Looking at the long list of College of the Holy Cross alumni, many names pop out as being very accomplished individuals. Such names as Bob Cousey, a basketball great, Jon Favreau, an accomplished writer who worked as a speechwriter for President Obama, and Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Despite these well-accomplished people, one man stands in front as the pride of Holy Cross, that being Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President. Despite his de facto status as the pride of Holy Cross, he is the least deserving of the lot, advocating policies that infringe on the American people’s freedoms, like vaccine mandates, and lying to the American public, most nobly in the case of gain-of-function research and the NIH’s involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The name Anthony Fauci first entered the collective American vocabulary in the spring of 2020, when he came to be who Americans looked towards for information on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Students of Holy Cross, having just been sent home due to the pandemic, rallied behind Fauci in an effort to gain that connection to the school who’s campus that had just been separated from. Soon, the Instagram trend “Fauci Friday” gained traction, where students would photoshop Fauci into pictures of them and their friends from before the pandemic and put it on their Instagram stories. Unfortunately, Fauci has proved over his time being the face of the COVID-19 Pandemic that he is not a man who should be celebrated.
Since that time, Fauci has become less of a public health policy maker, and more of a talking head for the masses, appearing in interview after interview — some serious, many not — to the point where many on the Left have given him cult status, all while he collects his salary of $417,608 a year, the highest of any federal worker, including the president. It has become commonplace for merchandise to be sold with his face on it, like pillows or bobble heads. Of course one must ask, “What has he actually done to receive this much praise?” Some may point to his earlier work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic that was essential in many ways, for which he received the presidential medal of freedom. Of course, this should be commended, but in terms of his leadership during the COVID-19 Pandemic, it has been marred by bad policy, conflict, and lies.
First, concerning the policies that Fauci has espoused and approved of, many would point to his flip-flopping statements regarding both the danger of COVID-19 as well as his stance on masks as worthy of criticism. On both issues he changed his opinion in the first few months of the pandemic, but I would not point to this as a failure as others would. It is important to acknowledge that science is an ever-evolving field where the answers on which we once agreed as the truth are not always the ones we find to be true later. In this same vein though, vaccine skepticism is surely justified since science is ever evolving, and the vaccine being seen as beneficial by science now, might change in the future. I do not support anti-vaccine rhetoric, but the point is that science is not as cut in stone as the so-called “experts” make it out to be. It is reasonable to be suspicious of a new, somewhat rushed vaccine, under an administration which, before it took office, blasted the vaccine as untrustworthy. Despite this, Fauci still supports the overarching policy of vaccine mandates.
Fauci’s policies limit the freedom of Americans by supporting policies that compel them to have a substance that they find untrustworthy injected into them. Fauci would point to the idea that public health trumps freedom in this case, meaning that you may have skepticism about the vaccine, but by not taking the vaccine you run the risk of killing others through spreading the disease. This argument has very little merit though when one looks at the data comparing the deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated Americans. Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to the Biden administration on COVID-19, noted that 98% to 99% of those who died in May from COVID-19 were unvaccinated, and with a vaccine for which we have near universal access in America, excluding children for which the virus poses an extremely minimal threat, this leads to the conclusion that the unvaccinated do not pose a threat to the vaccinated. Why are we trying to save those who do not want to be saved? The United States is a nation constructed to stand against tyranny. This means that, in America, one should have the right to refuse a vaccine, as at this point in the pandemic, the only one that they stand to hurt is themselves. If they choose to risk their lives in this way, that is their choice, similar to how a smoker has the right to smoke, despite increasing his chance of cancer by huge margins.
Fauci’s policies may fly in the face of freedom, but the most disgraceful act that Fauci has undertaken in his time as America’s doctor are his actions related to the lies regarding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. In an exchange in May between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Fauci said that “We did not fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Wuhan, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is the theorized origin of the virus. Gain-of-function research is research that increases the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen, generally involving its transmissibility towards humans.
On October 20th, this claim was utterly debunked by the National Institute of Health (NIH), of which Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is a part, when they sent a letter to Congress admitting that gain-of-function research did occur in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The letter details that at least $600,000 was given to EcoHealth, an American-based group who used that money, along with researchers in Wuhan, to study bat coronaviruses. This completely contradicts Fauci’s categorical denial that this type of research occured, despite Fauci working under NIH.
The NIH blames the EcoHealth group, claiming that the appearance of a new highly contagious form of the coronavirus was not reported to them until August of this year. Either Fauci lied and the NIH revealed that lie; or Fauci had no clue what was occurring under the supervision of his own agency; or there is a much larger cover up, possibly involving the origins of COVID-19 and the United States government’s role in it. This comes after an increasing amount of skepticism whether the coronavirus lab leak theory is really as debunked as Fauci would like to make it seem.
Fauci has, time and again, decried the lab leak theory. And while the majority of government agencies still maintain either that the origin is uncertain or that it is natural (notably with self-reported low confidence), an increasing number of news organizations and even one US government intelligence agency has come to the conclusion that the lab leak theory is the most likely origin. Of course, geopolitical concerns are undoubtedly in the back of the minds of Fauci and the NIH. These concerns include not upsetting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), similar to how the Director-General of the World Health Organization refused to criticize the CCP in fear that it would not cooperate with the pandemic response, despite its repeated efforts to undermine the information gathering process. It is clear that the CCP has no intention of cooperating and has no consideration for the rest of the world, yet Fauci still chooses to put his trust in them and their scientists.
The CCP has shown repeatedly that it can not be trusted, yet Fauci’s NIAID and the NIH still continue to fund research in China and other foreign countries with suspect ethics. These places do not have the same regulations and safety precautions regarding experiments, and so they are ideal places to conduct dangerous and ethically questionable research. They can claim some degree of plausible deniability as they have done through EcoHealth and its gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Why try to do this research in an American lab with ethical standards, when you could do it in China with no concerns and the ability to blame it on someone else if you leak the most dangerous virus in a century?
Additionally, at the time of this writing, a new story is emerging that Fauci, through the NIH, sent funding to a Tunisian laboratory conducting inhumane experiments on beagles. According to White Coat Waste Project, a bipartisan organization that seeks to end taxpayer-funded experiments on animals, Fauci’s NIAID sent $424,000 to a Tunisian laboratory that undertook experiments where beagles’ heads were put in cages to which sand flies were introduced to eat the dogs’s heads. This story is still developing, so it should be treated with a fair amount of skepticism, but it is concerning nonetheless.
While many on campus take pride in Dr. Anthony Fauci as a Holy Cross alumnus, he has proven, especially through his most recent actions, that he should not be celebrated. His deliberate disregard for freedom in exchange for questionable policy is nonetheless ignored and sometimes even encouraged by his supporters. The cult-like following he has garnered, not just on campus, but in America as a whole, is concerning. Fueled by fanaticism, the very real concerns of suspect research are thrown out the window as nonsense conspiracy theories, rather than concerning and possibly criminal allegations which should be investigated further. Holy Cross should take no pride in Fauci.
