the bonnie and clyde of bioethics

christine grady and tony fauci are quite the pair

a friendly reminder: for 12 years, fauci’s wife has been the head of clinical bioethics at the NIH.

absolutely no one in government has seen any undue risk or conflict of interest here.

to my knowledge, no one in power has even taken a look at potential problems with this arrangement.

and perhaps they should.

christine grady (who seems to have kept her maiden name) has been prolific in her writings, sucked up grant after grant from NIH, and appears to have the ethical grounding of a hungry cane snake.

her LATEST PIECE is yet another foray into interpretive bioethics for fun and power. it’s a seriously ethically challenged white-wash of vaccine mandates and pressure with large dollop of ostracization and vilification to round it out.

the science upon which it bases these claims is not only inaccurate, it’s inverted.

this is not ethics policy, it’s a propogandist’s user guide to sidestepping morality and gaslighting and othering those who fail to fall in line.

let’s have a look.

we’re off to a bad start with “The coronavirus pandemic continues to hinder the ability of businesses to operate at full capacity” because, of course, it hasn’t. the rules and regulations imposed by governments in futile and ineffective response did this. places that did not adopt them did not have these issues. blaming pandemic response on the pandemic itself is strike one.

then we land here:

your vaccine protects me and stops spread. we know this to be 100% false. even CDC and NIH have said so. the evidence is now overwhelming that the vaxxed not only get more covid than the unvaxxed, but unlike their unvaxxed peers, likely never develop proper sterilizing immunity.

hard to argue that that’s protective.

strike two.

and then, the charmingly slippery one: “well, i gave you a choice and warned you of the consequences!”

this is literally arguing that “your money or your life” mugging is unethical if done to one person, but fine if done to everyone. (in fairness, this argument has been working for the IRS for a century)

but still, gotta call this. strike three.

this is not even a real attempt at ethics, it’s a shallow whitewash.

and this is simply reprehensible:

“There can be social consequences associated with peer communication about vaccination, such as stigma and ostracization of those not vaccinated. Individuals who choose to make the workplace less safe for others through their vaccine refusal should be able to foresee the possibility of this kind of social consequence, independent of peer engagement about the benefits of vaccination.”

this is literally arguing that because you should be able to foresee your peers stigmatizing and ostracizing you for failing to adopt an intervention that may well harm you and clearly does not protect them but rather likely puts them at greater risk that it’s fine for them to do it to you.

i’d love to see her apply this logic to say, having a child out of wedlock or abortion or coming out as homosexual.

i doubt very much she’d accept it. this is special pleading of the worst sort which renders it the antithesis of ethics. this bioethics gang at NIH seems to reside at a truly unfortunate venn intersection.

this led me to wonder what other positions this group has pursued and promulgated in the past.

it was not reassuring.

back in the halcyon days of 2002, a veritable who’s who of NIH fiefery collaborated on quite the little position paper:

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and his wife Christine Grady, who directs the National Institutes of Health’s Bioethics Department, co-authored a paper outlining criteria for international grants administered by the National Institutes of Health.

Published March 1st, 2002 in the journal Nature Reviews Immunology, the paper counted two other authors in addition to the Faucis: Gregory Folkers, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director (NIAID) Immediate Office of the Director, and Jack Killen, the former Director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

its proposals were, shall we say, a bit of a piece with the rest of their ethical stances:

“Many commentators believe that all clinical trial participants must receive a level of care equivalent to the world’s best. Using HIV/AIDS research as an example, we show how this ‘Uniform Care Requirement’ can undermine biomedical research aimed at improving global health, and then we point towards a more rational and balanced approach to ethical assessment,”

got that? it’s the third world, we should get to play fast and loose with standards.

what happens in rawanda stays in rawanda.

“Studies carried out in resource-poor countries might differ substantially from those in the developed countries that are most likely to sponsor the research,” add Fauci and Grady.”

the whole argument here is basically “because the third world is the third world, doing studies like we do in the first world and adhering to similar standards of ethics might mean the studies are “not relevant to local populations and concerns” (because, apparently, medical ethics have a geographic component) so we should not hold ourselves to such stricture.”

this is just a flimsy cover for “we’d like a blanket license to color outside the lines where the poor and powerless people live to get around all the pesky rules we have around here.”

and we’ve seen how THAT works out, haven’t we…

this is how you wind up causing more polio than you prevent.

this is how you wind up funding massive gain of function in bat coronaviruses in chinese labs that lack basic safety standards, testing unsafe drugs and vaccines on poor kids in africa, and letting sand fleas eat the faces off live beagles in morocco for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained to me.

there are no checks. no balances. i’m not even sure there is any review.

the ethics board is your wife and she seems to have even less conscience or morality than even toxic tony. she is not a safeguard, she’s an enabler and possibly an instigator.

there is a long and abiding pattern of dishonesty, immorality to the point of amorality, and of scientific illiteracy and hubris exhibited by both.

you’ve literally made clyde the police and put bonnie in charge of internal affairs.

imagine the questions that were never asked but should have been like “is it ethical to push for vaccine mandates when they clearly have not worked as the studies claimed and are leaky to the point of total inefficacy on spread attenuation?”

because that might have been a real game changer had there been any honest oversight.

so many questions.

and it’s long past time for us to be asking the serious ones because these are the people making the policy that gets imposed on you, your loved ones, and your children.

and when you grant such power to such people, it always ends up one way.

and this is NOT where you want to land.