This week’s Real Time with Bill Maher comedy-and-news bit takes up Rand Paul’s jihad against Anthony Fauci, which includes Paul’s publishing Fauci’s personal diary, which showed Fauci basking in his celebrity.
Maher concludes that Fauci is, at the same time, “an esteemed, dedicated public servant” and a “vain, flawed bureaucrat”. As Maher notes, Fauci got some stuff wrong, but was not deliberately lying; as Maher says, “science is complicated.” And I agree with Maher that “we should not call people criminals for just the part they got wrong.”
Yes, Fauci did pressure scientists to publish a “wet market” conclusion about the origin of covid, but its origin is irrelevant to how the pandemic should have been handled. But Fauci nevertheless fell prey, as did Trump, to the addiction to worship that comes with fame. In fact, Maher plays a game, giving quotes from either Trump or Fauci’s diary and asking the viewer to decide “who said it.” Maher gets a dig at “progressives,” noting that Julia Roberts called Fauci “Jesus with a Petri dixh.”
But in the end Maher concludes that Fauci put in a lot of service to the country, but was not a criminal, even though the adulation he received might have made him more dogmatic. It’s sad that Fauci became seduced by celebrity, but he’s human and that’s a human tendency.
The guests shown are journalists Tara Palmeri and Matt Welch.
There is a lot of wisdom in Maher’s commentary. I was taken in by Fauci. My father succumbed to COVID and I had to say goodbye via Facetime. I suspected Fauci’s deceit after he vouched for the efficacy of masks when in the early days he said they wouldn’t do much good.
Still, I was appalled when Sen. Paul released Fauci’s personal diary. Privacy matters. The contempt charge is equally appalling. The Fifth Amendment matters too.
I’m terribly sorry about your father. That must have been hell to go through.
Since covid has morphed into the equivalent of a bad cold, it’s hard to remember how lethal it could be in the early days.
Here’s something I just read about this exact perspective. My family was fortunate not to get Covid until it became less dangerous, but that doesn’t mean our reaction at the time was illogical.
https://substack.com/@thewellnesstherapist/note/c-304430975?r=4ciwk&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Is there an expectation of privacy for a diary written on government computers?
I was disappointed by Maher on this. Fauci’s ego is irrelevant to the only important questions, which are about responses to the pandemic and the efficacy of vaccines.
Maher trumpets Sweden and Florida, but ignores that the rest of the world pretty much did the same as Fauci recommended for the US. Are any other countries trying to rewrite history to pretend none of that was necessary and herd immunity would have been just fine? No. They recognize that, draconian as it was, it was probably the course that resulted in the least deaths. No one seems to remember that 4 million people still died of the disease.
Masks and social distancing very obviously were effective in reducing transmission, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. The spikes in infection that followed unmasked, undistanced gatherings is evidence enough of that, even without applying common sense.
Vaccines do indeed protect even people who have had Covid: strains vary constantly, which is why, like flu shots, we now get annual boosters covering the latest strains. Vaccination also ensures that, when people do get Covid, it’s much less severe and very rarely life-threatening.
More generally, I didn’t get any sense of Maher’s awareness that in early 2020, when the precise characteristics of Covid were unknown, the closest parallel we had to it was the Spanish flu, which killed up to 100 million people, so an abundance of caution was very much justified. It’s easy to be blasé in retrospect, but if everyone had said “we’ll just let herd immunity take care of it” and 100 million had died from Covid instead of “only” 4 million, the people advocating that would be the ones now on trial, and rightly so.
I think it is likely that the worldwide number of covid deaths is undercounted. Some governments didn’t want to admit the true tally as it would make them look bad, in India for example, and perhaps in China too. In other undeveloped countries there was probably a lack of systems to accurately assess and record causes of death.
Even in red areas of the US, there was a reluctance to list covid as cause of death.
Probably not 100 million, but likely more than 4 million.
I defended Fauci on Twitter/X yesterday – pretty much as Bill Maher does here – and I’ve never received so much hate mail!
D.A.
NYC
Considering the platform and its denizens, that would be expected.
