Anthony Fauci, COVID, HIV, MD/PhD . . .

In retirement, Anthony Fauci has offered lessons to be learned from his own understanding of COVID and HIV [1].

That brought me a renewed attack of intense frustration over the continuing global blunder about HIV; and reinforces some other matters that I have written about often, in particular that MD degrees constitute no education or training at all for doing research.

Fauci’s new opinion piece repeats some of the lessons purportedly to be learned from his experience of COVID-19 [2] and adds further evidence of dangerous misunderstandings on the part of Fauci himself.

Interestingly, the earlier set of lessons included an item (#2) that is not repeated now: “2. Early, rapid, and aggressive action is critical in implementing public health interventions and countermeasure development”.

Whether intentionally or not, this omission underscores that Fauci’s advice as to COVID had been too hasty, and turned out to be counter-productive in fostering and mandating ineffective and damaging masking, distancing, extreme social isolation, lock-downs.

The now-available data show that, in terms of per-capita death-toll [3], the United States, with 3642 COVID-attributed deaths per/million population, performed worse than other First-World nations: lower were, for example even Russia (2762) as well as UK (3389), Italy (3261), France (2556), Germany (2182), Canada (1538), Netherlands (1336), and all Scandinavian countries including Sweden (2682), which latter had been much criticized for leaving schools open and not mandating masking or distancing. A few countries even did far better: New Zealand (1163), Australia (937), Japan (595). Those last few may have been helped by island status; and other influential factors may have been universally free health-care; but the only countries reported with higher death-rates than USA were Peru (6595), Bulgaria (5661), Hungary (5106), Bosnia (5044) — although varying accuracies of counting and categorizing probably means that none of those numbers should be accepted beyond two significant figures (at best).

However, no less serious than death rates was the effect of United States mandates that brought serious harm to children who missed a couple of years of normal learning [4a, 4b], and to the many small businesses that were unable to survive [5].

So perhaps the new set of lessons is offered in hopes that the earlier version with its item 2 might be forgotten. But now including HIV is no improvement at all, since Fauci’s part in that is nothing to boast about either, to put it at its mildest.

At any rate, the offered lessons are hardly original or significant:

“Expect the Unexpected” (Lesson One) seems good advice, but equally applicable in every aspect of life, a banality that might well, indeed appropriately, have been explicitly acknowledged as such. One might add that the more one knows and understands, the less frequently will one be caught off guard.

Lesson Two, “With Pandemics, Political Leadership at the Highest Level is Critical”, is similarly applicable In any number of different circumstances. As it happens, though, both technical and political leaderships made matters worse rather than better with both COVID and HIV.

Lesson Three, “Prior Scientific Advances are the Foundation of Successful Pandemic Preparedness and Response”, continues the stating of obvious banalities: after all, it always helps when one happens to understand the realities of what is involved in what one is doing.

Lesson Four, “Misinformation and Disinformation Are Universal Enemies of Pandemic Control”, again continues saying what ought not to need saying; surely it is obvious that misinformation and disinformation are harmful in any and every context.

Lesson Five, “Increased Attention to the Human/Animal Interface is Critical for Pandemic Prevention”, makes obvious sense — but one should also not overlook the possibility of a pandemic being caused by something other than a pathogen transferred to humans from animals.

Lesson Six, “Inequities, Health Disparities, Stigma, and Discrimination are Amplified in Pandemic Settings”, is the politically-correct virtue-signaling that has become so routine in public discourse. Every form of stress inevitably amplifies existing inequities and disparities, and that once more should need no saying.

Lesson Seven, “Community Activism and Engagement are Critical in Pandemic Responses”, deserves to be argued against. Community activism and engagement can indeed be useful, but only if what the activists know is accurate and if what they want is feasible. Neither was the case with HIV.

Lesson Eight, “Emerging Infectious Diseases are a Perpetual Challenge”, is obviously a matter of opinion, described here explicitly as an extrapolation from past history. Such extrapolations are not inevitably sound, however; and for practical purposes one might want to estimate the dangers from this particular perpetual challenge as compared to the dangers from other serious challenges facing modern civilization.

To cite the basis for my assertions and assumptions in the foregoing:

