Dr. Anthony Fauci

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Wow, the opposition press isn’t what it used to be!

In a Sunday interview with “The Sexiest Man Alive,” Anthony Fauci, CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., criticizing Fauci for keeping the public in a state of raw panic over COVID.

Johnson: “Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population, when it couldn’t. And he’s doing — he’s using the exact same playbook for COVID.”

At that point, the anchor is supposed to say something like, “Dr. Fauci?” and let him respond. But CNN apparently thinks Fauci is too delicate a flower to answer an attack all by his lonesome.

So, before turning it over to the interviewee, Tapper blathered: “Obviously, that’s a bizarre and false assertion. President George W. Bush gave you the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of your leadership in the AIDS crisis. But I did want to give you an opportunity to respond.” (I guess this is how you apply for Chris Cuomo’s job at CNN.)

At that point, Fauci merely had to join Tapper in sneering at the senator: “Jake, how do you respond to something as preposterous as that?”

Thank you, Dr. Fauci for that penetrating response. Next up on CNN …

Actually, Fauci then went on to use the Hillary Benghazi defense: HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME WHEN PEOPLE DIED!!!

He said: “Overhyping AIDS? It’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million people worldwide. How do you overhype that? Overhyping COVID? It’s already killed 780,000 Americans and over 5 million people worldwide. So, I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about.”

That would have been a fantastic answer if Sen. Johnson had questioned whether anyone had ever died from AIDS or COVID. Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. Rather, he accused Fauci of overhyping the risk of COVID, terrifying everyone — as he did with AIDS — instead of concentrating protections on high-risk groups.

Overhyping car accidents? Cars have killed over 3.6 million Americans and multiple millions of people worldwide. How do you overhype that?

Yes, but you recommended that people drive blindfolded.

Long after it was clear that COVID was dangerous nearly exclusively for older people and the obese, Fauci lied, just as he once lied about AIDS being a risk for heterosexuals long after it became clear that it was almost entirely a problem for gay men and intravenous drug users.

Instead of devoting massive resources to shutting down bathhouses and shooting galleries to stop the spread of AIDS, and blanketing older Americans with protections in the case of COVID, Fauci repeatedly claimed that everyone was at risk.

This isn’t a matter of It’s a new virus! No one knew anything! I knew the high-risk groups back in March 2020. (bit.ly/3oBu8Et)

It seems that Fauci believes in “science” — except when he needs to terrify heterosexuals in the cause of destigmatizing gays, or frighten the entire population so as not to stigmatize the elderly and obese.

AIDS first appeared in 1981 in gay communities in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two years later, 72% of cases involved gay men, and 90% of the non-homosexual AIDS victims were intravenous drug users. Most of the rest were children born to AIDS-infected mothers or victims of AIDS-tainted blood transfusions.

This wasn’t a big secret. According to CDC, by June 1983, out of 1,552 AIDS victims, only 37 were not gay men, drug users, hemophiliacs or Haitians. Frontline doctors actually dealing with AIDS patients were assuring the public, “The average person has nothing to be concerned about,” as a New York cardiologist told The Associated Press. (Then, as now, you can trust your doctor; you can’t trust “public health authorities.”)

But Fauci was out there, alarming the entire population about the odds of contracting AIDS. In April 1983, he said: “As the months go by, we see more and more groups … AIDS is creeping out of well-defined epidemiological confines.”

A month later, he wrote: “The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS … has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome.” (This was based on a study of eight infants in Newark, New Jersey — who may or may not have had AIDS, in households with people who also may or may not have had AIDS. So it was a solid study.)

By 1985 — four years after AIDS first appeared — 73% of the cases were in gay men, 17% in intravenous drug users, 3% in Haitians, 2.2% in those who’d received blood, and 1% in sexual partners of AIDS patients. Less than 4% didn’t fit into one of these categories.

With zero cases of proven heterosexual transmission, in February 1985, Fauci said, “Am I worried about [heterosexual transmission]? Yes.”

By 1987, only 4% of AIDS cases could possibly be attributed to heterosexual contact — and half of those were in Africans and Haitians.

And yet, here was Fauci in March 1987, still babbling about the risk of AIDS to heterosexuals. Asked if AIDS could be transmitted to men by vaginal intercourse, he answered, “Absolutely.” He actually warned the public about French kissing: “[H]ealth officials have to presume that it is possible to transmit the virus by exchange of saliva in deep kissing.”

If some of these quotes sound familiar, I cited a few of them in that March 2020 column, at a time when “public health authorities,” cable news hosts and the president were demanding nationwide lockdowns.

Today, Fauci is doing the exact same thing with COVID, treating teenagers as if they face as much danger as people in their 70s, despite the latter having a 300 times greater chance of dying from COVID than those under 20. For young people who contract COVID, the chances of dying are less than the risk of dying from sunstroke over the course of their entire lives. Even for those in their 30s, the odds are about the same as their lifetime risk of dying by choking on food.

If he’s ever interviewed by a serious journalist, perhaps Fauci could explain why his idea of “science” is about avoiding stigmatizing certain groups, and not about saving lives.