At Long Long Last: Farewell Lockdown Architect Anthony Fauci

Michael Senger and the Brownstone Institute

After more than five decades in the federal government, Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, has announced his resignation as of December to pursue “the next chapter” of his career.

Fauci first came to prominence during HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, in which he advocated for widespread use of the drug AZT, a practice later discontinued due to the drug’s extreme toxicity and deadly side effects including anemia and bone marrow toxicity. Fauci also pushed for the widespread application of PCR testing for diagnostic purposes, which was strongly opposed by Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR technology.

It had to come at some point, but Anthony Fauci, the highest paid employee in the American government today, is finally leaving his post as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post that enabled him to become the face of lockdowns and vaccine mandates that have left enormous economic, cultural, and health destruction in their wake.

He has never acknowledged the downside to the policies he pushed as advisor to both Trump and Biden, and still refuses even fully to admit his role. Nor has he been forthcoming about his role in the funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan. 

Has Fauci’s presence become a liability to the Biden administration and the Democrats generally? Perhaps but there is also the issue of book royalties that await him once leaving his post with government. The New York Times explains: “While he has been working on a memoir, Dr. Fauci said he did not yet have a publisher. In an interview last year, he said he was precluded from contracting with a publisher while he was still employed by the government.”

As Director of NIAID, Fauci amassed unprecedented power over the funding distributed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the initial weeks of Covid, Fauci secretly fretted that the virus may have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Jeremy Farrar—one of the leading voices behind lockdowns in the United Kingdom—recalled clandestinely discussing the possibility of a lab leak with Fauci and others.

During the response to Covid, Fauci was one of the “Trifecta” of three leading officials behind lockdowns in the United States. Fauci’s emails reveal that he’d been inspired to adopt lockdowns as national policy due to the conversations he’d had with New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, an early advocate of strict lockdowns in the Times. 

McNeil had been very impressed with the Chinese Communist Party’s lockdown of Wuhan, China, and expressed great admiration for WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward, who’d instructed the world: “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this.” Fauci had been in constant contact with McNeil, and as McNeil wrote to him regarding China’s lockdowns:

In China, we in the media tend to report the horrors and the lockdown and the government’s early lies… But the truth is that a lot of average Chinese behaved incredibly heroically in the face of the virus… Meanwhile, in America, people tend to act like selfish pigs interested only in saving themselves.

“You make some very good points Donald,” Fauci replied.

Fauci’s pro-lockdown sentiment ran contrary to the instincts of President Donald Trump. Thus, he planned for the White House to merely encourage lockdown rules which governors could then mandate. As former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator recalls in her book:

The White House would “encourage,” but the states could “recommend” or, if needed, “mandate.” In short, we were handing governors and their public health officials a template, a state-level permission slip they could use to enact a specific response that was appropriate for the people under their jurisdiction. The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.

When Trump announced “15 days to slow the spread,” encouraging those who were sick, elderly, or had underlying health conditions to stay home, Fauci encouraged Americans to read the “small print.” The “small print” encouraged governors to implement full lockdowns:

School operations can accelerate the spread of the coronavirus. Governors of states with evidence of community transmission should close schools in affected and surrounding areas. Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission, even if those areas are in neighboring states. In addition, state and local officials should close schools where coronavirus has been identified in the population associated with the school. States and localities that close schools need to address childcare needs of critical responders, as well as the nutritional needs of children… In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.

Both factors could explain the decision. He will wait for his final departure until after the November election. 

No one person in the US government was as influential as Fauci in pushing the Trump administration toward locking down the country as testing results revealed the spread of the virus that causes Covid. From late January through March 2020, he was in constant consultation with others about the virus and the possibility that it could have come from a lab in Wuhan, China, with which he had developed ties through intermediaries such as Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. 

Fauci initially wrote to reporters that no vaccine would be necessary. On March 2, 2020, David Gerson of the Washington Post wrote asking about the point of social distancing. Fauci wrote back:

“Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine. The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), work places (do teleworking where possible)…. The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”

Those were his beliefs two weeks ahead of the lockdowns. It’s a remarkable email not only because it reveals that Fauci was not among the champions of the vaccine but also because he believed that lockdown policies would stop the spread and even eviscerate the virus itself. 

That position puts Fauci in the camp of what later became known as the Zero Covid movement that so completely drove policy in China, New Zealand, and Australia. It did not work, there or here or anywhere. 

The email also shows that Fauci had no interest in the power of naturally acquired immunity that even the CDC now admits contributed to the end of the pandemic. The vaccines that Fauci later came to champion stopped neither infection nor spread, contrary to his promise, so it stands to reason that the end of the pandemic comes about by the very forces that he ruled out in his initial emails. To him, the lockdowns alone would somehow work to end the pandemic. Nowhere on the planet has that proven true. 

Fauci stayed on after the Trump administration left office, having likely pushed trial delays that caused the vaccine release to appear only after the election. He then became the leading pusher of mask and vaccine mandates, and later boosters on a regular schedule as the key to getting out of the pandemic. 

He was the subject of a documentary profile in 2021 that garnered praise from critics and rotten tomatoes from audiences. 

Fauci’s influence over Covid policy follows decades of work in the federal government during which he acquired enormous influence over the use of money dispersed by the National Institutes of Health. He will likely be called by a Republican Congress to testify on many mysterious aspects of his tenure. The publisher of his forthcoming book surely hopes it will be an international bestseller, and Fauci will face no restrictions in taking an advance on the earning of royalties from sales. 

---

This piece is a merger of two separate stories from the Brownstone Institute, the world's leading academic body challenging the government driven Covid narrative.

To read the original stories in full: