Category Archives: Health

Anthony Fauci

Jim Meigs reviews his book:

Anthony Fauci, whose early career did so much to improve human health, leaves behind a tainted legacy. He and his colleagues abused their authority, overreached on lockdowns and vaccine policies, and dissembled about dangerous research that his agency funded. The populist backlash to these excesses is still building. The public’s growing distrust of medical experts—and new skepticism toward all vaccines—is a public-health timebomb.

It is tempting to attribute Fauci’s late-career lapses to some personal moral deficiency. I think that’s the wrong tack. Fauci’s ethical shortcomings weren’t personal so much as institutional; he had been given enormous authority while being almost completely insulated from political oversight. Even the president could not easily fire him. And his centralized control over massive research budgets meant that few scientists were willing to challenge his claims or policies.

Over the decades, Fauci came to see himself as infallible. He represented “science.” Instead of welcoming contrary views, as he did during the AIDS years, the older, more thin-skinned (and more institutionally entrenched) Fauci resented criticism and tried to silence dissent. If not for the persistent pushback from a few bold scientists, journalists, and lawmakers, he might have succeeded in shutting down crucial debates entirely. No federal official should have so much power, with so little accountability, for so long.

Few people have the probity to withstand the temptations of that kind of power.

Coffee

Yet another study on its supposed benefits.

They lose me right off the bat when they compare it to the “benefits” of the Mediterranean diet. I don’t think there is any value at all in restricting red meat and fat intake.

Anyway, I suspect that even if the correlation is causation, it’s not clear that it will work for everyone. If coffee has no discernible effect on me (which it doesn’t) other than making me brush my teeth more to get rid of the foul aftertaste, then it seems unlikely that I will derive any health benefits from choking the swill down.

The Stanford Internet Observatory

Good riddance.

A recent House Judiciary Committee report alleges that, by cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security, the SIO’s Election Integrity Partnership “provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”

Of course it did.

The Fauci Covid Conspiracy

Jim Meigs describes the sordid history:

…our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.

But not everyone joined the lockstep march on Covid. Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, along with two other public health experts, issued the Great Barrington Declaration. It sensibly argued that the social costs of extended lockdowns far exceeded their mostly hypothetical benefits. The Great Barrington argument was derided in the press and secretly censored on social media at the behest of government officials.

And no one has been held accountable, even at the polls. At a minimum, Fauci should be indicted for perjury to Congress, though that’s hardly the worst of his sins. But nothing will happen to him until we get an Attorney General who cares about the law and the Constitution.