Thinking Citizen Blog — Dr. Anthony Fauci — Hero? Villain? Neither?
Thinking Citizen Blog — Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: Dr. Anthony Fauci — Hero? Villain? Neither?
So what grade would you give Dr. Anthony Fauci? An “A” or an “F”? or something in between? Was he a model public servant facing an impossible dilemma? Or were lockdowns “oppressive and deadly”? What leader of any state or country should be held up as a model for future generations? Why? Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“HE’S EARNED AMERICA’S HEARTFELT THANKS” (Kansas City Star)
1. “Dr. Fauci waged war on foolish refusals of fact.”
2. “ Without Fauci’s steady leadership, the COVID-19 pandemic would have created more havoc on our country than we could possibly imagine.”
3. “He stepped in to become the face of a responsible public servant and a welcome antidote to the poor examples set by Trump and many Republican governors.”
“GOOD RIDDANCE TO DANGEROUS DR. FAUCI” (NY Post)
1. “He demanded contact tracing, a measure as costly as it was useless. He called for economic shutdowns and national school closures. He ridiculed efforts to focus protective efforts narrowly on the truly vulnerable — the elderly and the immuno-compromised.”
2. “He mocked the idea that people who recovered from COVID had some degree of natural immunity (after having once proposed it himself). And he did all this even as he doubted in private the efficacy of masks and the existence of asymptomatic spread.”
3. “His overgrown ego, in short, led him to promote the most destructive federal and state policies in recent US memory.”
NB: “The United States did worse on overall COVID outcomes than did Sweden, which never closed schools nor implemented other draconian policies.”
BASICS ON FAUCI — “an advisor to every President since Ronald Reagan”
1. “From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals.”
2. “In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.”
3. He served on the White House Coronavirus Taskforce under President Trump and was appointed chief medical advisor by President Biden.
FOOTNOTE — Were the policies of Florida and Sweden vindicated? What were the non-Covid excess deaths during the lockdown? What were the costs to children in terms of learning? (see last four links below)
1. “Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment.”
2. “Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and there’s one particularly dismal differencecbetween it and the rest of Europe as well as America: the number of younger adults who died not from Covid but from the effects of lockdowns.”
3. “Even in 2020, Sweden’s worst year of the pandemic, the mortality rate remained normal among Swedes under 70. Meanwhile, the death rate surged among younger adults in the U.S., and a majority of them died from causes other than Covid.”
NB: “In Sweden, there have been no excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic, but in the U.S. there have been more than 170,000 of these excess deaths.”
Opinion | Why Many Americans Turned on Anthony Fauci
What legacy does Fauci leave behind?
Dr. Fauci waged war on foolish refusals of facts. He’s earned America’s heartfelt thanks
Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci
Opinion | Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response
The WHO Doesn’t Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize | City Journal
States Ranked by Age-Adjusted COVID Deaths
The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history…. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
