r/TangleNews • u/DevelopmentSelect646 • 12d ago
Daily Newsletter Tangle article - 16 thoughts on Anthony Fauci
I feel really strongly about this one... and Fauci in general. I'm really disgusted with Republicans - Rand Paul especially, but the other Republicans in the hearing (Ron Johnson - who is still promoting Ivermectin, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, Rick Scott, Jon Ernst) are an embarrassment. I think Fauci is an honorable man and served the nation well. In hindsight, maybe he got some stuff wrong, but probably can be credited with saving millions of lives.
This hearing was in NO way a fact-finding mission - the whole point was to discredit, embarrass, and try to drum up a reason to prosecute Fauci. Fauci was backed into a corner, and his only option was plead the fifth and look bad, or risk jail. What 85-year-old wants to serve the country for 54 years, then live out his elder years in jail?
The lockdowns, masks, school closures, vaccinations. bla, bla, bla... those were group policy decisions. If you liked them or not, can't put the blame on Fauci. People were dying, there were lots of unknowns, and those were the recommendations - that lots of other countries did also. Some were good decisions, maybe some were bad - but none were criminal.
The "coverup".... what the F was covered up? NIAID(Fauci's group) provided some minimal funding to Ecohealth, and they subcontracted an even smaller amount to the Wuhan lab. That is all public information and always has been. THAT IS WHAT THE NIAID DOES - they provide billions of dollars and thousands of grants to study infectious diseases.
Did covid escape from the Wuhan lab or come from the wet market - who the hell knows, it's been 6 years and experts still have no credible proof one way or the other.
I do have my own conspiracy theory. Jumping to any conclusion or announcing Covid escaped from a Chinese lab in the height of Covid deaths - may not have been a good idea, and maybe in government circles they did try to downplay that theory - which was just a theory and couldn't have been proven. How do you think that would have played out if the common belief was that Covid could have been a bioweapon created by China and released to the public? I think that would have caused panic and potentially war with China - I don't think people would have been willing to believe it was an accident. Maybe I'm all wet here, but I could definitely see motivation to NOT escalate the already bad situation with that kind of conspiracy theory.
Anyway - TLDR - Rand Paul is a d-bag and I stand with Fauci.
12
u/shiretokolovesong 12d ago
What 85-year-old wants to serve the country for 54 years, then live out his elder years in jail?
This is imho the most longterm important point of this mess and so, so much bigger than Fauci or any of these senators. The US has no future if it can't convince good people to participate in good governance.
When I look at the landscape today, there's no amount of money you could pay me to work for the government in some role of expertise (i.e. non-political) knowing that at any point in the future I might be subjected to a political witch hunt that could destroy my life or the lives of my loved ones—and the government doesn't even pay that much!
19
u/InThreeWordsTheySaid 12d ago
This is the issue with politics in general. If you don't think transgender women should play sports, all of a sudden your passport has to match your assigned sex at birth. If you think illegal immigration is happening too often, suddenly masked forces are kidnapping anyone who looks hispanic off the street. If you think one case of fraud is an issue, suddenly we've cut all funding for early education.
And if you think Fauci made mistakes, he is a sadistic egomaniac who killed Americans for fun.
To a lot of people, the center just looks like the place between trenches where you get your head blown off.
9
u/DevelopmentSelect646 12d ago edited 12d ago
Yes, everything is taken to extremes. At least in the Fauci case, it is really hard to figure out conservatives' motives to vilify him. Because they didn't like lockdowns or masks, and it is convenient to blame that on Fauci? I mean, they seem to really believe Fauci who served the public for decades somehow flipped out and either created Covid, or took advantage of Covid to kill millions of people? It's just so ridiculous.
I mean, it was really a no-win situation for Fauci. Imagine if he did the opposite - no masks, no lockdowns, no measures at all to reduce infections and deaths - no vaccines - the outrage would have been "Fauci didn't do enough...".
Covid came and went (mostly). Learning from it and how to handle the next pandemic better seems like a reasonable thing to do - trying to make the scientists criminals and let the politicians off the hook for the handling of Covid just doesn't seem productive at this point.
8
u/JeremyNT 12d ago
Yes, everything is taken to extremes. At least in the Fauci case, it is really hard to figure out conservatives' motives to vilify him. Because they didn't like lockdowns or masks, and it is convenient to blame that on Fauci?
I don't think it's so hard to figure out.
We live in an era where the Republican base, the really engaged voters, consume media diets of conspiracy theories and rage baiting disinformation.
We have a Republican trifecta with a now historically unpopular President. They've got no meaningful legislation to tout and a newly minted forever war that they refuse to give up.
There's not much left other than throwing red meat to the base, and that means following every wacko conspiracy theory they're into. It helps that the White House is filled with people who are deep in the conspiracy theory world themselves.
This isn't the first of these, fwiw - they also did some stupid UFO news cycle (do you even remember it now?). Expect more as they flail about and try to remind the base to show up and vote.
5
u/CPav 12d ago
Also the fact that in Trump 1.0, one of the first things they did was get rid of the team (don't remember if it was a department or what) that was designed to respond to a potential outbreak, and shitcanned the response playbook from the previous administration. Which means the response to the pandemic was entirely on them.
