fauci's 15 minutes are up

narcissistic personality disorder writ small

in case you had any lingering shred of doubt that fauci is nothing but a self-aggrandizing little liar, this should put it to bed.

fauci did next to nothing here except get in the way. this was HHS and DOD, not the NIH. this was done outside the fauci fiefdom and without the help of the dissembling little grifter who has played such consumate and dishonest politics that many have mistaken him for a medical expert. but this will be the bridge too far. this is the fish story that will make people realize just how fishy all the other stories have been, and these stores reek like the dumpster behind a cheap sushi bar.

operation warp speed kicked off in april 2020, a time when fauci was still an anti-masker and had recently just told americans that they ought to go on a cruise if they were young and healthy and wanted to. sure, he now claims he “lied to americans for their own good” about masks to “save them for medical professionals” but if you believe that one, please drop me a line about a charming bridge i can offer you at a once in a lifetime price. that one is just one more rotting tuna in the faucian follies. it certainly did not stop him from accepting a free cruise from a grateful industry.

i mean, the man has flat out admitted that he’s a liar. he told us he lied to the american people and that he did it on purpose. anyone who will “lie to the nation for its own good” will sure as sunrise lie to it for his own good as well. the truth, of course, is something even more sinister: fauci did not lie to america about masks last march and april. he told it the truth. what he’s lying about is about having lied, and this new “lie squared” is not for anything resembling the good of america. it’s for the good of fauci to protect his mythos from accusations of having recanted the actual science on masks which had 80 years of data showing they do not work to stop or slow respiratory pandemics and provide some sort of moral and faux-scientific cover for his adoption of a take on the issue that was political and not empirical or scientific. what he’s really lying about is having abandoned science and thrown the american people under the bus to carry water for team lockdown, further his career, and to influence the presidential election. but the simple, unarguable fact is this: fauci is a liar. even if you take him at his word now, he told you this himself and no one lies like this only once. they always do it again.

and fauci is doing it again now in order to make it look like he was the solution and not the problem. this vaccine development was not public, it was private. this was not government, it was the free market.

and the reason we do not have it ALL THE TIME instead of just once in a generation is, again, GOVERNMENT.

government did not help. it did not provide science or develop vaccines or treatments or run drug trials. private companies all over the world did that. this same thing is true of all the tests and treatments that came to market at such jarring speed. when you look at what the government actually did here the answer is pretty much always the same: it got out of the way. and it worked. products came to market at incredible speed.

the astute reader might now be ready to ask some pointed questions about “well, if this is what happens to drug development when government gets out of the way, why is it in the way to begin with?” and this is, indeed, the correct question. why indeed?

the common answer to this question generally runs along the lines of “we need the government to keep us safe from charlatans and bad drugs and unsafe products.” i suspect given the history of the last year with government getting in the way of safe, effective products, pushing and approving products that really do not work at all because the panels handling the trials are willing to move the goalposts at the 11th hour (as they did for remdesivir) to get them through (surely not because 7 people on that panel are paid by gilead) and generally relying upon tests like high Ct PCR that were manifestly unsuited to purpose may have dented this perception somewhat. far from saving us from charlatans, this system has been feeding us to a different group of them and a far more pernicious one because these charlatans get to wield coercive power.

and this is a key issue when one begins to look at ideas like “what is safe?” and “is this a good risk/reward?” there has been some real debate over some of these drugs and vaccines, whether they work, how well, and how much faith can be placed in the safety. i’m not going to weigh in on that here beyond saying that so long as no one forces you to take one no one is facing any risk they do not wish to and it’s just paternalism to claim that you are smart enough to make my choice for me better than i can make it for myself (and worse, that you have some right to). speak to your trusted medical advisor and make the choice that’s right for you. but at a high level, the idea of risk/reward is the foundation of medicine and medical decision making.

if you are facing terminal cancer, the risks of a drug may look very different to you than to a healthy individual. risks might look different to two different people. but only being allowed to use that which the government has, through increasingly daunting requirements, allowed, creates long development timeframes, extremely high costs, and thus, FAR fewer choices and treatments than a free market would provide. it sets a very high bar for what anyone is allowed to try. to “protect you from yourself” they are certainly delaying life saving treatments by years and decades. they are certainly preventing many from coming into being at all as scarce resources stretch less far and produce fewer products.

worse, this all puts the debate about “what is safe to use?” into the public sphere. it means that guys like fauci and gottlieb are going to be making this choice for you and it means that you are, by law, barred from making your own choices and using a drug they have not approved. you cannot buy it. you doctor cannot prescribe it. this keeps pricing high and choice low. this regulatory straitjacket is far more disease than cure at this point. it’s ruining healthcare and bioscience (and lest you think i’m somehow talking my book here, half the reason i invest in and build life science/biotech/med device companies is because of how insanely valuable and profitable this regulation makes them. i’m not looking for cronyism here, i’m talking myself out of a money machine.)

consider a hypothetical: we make the FDA optional. it is no longer an agency that can keep a drug off the market. you can take any pharmaceutical that you and see fit. it is a system of accreditation, not of mandate. other private agencies can emerge and compete with the FDA to offer good advice and data on what is effective and safe. can you seriously think this would not outperform? if what you want is what we have now, you can keep it. only use those drugs the FDA says are OK. but keep in mind, the FDA is a bureaucracy that is NOT accountable for outcomes or for impeding the advancement of medical science. they only get noticed and blamed when they approve something dangerous. so they play it uber-safe and take no chances. they force their extreme risk aversion, not driven by medical cost/benefit but rather by the optimization strategy for bureaucratic career preservation upon you. this is a recipe for stultification, not innovation.

a private drug company has to convince you to adopt its product. its reputation is everything to it. they have strong incentives to generate real cost/benefit and so do you and so does your doctor. the only people in this ecosystem who do not share this incentive set are the regulators and yet they are the ones we allow to dictate the pace of development and to set the menu of allowable choices. when you really step back and look at it, this is clearly a deeply stupid idea.

we’ve just seen how much innovation can come pouring out of the industry if you just get government even halfway out of the way. imagine what all the way would look like.

this is precisely why we need to stop the folks like fauci, who literally represent the gravel in the gears of medical progress, from taking their dishonest rooster walks across the public stage as they seek to claim credit for that which they did not do. at best, this beaming buffoon “helped” by getting himself and those like him out of the way, but in this case, it does not even appear that he did that. he’s just playing politics now to shore up his personal fiefdom and his mendaciously manufactured mythos. he’s seeking to buttress the edifice of regulation that suppresses progress and to validate it as heroic and vital just as he seeks to get one more spin in the media cycle to satiate his own vast and unwarranted ego. this man has done nothing but get in the way for 40 years because that’s how you win a greased pole climbing contest in a bureaucracy. but he is, by his own admission, a liar, and this is why we need to rid ourselves of him and the public health system that causes detritus like him to float to the top. because when you let politics drive science and health policy, one thing becomes inevitable, time after time: