In recent weeks accusations against Doctor Anthony Fauci pertaining to the origins of COVID-19, pandemic lockdowns, and financial disclosures are making big headlines. The main accusations come from Republican lawmakers and particularly Senator Rand Paul who claims Doctor Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022 supported dangerous coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, China, and suppressed the lab-leak theory. Other accusations claim Doctor Fauci privately pushed for school and business shutdowns early on while publicly downplaying his involvement in those mandates. It has been also said that Doctor Fauci used government staff time to apply for lucrative cash honors and awards himself.
María Cristina Rosas, a professor and researcher in the faculty of political and social sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
One may remember that Doctor Fauci served as the Chief Medical Advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022 amidst the SARS-CoV2 pandemic where the United States was the worst hit country in the entire world. With 103 436 829 confirmed cases of COVID-19 -almost a third of US population- and over 1. 1 million deaths as of April 26, 2023, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is a political need to blame somebody. After all the handling of the pandemic prevented Donald Trump from being immediately re-elected. But, why blame Doctor Fauci now?
As one may remember during the first months of the pandemic Donald Trump undercut his own intelligence agencies by suggesting he has seen evidence coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory -more specifically in Wuhan. At that moment, the US intelligence agencies were cautious about how the virus began but there was a preliminary consensus that it was not man mad, neither a bioweapon as Trump suggested. Then he made several forecasts pertaining to how long the virus would last, when the pandemic would end and such. Readers may remember Trump saying at the beginning of the pandemic that COVID-19 would end in a couple of months or sometime during the summer. He challenged different states like New York about the best way to stop the virus from spreading. In April 23, 2020, Trump speculated about the possibility of an injection into the human body to treat COVID-19. His specific comments followed a presentation by a Department of Homeland Security official regarding how bleach and isopropyl alcohol can quickly kill the virus on surfaces and in saliva. The exact words of Donald Trump were “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that.” The cameras and media showed Doctor Fauci, present on that occasion, in distress as the President spoke.
Of course, many memes followed showing Trump drinking “Lysol.” Despite not mentioning "Lysol" by name, the President's comments on introducing disinfectants into the body triggered warnings from medical professionals and manufacturers. Reckitt Benckiser, the owner of Lysol, issued a statement advising that their products should never be injected, ingested, or used internally. Common sense indicates that disinfectants cannot be ingested but the New York City Poison Control Center managed 30 chemical exposure cases within 18 hours of the Donald Trump briefing—more than double the rate from the same period the previous year. Happily none resulted in hospitalizations or death.
Now: as for the origins of SARS-CoV2 is concerned, WHO and its Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) have concluded that the weight of available evidence suggests a natural animal-to-human (zoonotic) spillover, though a definitive final answer remains out of reach due to missing data. This supports the natural origin over the bioweapon coverup theory, which is not satisfactory for the Donald Trump administration that instead has decided to leave the international organization. Trump claims WHO has been acting as the public relations office of China.
Relations between the US and China have rapidly deteriorated under the two Donald Trump administrations -although the Biden administration was also punitive against China, mostly on trade and human rights issues. Because the size of the Chinese economy plus the existing interdependence with the US economy makes very hard for Washington to punish the Asian giant without hurting itself, the conspiracy theories on the origins of SARS-CoV2 seem to be part of the plan of the veteran Republican to secure support from voters at the forthcoming legislative elections in November.
During the second term of Donald Trump there has been a continuous attack on science and education. The fact that a well-known anti-vaccines individual like Robert Kennedy Jr. lead the Department of Health and Human Services is part of this trend. Although vaccines have made possible to extend the lives of millions of peoples by fighting a number of very serious diseases, there is a global anti-vaccine movement that has contributed to the resurgence of preventable diseases like measles, to ferine, polio, scarlet fever, mumps and others. This, together with new diseases plus the so-called life-style diseases -like diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer and other- shows health is rapidly deteriorating all over the world since science is being left behind by several governments. Societies tend to forget -and fake news play a prominent role here- that vaccines have side-effects bur generally these are less serious than the diseases they are fighting -an exception could be the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and its rare link to a severe condition involving blood clots and low blood platelet counts, known as Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) or VITT, which is the reason the company withdrew the vaccine worldwide. Do not forget COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use due to the urgency to face the pandemic. Now COVID-19 treatments are much more reliable, and the mRNA vaccines seem to be a revolutionary technology that may be applied against other diseases.
Now concerns on biosecurity are valid, but probably not as the Donald Trump administration and Senator Rand Paul put it. In fact, the US has experienced several biosecurity episodes on its own territory such as the 1984 Rajneeshee Salmonella Attack when members of a commune intentionally contaminated local salad bars in Oregon with Salmonella, sickening 751 people in one of the largest domestic bioterror event, apparently to prevent people from going to the polls so that Rajneeshee candidates win the county elections. Then in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, envelopes laced with Bacillus anthracis spores were mailed to media offices and US Senators, killing 5 people, infecting 22 total, and causing widespread panic. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suffered multiple internal safety failures when live anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials were improperly handled or shipped, prompting temporary lab closures. Worse: a US military lab inadvertently distributed live anthrax strains to nearly 200 external laboratories over a span of 12 years rather than inactivated samples. Those are real biosecurity concerns, but most cases have not been properly investigated and, in the case of the post 9/11 anthracis spores many doubts remain about Doctor Bruce Ivins involvement. Ivins was a senior biodefense researcher but the case against him relied heavily on circumstantial and genetic matching, with some colleagues questioning whether he had the capability or equipment to process the dry-powder form used in the letters.
Today, Doctor Fauci's demonization shows how lost America is on public health. A quick look at Robert Kennedy’ Jr.’s handling of public health shows remarkable differences between him and Doctor Fauci. The former has dismantled the Health and Human Services department by firing longtime public health experts, overseeing the greatest surge of measles cases in recent American memory, the poor handling of the current Cyclospora diarrhea debacle and prohibiting the purchase of vaccines against avian influenza and seasonal flu. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advanced the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) agenda. While supporters praise his focus on nutrition and chronic disease, major medical organizations and public health groups criticize his actions—including rolling back vaccine policies, restructuring public health agencies, and promoting unproven medical claims—as harmful to public health.
Kennedy Jr. slashed portions of federal childhood immunization schedules and issued more restrictive guidance on COVID-19 boosters, excluding groups like healthy pregnant women. He even dismissed independent members of the CDC vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with figures known for vaccine skepticism. Not only that: he halted or canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for mRNA vaccine and infectious disease prevention research… In short: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science agenda has been “a wrecking ball” for US public health that endangers American lives. It is like going back to the Middle Age!
Compared to Robert Kenndy Jr. -who, by the way is not a physician, but a conspiracy theorist- Doctor Fauci has championed the US health time and again. He led the United States through the HIV and Ebola pandemics and brought that same science-centered work ethic to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. Through his actions and recommendations, he, in fact, prevented the number of casualties from being even higher. Had Robert Kennedy Jr. overseen the response to the COVID-19 pandemic the country would have experienced a much worse health crisis.
The most regrettable consequence of the witch hunt against Doctor Fauci is the preparedness for coming pandemics. SARS-CoV2 was not the first nor the last pandemic of the 21st century. But apparently Donald Trump intends to re write the story of his role during the COVID-19 pandemic to exonerate himself from his much-known mistakes. Putting Doctor Fauci behind bars will not erase the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by Trump but will certainly Make America Sicker Again.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by María Cristina Rosas, a professor and researcher in the faculty of political and social sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. The column appears in The Rio Grande Guardian International News Service with the permission of the author. Rosas can be reached via email at: mcrosas@prodigy.net.mx