HIV “pandemic”:
Lloyd Billingsley [6] had already pointed out that “HIV” was in no way a pandemic: “AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) or HIV/AIDS fails to qualify as a pandemic. Dr. Fauci once contended that AIDS could be spread by simple family contact and would ravage the general population. As it turned out, the syndrome never moved beyond male homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and intravenous drug users in any significant measure. As with COVID, the origin of AIDS was a matter of dispute.”
Furthermore, HIV may not even exist. So-called “isolates” of it are revealed by electron microscopy to be mixtures of a variety of larger and smaller entities. As De Harven pointed out, “HIV” is likely pieces of human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) released under conditions of physiological stress as cells rupture and decompose. The “HIV antibody” test is actually a test of physiological stress; it was derived from reactivity against sera from AIDS patients, in other words seriously ill individuals. The very presence of a retrovirus in sera from AIDS victims had been merely presumed because of the presence of reverse transcriptase, before it had been known that this enzyme is found in all normal cells. For sources of these statements, see the books, chapters, and >900 articles organized by individual specific substantive points in “The case against HIV” [7].
Part III of my book about AIDS [8] details at length (pp. 183-250) “How HIV/AIDS Theory Took and Kept Hold”; here is a sort of summary from it (p. 211):
“After the U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services announced Gallo’s discovery of HIV as the probable cause of AIDS, researchers naturally used that as the basis when they sought support for work on viruses or vaccines or drugs. HIV/AIDS theory became accepted more or less by default. Epstein (1996) recounts that it became entrenched through repetition and rhetoric, not through science: in 1984 fewer than 4 percent of published articles displayed explicit and unqualified belief that HIV equals AIDS, but by 1986 more than 60 percent of all papers on the subject were firm about the connection, though no confirming discoveries had occurred. Similarly, Rodney Richards has traced how it became generally accepted, through rhetoric and not scientific discovery, that the presence of antibodies to HIV indicates active infection by HIV (Farber 2006b, appendix II, 333–40). Once established as an effective monopoly, HIV/AIDS theory was further entrenched because of its appeal to a range of vested interests, which could influence the gathering of data and which the media could accept as authoritative.”
Epstein 1996: Steven Epstein, Impure science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press.
Farber 2006b: Celia Farber, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS,
Melville House.

MD/PhD:
I’ve pointed out that “Doctors are not scientists” [9]; and in “Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci” [10] I tried to be kind to Fauci on the grounds that he had not been the one who ignored his lack of qualifications for the positions he was placed in; and that he behaved no worse than any other unqualified bureaucrat might have.
Billingsley has given further quite convincing details of Fauci’s lack of scientific qualifications or competence [11].
Of course, there are many people with (or perhaps despite) MD degrees who are keen observers, are properly familiar with the pertinent technical literature, and exercise critical judgment based on evidence of symptoms and treatment outcomes. Many such medically trained individuals joined with Rethinking AIDS in publicly debunking HIV/AIDS theory, and quite a few have successfully treated “HIV-positive” patients by diagnosing the specific actual problem. Many of the authors of critiques of misguided mainstream approaches [12] also have medical degrees (as well as, often, PhD or D.Sc. or the like).
Fauci unfortunately is not one of the MDs who can be described accurately as a “scientist”, with all that commonly implies.

Fauci will not help his legacy with publications like these “lessons”.

Not everyone will admit, as I did [10], that he is a human being like all others: fallible, sometimes doing damage even while trying to do good, rarely or never knowing everything that needed to be known.

Some other people — say, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will be overly critical and censorious [13] and apply the infamous Oliver-Cromwell words that Winston Churchill directed against Neville Chamberlain: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go” [14].

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[1] Anthony S. Fauci & Gregory K. Folkers, VIEWPOINTS ARTICLE: HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared lessons from two pandemics, Clinical Infectious Diseases, DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciae585

[2] Anthony S. Fauci & Gregory K. Folkers, INVITED PERSPECTIVE: Pandemic preparedness and response: Lessons from COVID-19, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 228 (2023) 422–5; https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiad095

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[4a] Megan Kuhfeld, Jim Soland, Karyn Lewis, & Emily Morton, The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?”, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/, 3 March 2022
“New data show how the pandemic affected learning across whole communities”; https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/05/new-data-show-how-pandemic-affected-learning-across-whole-communities, 11 May 2023

[4b] Professional College-applications counselor Helen Codron (Manhattan Beach, CA) has found that several recent cohorts of high-schoolers lack essential essay-writing skills [frequent personal communications, HC to HHB]

[5] COVID-19 was “a shock to America’s small firms that has little parallel since the Great Depression of the 1930s”; That’s quite a striking comparison!
Alexander W. Bartik, Marianne Bertrand, Zoe Cullen, Christopher Stanton et al., “The impact of COVID-19 on small business outcomes and expectations”, PNAS, 117 (30) 17656-17666; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006991117
A personal anecdote: I, together with many local residents, greatly regret the COVID-caused demise of The Homeplace, a highly popular and acclaimed family-run restaurant that for several decades had served large crowds at Catawba (near Roanoke, VA)

[6] Lloyd Billingsley, “Dr. Fauci Doubles Down: Former NIAID director now claims that AIDS, like COVID, was “zoonotic”, American Spectator, 31 December 2024; https://spectator.org/dr-fauci-doubles-down

[7] https://thecaseagainsthiv.net (October 2013, last updated December 2017)

[8] The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007

[9] https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/doctors-are-not-scientists (18 August 2024)

[10] https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained (24 August 2024)

[11] Lloyd Billingsley, “When Tony Met Kary”, American Spectator, 5 January 2021; https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-tony-met-kary-lloyd-billingsley

[12] Henry H. Bauer, What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine (last updated 29 October 2020); https://mega.nz/file/gWoCWTgK#1gwxo995AyYAcMTuwpvP40aaB3DuA5cvYjK11k3KKSU

[13] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Children’s Health Defense), The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Skyhorse, 2021

[14] Harry Sherrin, “‘In the Name of God, Go’: The Enduring Significance of Cromwell’s 1653 Quote”; https://www.historyhit.com/in-the-name-of-god-go-significance