publishing online thousands of pages of Fauci’s own diaries and notes, all kept in his government files. Read them all here.
This is what local and national media, once so eager to lionize Fauci, now seem to be working so hard to ignore.
I looked at the Star-Advertiser, as well as Honolulu Civil Beat, and HawaiiNewsNow.com, to see if anyone locally was covering, or even picking up from Mainland sources, the news coming out about Fauci’s diaries.
Nothing, at least as of Tuesday.
Maybe you loved the man. Maybe you bought the Fauci candle and hung on his every word. Prepare to be disappointed.
Maybe you loathed the man on sight, with his suspicious eagerness to be the ringleader of a calamity circus.
You were right. Fauci’s own words prove it.
For a summation of the diary, it’s hard top the highlights published this week at The Federalist, which doubted the Covid lockdown madness from the get-go — and was demonetized and censored for not going along with the groupthink.
Examples:
In March 2020, went on TV, gave the day’s death toll of 9,800. Then he wrote in his diary, “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”
I could go on and on with examples from the diary of Fauci loving his fame, because Fauci himself sure did. But I’ll just let that one ghoulish example stand for them all.
Publicly, Fauci claimed he never advised lockdowns. His diaries tell us he bragged to himself about convincing New York and California leaders to close schools and businesses. In the climate of fear of the time, policymakers marched like lemmings off the lockdown cliff to do likewise.
As for that fear, it was needlessly stoke by Fauci himself.
And he was lying.
He told us, via the media, the Covid fatality rate was 2 to 2.5% — that’s 10 times higher than the typical death rate of the average flu season. One might panic over such a thing. Except, the real rate, as he noted privately, was “more like 0.2-0.3%.” That’s double the fatality rate of the flu, but it isn’t 10 times the rate, and we might have asked better questions about a more targeted approach to Covid if he had been honest.
When other experts criticized the lockdown strategy as doing more than harm good, Fauci worked with the government and social media companies to silence them. In crisis, we need more communication and more questions, not fewer. Fauci would not be questioned at all.
Publicly, Fauci touted mask-wearing as the key to safety and a “return to normalcy.” Privately he knew there was no evidence to support that.
While we were being told we couldn’t so much as take a walk alone in a park, Fauci was having dinner with CNN’s Jake Tapper, at Tapper's house.
Remember when it was forbidden, even considered racist, to suggest that Covid-19 was the result of Chinese lab leak? The only acceptable belief was accidental transmission from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market.
Well, the overwhelming consensus of a team of international experts was that there was no way this virus was entirely natural, parts of had to be inserted. Fauci knew this because he assembled the experts and summarized their consensus in his diary — in January, 2020. Yes, that early.
What Sen. Paul has been chasing, and will likely grill Fauci about in these hearings, is what role Fauci himself and the U.S. government played in funding gain-of-function research on viruses overseas after such work had been banned at home. As the Senator notes, no pardon from Biden protects Fauci from the consequences of lying now.
We’ll see what he has to say for himself, but I expect a lot of memory lapses. “During a seven-hour deposition in December 2022, Fauci failed to recall pertinent information about his role in the federal government’s Covid weaponization at least 174 times,” The Federalist reports.
And it also notes: “While regular Americans struggled to make ends meet and keep their small businesses afloat amid lockdowns, the bureaucrat made $1.7 million. By the end of 2021, Fauci was the highest paid federal employee.”
I think the man ought to be in prison. I fear the worst he’ll experience is a few more hours of pretending he can’t recall how he earned so many of our tax dollars.
In his monstrous and ego-driven campaign to milk Covid for all it was worth, Fauci had plenty of accomplices. Mini-Faucis ruled from coast to coast, basking in the glow of the local TV studio lights, not least of all here in the Islands, pushing maximum panic and maximum lockdowns. Gov. Josh Green likely owes his current job to being Hawai‘i’s Mini-Fauci.
My own industry played a huge role in amplifying both fear and the overreaction, so I’m not surprised they aren’t rushing to confront the ugly truth behind the St. Fauci narrative.
It was ugly, and we’ll be dealing with the fallout for years to come. Maybe you had a loved one die pathetically alone in a hospital as a result of insane visitation policies. Maybe your kid still struggles from lost schooling. Maybe your business never quite recovered, or you’re running a new one now because lockdowns killed your old one.
We’re all certainly paying for the billions in fraudulent Covid-relief payments made as the Feds shoveled money at Americans to buy their patience with the lockdowns. We’re certainly all paying the price in inflation as the Biden administration borrowed trillions for that relief, inflation that peaked at 19% during his term, permanently resetting prices.
I’m stumped at how to quantify the psychic pain that came from learning just how many of our friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues turned out to be East German at heart — eager secret policemen, dropping a dime on curfew violators, wishing death upon the unmasked or the unvaccinated. There’s a thing you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it, and one can't help but wonder, did that part of them ever really go away or are they just waiting for the next excuse to go after people they don't like?
No one, anywhere, who brought all this about has ever been held to account.
Fauci would be a good start.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
