assessing the case for pardoning fauci
laundry vs legalism
dr joseph marine recently published this provocative piece in which he makes the case for pardoning anthony fauci.
i do not know dr marine (or of him) and so my first reaction was something akin to “sheesh, here we go”
but, far from being the “tony is a good guy and everyone is out to get him” narrative i expected, it instead was an interesting take and one of which some surprising folks seem supportive.
i was about to post some half-cocked twitter comments but then paused to read his stack. (a practice we really all ought to seek to be better about cultivating in order to avoid jousting at straw men)
his line of argument was not at all what i expected and i believe this to be a sincere take made in good faith and so i think it warrants engagement in the same vein.
his fundamental argument is this:
having read this, i still disagree strongly with the “sensible med” assessment that we should pardon fauci. allow me to lay out why:
to my mind, a pardon is not, as he describes, a permanent badge of dishonor on fauci's name. his supporters will just see it as "biden protecting noble tony from the predations of evil don” proof of the virtue of antonio and the villainy of this new regime of detractors.
the middle will not be moved by the idea of “only the guilty need pardons.”
the middle gets moved by seeing facts that it views as definitive.
this sets the overton window.
a trial, whether or not it results in conviction, is a means to surface information. the actual conviction is relatively unimportant especially if it comes down to technical semantics about whether "serially passaging a virus through a murine model to enhance infectivity" constitutes "gain of function work."
a court may run on technicalities, but public opinion can see a big obvious thing when the pachyderm is plopped into the parlor.
here in our hyper-focused highly informed rabbithole of covidian assessment, it's easy to forget an important salient:
most of america does not know this stuff.
they still think covid-19 was a bat virus in a wet market or maybe a pangolin.
and that is not a belief that we want to leave intact.
most of the american public have no idea that the NIH paid ecohealth to create covid 19 then their leadership lied about it.
they have no idea the the NIH as an agency and its staffers as individuals were paid royalties by moderna and bioNtech (pfizer) to license the mRNA payload for their covid vaccines.
they do not know that tony and the NIH staffers knew this all along and were taking aggressive and deliberate steps to sidestep and hide from FOIA so they could keep coloring outside the lines and feathering nests.
in our little slice of the world, this is common knowledge and common parlance, but in the rest?
this is exotic information widely doubted and disparaged.
so let's get all the definitive documents into court/congress and air the laundry.
let's see who knew what, who hid what, who funded what, and who got paid on the vaxx (and any other drugs). NIH employees do not even need to disclose their personal royalty payments.
does 95% of the american public know that?
i would wager that they do not.
they should.
and we should know what tony walked with.
dr marine then argues:
this argument seems to fail for the same reasons as those above including some matters of fact. for a public servant to lie and self serve and fail to disclose conflicts of interest ought to be a crime. it should also be a basis for civil suit. if nothing else, it should be widely aired and shamed. lying to congress under oath is a crime, especially when such lies inform the worst crisis response in american history.
this one, i must confess, confuses me.
indeed he did. let’s pull all the threads and draw them into the light as well that, conviction or no, we may understand who we may trust going forward and who colluded to lie to the public about public health. if institutions are rotten root and stem, let us put names upon the spoilage and remove it.
but perhaps most important, in the end it was not tony who drove this pivot. he was anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and pro “go on a cruise.” his sudden volte face occurred when debbie “the scarf” birx arrived on the scene. just how this idea contagion was spread and/or forced is a very interesting question that we the people deserve to get answers on (and we have not). the possible fauci felony is just the first thread. where it leads will be instructive. let’s pull it.
but it is the final argument here with which i find the most fault.
this seems to be a passive voice sort of excusal akin to “car runs over pedestrian” or “mistakes were made.”
decisions are made by individuals and thus, ultimately, it is individuals who bear blame and culpability for the events that arise as a result. such malfeasance may only be deterred by personal accountability. “NIH acted badly” solves nothing. it deters no one. in encourages no future leader or apparatchik to exercise due care. it’s a whitewash where the people skate and “the events” take the blame.
i must strongly disagree here that seeking to discern which individuals made which choices upon what information and incentive (or the rummaging around hunting for such) is a distraction. it constitutes the meat and marrow of the issue. one cannot reform a system whose people fail to face accountability. that’s just fining toyota dealers over hit and runs.
the real win for america is sunlight on the dark deeds and the misincentives.
the real win is dragging those who worked such self-serving mischief out into common view such that those who come in the decades after are deterred from acting as their predecessors did.
pardoning fauci stops this process. it removes the standing and incentive to go digging into this midden of malfeasance.
i don't care if teflon-tony goes to prison (though i'd be happy with that outcome) nearly as much as i care that his actions and those of other individuals at NIH, EHA, CDC, collins, dasak, baric, and birx in particular are painted with 10,000 watt spotlights and etched into the retinas of the american consciousness.
i’d like to know how redfield, then head of CDC and who seemed not to buy a whole lot of this was so effectively flipped. somewhere in here is a serious set of influence that has not yet been revealed.
and it needs to be and is therefore why i think that on this matter we must err on the side of laundry and not legalism.
because that is how we stop this from happening again.
His association with the Proximal Origins paper is not the first time he covered his tracks with deception. He should be held accountable for years of deceit.
There are segments of HIV in COVID 19 DNA. It was an engineered virus. Tony paid for almost 20 grants carried out at the Wuhan lab, including creating CoVID 19.
Then he excluded working meds to force through an EUA on a risky gene therapy as a ’vaccine’, and pocketed millions personally. He had a direct financial interest in the actions he took that was contrary to good medecine.
The world needs to know this.
My reaction to and summary in response to this entire idea began and ended with the first quotation of the man at the top:
« Because arrogance, grandiosity, self-importance, poor judgment, dogmatism, and dishonesty are character flaws, not crimes »
No. Absolutely not. Incorrect on all counts.
Has Dr. Marine never heard of crimes such as manslaughter, even including involuntary manslaughter? People die, yet the ones who killed didn't mean to do so, but they still get tried, convicted, and sentenced. Rightfully so. Certain levels of "didn't mean it" are still criminal.
The fact is that "but I didn't *mean* it!" has bearing only on the severity of the charge and the extent of the sentence. Ignorance is no excuse, especially for a man in Fauci's oh-so-vaunted position, where he had all the resources necessary to carry out a decent course of action.