Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is 80, has had an extraordinary career. As the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he has both engaged in and supervised a remarkable range of research including HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. One of his sharpest and most aggressive critics about the AIDS crisis, Larry Kramer, ended up saying Dr. Fauci was “the only true and great hero” among the government researchers trying to find a cure for HIV. Fauci himself has said “my career and my identity has really been defined by HIV.”
Dr. Fauci has been a leading researcher saving lives and a leading health administrator spending billions of taxpayer dollars on groundbreaking studies. The most recent NIAID budget is $6.1 billion, and Fauci has been administering that budget since 1984 (37 years).
The fact is: Dr. Fauci was one of the most effective, indeed brilliant medical researchers of the last century. However, he is now so absorbed in defending the indefensible that he can best serve the country by stepping down.
Dr. Fauci forecast his own problems in an Oct. 9, 2012 article in the American Society for Microbiology. Written in true scientific fashion, the average citizen is unlikely to read a short study entitled “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward.”
This article from nearly nine years ago predicted the kind of problem that might be posed by scientific research on a dangerous, highly contagious virus that could potentially spread rapidly as a pandemic with devastating consequences.
The scientific community had already recognized that researching potential pandemic creating viruses was a dangerous process. In fact, Dr. Fauci was writing during a moratorium on this kind of research imposed by the researchers themselves.
His comments add up to a tragic forecast of what was not done, and a condemnation of the path taken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—even though Fauci and his team were supposedly monitoring and funding the Chinese lab.
In his 2012 paper, Fauci warned:
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario— however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?”