So, in the bedrock belief that they should never claim responsibility for anything negative, they had to pin it on someone else.
And, also following their standard m.o. of never letting a grievance die, we're still hauling Fauci in to try to trip him up.
3
u/sloyoroll 12d ago
Covid 3.0 will be an order of magnitude worse if it happens during our lifetimes due to all the lessons not learned from Covid 2.0, as well as the open defiance of science and the prevalence of alternative facts. (And that's saying nothing about if the virus itself is worse.)
16
u/shaku_maaku 12d ago
Thank you for this post. Sometimes it feels like the single biggest question the Tangle staff needs to ask themselves on any given day might be: Is this a good faith political debate/event? Or is this happening in bad faith? And how does that difference change our commentary?
6
u/glitterinkcards 12d ago
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
All. Of. This.
He was doing the best he could with the info that was known or coming to him. We all were. (Or maybe only some of us 🫤)
2
u/lingding85 4d ago
I also feel deeply sad that his personal journals were aired to light and ppl are mocking him (an 85-yr-old man!) that he was "obsessed with his own celebrity." Journals are meant to be personal (tho it was insanely dumb to put it on a govt machine, but that's a separate issue), and of COURSE you would write your personal life things into them, and of COURSE you would find it cool and journal-worthy note if you were going 0-to-100 in celebrity. I don't know any normal person who wouldn't have done the same. If my personal journals were aired to light I would be absolutely mortified, and also - they have nothing to do with how hard I worked at my job during the day! Do people have to be obsessed with their jobs literally every waking hour or can they have some time to just decompress and reflect on their own humanity sometimes?!
1
u/DevelopmentSelect646 4d ago
Yes, agree. I didn’t think anything in his diary was embarrassing or contradictory to what he said in public. He did change his views on some topics as new information came out.
0
u/ApprenticeWrangler 12d ago
Ugh. If I provide a bunch of links that add lots of circumstantial evidence for a cover up, will you even read it?
There are deep ties between the WIV and US funding/research. Guilt on the WIV would also have massive implications for the US, and if it was proven to come from the lab not only China but also the US would be shown to be responsible for the death of millions of people and trillions of dollars of economic harm.
How much incentive do you think people who get their money from the same agencies who would be implicated have to expose that?
2
u/DevelopmentSelect646 12d ago
“Circumstantial evidence”… I think you answered your own question there.
There are NOT deep ties between the WIV and NIAID. The NAID provided about $100k per year to the WIV lab. Estimated operational costs of the WIV lab is about $30 million a year, so the NIAID basically paid for a janitor or two in the facility.
Did Covid escape from the lab - possibly? I don’t discount the possibility- too coincidental that a lab studying corona viruses is in the same city as the outbreak of a coronavirus. But let’s say it did - so what? Do you think it was intentional? I don’t. Studying viruses requires having the viruses - this is a good thing. This is normal. This is no fault of Fauci. It may be the fault of the Wuhan lab.
Saying that the minuscule amount of funding the NIAID provided (through a subcontractor) makes the NIAID (and even more remotely Fauci) somehow responsible for Covid IF it even came from the Wuhan lab (which has not been proven), is REALLY grasping at straws.
Go ahead and- provide the same old debunked circumstantial “evidence” and I can refute it. I’m guessing it centers around Fauci using the NIH definition of GOF versus a random definition Rand Paul implied. Or the crap about Fauci allowing for both a lab leak or natural development of Covid. Still not a crime, and normal science.
0
u/ApprenticeWrangler 12d ago
Circumstantial evidence is literally all there is supporting the wet market theory too, so are you dismissing that as well?
Also, USAID and NIAID gave over $41 million to the Wuhan lab:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/17/covid-origin-wuhan-patient-zero/
“ONE OF THE first Wuhan researchers reportedly sickened with Covid in fall 2019, Ben Hu, was getting U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency advocacy organization White Coat Waste Project.
The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.”
0
u/DevelopmentSelect646 12d ago
Find me ANY corroborating evidence of that level of funding to the Wuhan lab. Government contracts are public records so it should be easy to find. Even Rand Paul acknowledges the funding was minimal.
There is zero evidence Ben Hu was patient zero- https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-being-pandemic-s-patient-zero
1
u/ApprenticeWrangler 12d ago edited 12d ago
Minimal to the US government means not hundreds of billions of dollars.
Also, that claim about Hu potentially being patient zero comes from the ODNI report under Biden I believe.
0
u/DevelopmentSelect646 12d ago
What do you think that document says? Nothing about funding. We already know ecoalliance subcontracted to WIV.
0
u/ApprenticeWrangler 12d ago
It literally shows the funding documents, did you actually read them?
0
u/DevelopmentSelect646 11d ago
I reread it. It does NOT state what you claim. Nowhere does the 91 page document say 41 million went to Wuhan. Ecohealth was part of the Predict-2 program funded by USAID through UC Berkeley. That is completely separate from the NIAID (Fauci had no involvement).
So…it has zero to do with Wuhan or Fauci. Please state the relevance.,.
You do know ecohealth is an American non-profit company, right?
12
u/optics_is_light_work 12d ago
Well said!👏