One of the first tasks for the new Congress must be resetting our nation’s pandemic response effort.
While now ex-director Anthony Fauci claimed he was “the science” and all of his decisions were based on science, that was far from the truth.
Dr. Marty Makary, professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explains how Dr. Fauci’s infectious disease institute massively failed in expediting research that could have better guided the nation’s COVID response.
“The NIH moved at glacial speed” in approving research grants, Makary writes in Newsweek. With a $6 billion (with a “b”) budget to work with, Fauci spent most of his time doing hundreds and hundreds of media interviews while researchers pleaded for funding. Even after a decision was made to award a grant, it took on average five months for the NIH to cut the check—all while countless lives and livelihoods were being lost in the pandemic.
Even though Fauci’s job description says the director must “respond rapidly to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases,” he “failed to pivot its mammoth research infrastructure to give doctors and policymakers the medical evidence they needed at a critical time. In the absence of evidence, dogma ruled the day,” Makary writes.
Masking children. Multiple vaxes for children least at risk of catching, spreading, or becoming seriously ill from COVID. Shutting down schools causing massive damage to children. Silencing doctors who offered alternative treatments.
“Physicians have told me privately,” Makary writes, “they were afraid to disagree with Dr. Fauci because their entire career is dependent on NIH funding.” Thousands of doctors and scientists at the NIH, FDA, and CDC were not allowed to speak to the media while Fauci and a few other agency leaders conveyed the “establishment narrative.”
“We are now learning—through the Twitter files—that U.S. health agencies pushed for the censorship of opposing opinions from top scientists at top institutions.” This medical censorship is now being enshrined in law in California calling for physicians to be disciplined if they disseminate information that departs from the “contemporary scientific consensus.”
Only now are NIH-funded studies starting to trickle out showing Vitamin D and steroids reduce COVID mortality significantly. And a year and a half after the world started disinfecting surfaces as Fauci opined that was a likely way for virus to spread, an NIH study said, actually no, the disease is airborne.
“The NIH spent almost $1.2 billion on long COVID research, but virtually nothing on masks, natural immunity, COVID in children, or vaccine complications,” he writes. The NIH spent twice as much on traditional aging research in the first year of the pandemic as it did on Covid.
And yet, some people still want to turn our whole health care system over to the government?
Fauci is gone, but the problem with misspent, delayed, and politically motivated government funding of research continues. The agency is broken. The House is expected to conduct oversight hearings and push for reforms—not a moment too soon.