From what I know at this time, Fauci did the best that he could with the information available to him the stem the pandemic. Masks and isolation are classic responses to reduce disease spread, and the vaccinations were a heroic effort to do the same. The flaw in his work, as far as I can see, was the fact that the medical community ignored the (relatively rare) side effects of the vaccines in vulnerable populations. How much of that can be attributed to Fauci is not known—nor can it be.
Fauci’s scientific achievements ensure his reputation in the biomedical community. In addition, he was a very good administrator. I think that the biomedical community and the country owes him a lot.
all the same, his diaries show that he succumbed to love of the limelight and being the center of attention. In my opinion, that is a personality flaw, but when weighed against his very real contributions, that does not outweigh the good that he has done.
Rand Paul is doing Fauci, the biomedical and epidemiological communities, and the country a great disservice. His role in this matter will be recorded as a great shame. I don’t know how it will go down in political history, given the role of disinformation and social media. But in the research and medical histories, when the books are written, I think that he will go down as the same type of villain as those who ignored epidemiological evidence in the influenza epidemics in the early 20th century.
Just my opinion, based on the information that I have at this time.
Well, you know The Science must have done something right since the flu virtually disappeared during the pandemic. The masks and social distancing were just that effective, can you believe it? Mask on/mask off in restaurants and the recommended double goggles worked like a charm.
I didn’t see much social distancing during the BLM protests – at least in the footage I saw. I thought it ironic at the time that police were going after individuals who went surfing alone whereas thousands marching in the streets together chanting BLM slogans was considered OK.
Yes, a Bill Maher level of irony. And now the party that was on the receiving end of lawfare for the last decade or so has turned that weapon on the other party and on anyone who angers our Emperor Wantabee or members of the imperial Senate. We are living in the land of Irony.
As it appears the nation is relitigating COVID partisanship and misinformation, this recent Substack post by political scientist Rachel Bitcofer may be of interest. Striking infographics.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecycle/p/grandpa-rodgers-is-still-wrong-about?r=a4v1r&utm_medium=ios
You should tell people what the message is you are trying to convey.
I would love to see historical data for all the Earth that list mortality vs. population density and other factors, throughout the pandemic. I was frustrated no end with statistics on various websites showing death numbers per country or province, when it was obvious that there are incomparable sizes of population affected, differing policies, different access to supplies (starting with masks), different vaccine availability etc. Even the willingness and ability to wash hands PROPERLY depends on so many things.
I think the U.S. was complicit in funding the gain of function research in Wuhan that led to the pandemic, and I think that Fauci signed off on it. That is the reason he wanted a pardon going back to 2014.
I am unaware of Tony Fauci asking for a pardon from Biden. Fauci explicitly denied that he did.
Maher intimated that people in Colorado continue to wear masks to prevent COVID. Does he consider that maybe, just maybe, folks now do so because of breathing the rampant bad air from the major fires taking place out west?
It’s possible, I suppose, but we just don’t know.
As a nurse working during COVID – I don’t get where Bill thinks anyone ever said “If you get the vaccine you won’t get COVID”. The idea with that vaccine (and with most vaccines which are almost never 100% protective) is that if you get the vaccine you reduce your risk of either dying or requiring hospitalization to survive COVID. And it worked! Most hospitals had to convert other floors to COVID floors (because people couldnt breathe). Good luck if you had a heart attack – the hospital was full!!! Morgues in NYC couldnt handle all the dead bodies so refrigerator trucks were brought in. Where do you get off reading from Fauci’s diary (this is not meant for public review!) as if these are comments he meant others to hear. It just proves he’s human – duh. If you didnt work in healthcare during the pandemic you don’t know what you are talking about. There was a time we absolutely needed masks. There was also a time in the beginning when no one knew the way the virus was spread. It took time to understand it. No surprise. You need to admit that you were wrong about telling people not to mask. Sure we don’t need to do it now but if I am coughing I am going to wear a mask when I am around patients (wouldn’t you want me to do that if I am around you?)
Herd immunity is a combination of natural and vaccine immunity. In Sweden many more people (percentage wise – 30% higher over 30 months) died during COVID compared to Norway (which pretty much paralleled our COVID recommendations). Stop pushing your uninformed COVID narrative!
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