AEIR: Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science

2021-12-19 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: AEIR, Dr Anthony Fauci, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus

re: COVID

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.

No interest from NIH, CDC, etc in following anything remotely resembling science.

See also: Who Will Be Held Responsible for this Devastation?

AEIR: Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science

2021-12-19

From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call the three of the scientists in attendance “fringe epidemiologists,” in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency. They were “fringe epidemiologists” because they had the temerity to ask whether the lockdowns of 2020 were effective. Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence.

They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.

So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins was clearly in no mood to replace his own possible ignorance with any kind of knowledge. He was pretty sure he knew all he had to know; and this is one of the most dangerous positions a scientist can take.

In an email obtained by AIER through a Freedom of Information Act request, Collins told Anthony Fauci, CCing Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH, that he wanted “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration’s premises.

One wonders why he would CC the Deputy Ethics Counselor on this, given the trouble these people seem to have with ethics...

...

Note that Fauci frequently portrays himself as a staunch defender of science who stays above the political divide and remains outside of partisan debates. In light of that, you might expect that Folker’s response to Fauci’s request would yield a small sample of scientific analysis on the logic behind lockdowns, even if only in a format bullet pointed by his staff. But you’d be wrong. Folkers sent Fauci a list of seven political op-eds and articles opposing the GBD from popular media outlets.

So yeah. Science.

WIND: follow the politics.