Thousands of e-mails from Dr. Antony Fauci, America's infectious disease chief, have been released due to FOIA requests. BBC. The biggest revelation is that in the early months of the pandemic Fauci and other top scientists were taking the Wuhan lab leak theory seriously at a time where people were getting banned from social media for advancing the theory. As early as January Fauci received e-mails that said the virus could be man-made. Fauci now says that he is not convinced that the virus is natural and supports an investigation. Dr. Fauci also said in a February e-mail that facemasks are not effective in preventing the virus, months before flip-flopping on the issue. However, it should be noted that he was saying the same thing in public as he was in the e-mail. Dr. Fauci also deflected criticisms that President Donald Trump was censoring him, saying that Trump had not been muzzled at all.
My Comment:
A lot is being made about Fauci's flip-flop on facemasks but I think it's probably the most unimportant revelation here. The fact that Fauci flip-flopped on facemasks was widely known before these e-mails dropped. The timeline matches so it's not like Fauci was saying one thing to the public and another to his colleagues.
I don't know if Fauci was right about facemasks then or if he was right about it now, but the flip flop did a lot of damage in terms of credibility. I know people were trying to downplay masks in an effort to keep them for health care workers but in the end it undermined the argument that they did work. And I still don't think that masks help too much, with any gains from wearing them being marginal.
The biggest revelation is probably the fact that Fauci and other health officials were taking the lab leak theory seriously while the idea was being censored on social media. I always thought that the lab leak hypothesis was likely, mostly because the natural origin theory made little sense. After all, the Coronavirus is found in bats but those bats don't live in Wuhan and even if they did they wouldn't be active in winter when the pandemic started.
To be fair to Fauci, it's possible that he didn't know the things we know now. The virus has been studied a lot more than it was back then and we also didn't know that three lab workers in Wuhan got sick. He might not have known that at the time. Still, the way that Fauci and others dismissed the lab leak theory was a disservice to America and the world and is the biggest criticism I have of Fauci.
Another major revelation is the fact that Fauci was not being censored by President Donald Trump. I mean, that should have been pretty obvious. During the entire pandemic Fauci was on TV making statements. He and President Trump occasionally disagreed publicly but he wasn't told to shut up.
Indeed, I always thought that President Trump listened to Fauci and his other advisors fairly well. He didn't always go along with what they said due to having to balance other factors such as the economy, but I don't think he ever even considered firing Fauci.
Is this the smoking gun that the right thinks it is or the nothing burger that the left thinks it is? It's probably both and neither. Both sides are going to have their preconceptions confirmed. For me though, I didn't see anything earth shaking but at the same time the fact that Fauci was concerned about the lab leak theory at a time when the media was dismissing it as a conspiracy theory does not reflect well on him.
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