perhaps if he had quit in March 2020 when Trump's reptilian sycophants had tried censoring mortality rates, people would have known the truth. But then again, would anyone who is actually against totalitarianism ever be promoted to that position? People who have morals wouldn't even get hired
Idk why he's hated here but i can tell you why I hate him.
Lied about masking working at the very beginning, losing whatever credibility he had, which undercut all future efforts
Refused to stand up to trump, thus lending his legitimacy to them
Has always pushed a vaccine as a solution, ie the solution that threatens capital the least and gives them the profits
I wasn't alive yet but wasn't he in charge of the disastrous AIDS response?
There are plenty more I can't think of, so everyone please feel free to add on
He was responsible for issues in the AIDs response but then he listened to activists and was responsible for lots of AIDs research
I honestly think people are going too far with criticizing him on the masks thing. What he said at the time was not a lie, it was backed up by what we knew at the time. And what we knew is this:
1 - masks dont provide very good protection to the mask wearer. The purpose of masks is to protect other people from the mask wearer, if the mask wearer is infected
2 - people didnt yet, and many still dont, understand that. They think putting a mask on protects yourself.
4 - Early on in the pandemic, it wasn't yet known that a large portion of infected people were asymptomatic, and that asymptomatic people were still infectious
5 - the US was facing such a severe shortage of masks in those early weeks, that they literally went to the manufacturers in Asia and offered to pay extra to buy shipments of masks that other countries had already ordered. They outbided other countries in order to jump ahead in the line. In other cases, US based mask producing companies were ordered to cancel all shipments to other countries and redirect all masks to the US instead. (These masks were made in Asia of course)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52161995
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-masks-idUSKBN21L253
Putting all that together, you're left with this reasoning
"Mask wearing by healthy people doesnt protect the wearer from infection, (even though people think it does) and since we are facing a mass shortage of masks that will be needed for medical use, we should probably go out and tell people that theres no need to hoard masks."
So fauci went and said this
Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
LaPook: And can you get some schmutz, sort of staying inside there?
Fauci: Of course, of course. But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks — that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine.
LaPook: But it can lead to a shortage of masks?
Fauci: Exactly, that’s the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.
Which, is not a lie. It's the best info we had at the time. This is literally just how science works. We don't go around and say that early astronomers who said that the orbits of the planets were circular are lying because we now know that they are elliptical. They were saying the truth to the best extent that they knew at the time.
If I'm missing something here or have my info messed up I'm willing to listen.
As for not quitting, I cant imagine that we'd be better off if he had. Trump likely would have replaced him with some sycophant that would have told people to take hydroxychloroquine
Even granting that Trump may have picked worse, okay fine.
But he should not have accepted a position in the Biden admin and cited his own failure with the initial response. He doesnt need to be there, America is a country full of talented epidemiologists that can do just as good a job and in my opinion much fucking better than this ghoul.
I simply do not understand these statements. Why does it matter if it protects one person or the other? If everyone (or more realistically, a majority) wore a mask, would it not protect everyone wearing it? It’s a respiratory disease. You don’t need to be a PHD expert to understand it infects you from breathing it in
I prefer going by what the scientific evidence shows, not what people who are not PHD experts think. It might seem intuitive that mask-wearing by uninfected people helps keep them from getting sick, but there is a lack of good evidence showing that to be true.
For example, look at this document about pandemic preparedness that was put together by the Canadian government in 2018. if tldr look at the bolded portions. (This quote is from section 3.5.1.5)
Little evidence exists as to how effectively the wearing of a mask by well individuals will prevent them from becoming infected Footnote87, Footnote88 However, mask use by well individuals, in combination with other protective measures, might be beneficial in certain situations (e.g., when high-risk individuals must be in crowded settings or for well parents caring for ill children at home).
For masks to be effective, individuals must wear them consistently and correctly; these actions can be challenging. Masks must be worn only once, never shared and always changed when soiled or wet. If not used properly, masks may lead to a greater risk of pandemic influenza transmission because of contamination, or they may make the user overconfident and hence neglectful of other personal protective measures such as hand hygiene, respiratory etiquette and self-isolation when illFootnote89 – measures that have been deemed important complementary actions to the use of masks for the reduction of disease transmission.Footnote90 Finally, given that masks cannot be used when eating and drinking and may make communication difficult, wearing them for prolonged periods may be impractical and ineffective. It is important to present the limitations of mask use to the public.Footnote91 Advice on proper disposal of used masks should accompany any recommendations for their use in the community setting.
Providing masks to well people is unlikely to be feasible or sustainable on a population basis in a pandemic and may not be an appropriate use of public resources since little evidence exists regarding their effectiveness in reducing the spread of disease in the general population.
Notice something here? It sounds quite similar to what Fauci said in March, doesn't it? That's because Fauci isn't an idiot and he wasn't lying.
Now, because we know that symptomatic spread is such a problem, we've changed our approach to make universal masking a priority. That's a choice that came up in response to evidence that Fauci didn't have back in March.
As for how imperfect protection might be no better, as Fauci said, and as that Canadian document says, there's fear (justified imo) that mask-wearing encourages riskier behavior, neglect of other preventative measures, and face touching. And again, they wanted to prevent hoarding. If you know that evidence shows that mask-wearing provides paltry (if any) protection from infection to the wearer, and if there isn't good evidence of asymptomatic spread being a serious concern, why would you tell people that mask-wearing is so serious that you should def run out and buy some, or make their own?
Fauci like Canadian researchers ignored all the evidence from Asia that masks helped prevent spread covid. Plain and simple.
Doctors in Canada were spreading this lack of research about masks with such certainty to the point that it was obnoxious. Friends of mine in HK were mystified as to why we weren't being told to wear masks.
A top Chinese scientists warned the west that not wearing masks was a big mistake: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-protect-against-coronavirus-big-mistake-top-chinese-scientist-says
Reagan asshole. Did the whole "masks aren't needed" thing at the start. Proceeded to not quit to keep the media narrative credible for people less versed in science, but stayed on for his own ambitions masked in "oh i need to do this" so there was an easy flip-flop type narrative for people less versed in science to distrust all further info.
He was appointed by Reagon to be director of NIH, but he joined the NIH as a physician in the 60s. Idk if this position is a political appointment
I think most of it is a reaction to libs treating this guy like some legendary hero, when really he was just a stooge that stood in the background of press conferences while Trump lied and downplayed the virus. That sort of lends Fauchi's legitimacy to Trumps lies by not objecting to them.
Not that Trump wouldn't have just got someone else to do that if Fauchi quit.
"no need to wear a mask" --Fauci, March 2020
"it's safe to use the subways" -- Cuomo, March 2020
"the virus is nasty as hell" -- Trump in a leaked private conversation, Feb 2020
"I'm gonna sell my stocks because I know there's a crash coming" -- Senators, Jan-Feb 2020
I had an argument with my lib mom about this, I said Biden still hadnt opened the cages and let the kids out or had a plan to reunite those kids with their parents or caretakers. Instead hes been spending executive orders and Senate time on performative bullshit and trying to get peoples hopes down gently about stimulus and the vaccine.
Well, it's easy to criticize apparently and what would I do about? Me specifically. The only thing I could do as an individual is storm the fucking detention centers and kill whichever jackbooted thugs I could and open the cages myself or die trying - I dont think that's a particularily effective course of action but that's al I can do as an individual without collective action and a political mandate.
But no, thats evil. Those ice guards are "just following orders." We didnt even kill the low level Nazis for the nuremburg trials (a hint that the far superior method of killing and hanging the low level fucks was better). But seriously, if you're an ICE prison guard the only moral thing you could do is free those people surreptitiously or quit if you dont have the balls to do it. Anyone working there is immoral and an enemy of the people - what do we do with our enemies in an ongoing class war that we're losing? It isnt keep the camps open and forgive the big guy in charge on account of how much is on his plate.
And now the liberals everywhere defend this as "he was responding to a mask shortage, to prevent a run. We needed to save masks for health-care workers."
Which, first, just nationalize the fucking mask distribution holy shit. Second, you can just tell people to make their own masks? They even did that months afterwards.
But more to the point, even if this was absolutely true and justified and necessary and democracy is evil and people must never know the truth and you have to lie to the rubes for their own good, he has to resign by the libs' own stupid rules of narrative. You can't be both the guy that lies to people for their own good and the meritocratic authority in whom everyone has to trust. It's not some noble sacrifice, fall-on-your-sword-for-the-greater-good morally ambiguous choose-the-lesser-evil moment if you stay in your position of power and suffer no consequences for it.
I was happy about not having read his name in some days and then this thread reminded me that he exists.
