I recently returned from a week-long vacation in the woods of northern Wisconsin. We played beach volleyball, went fishing and sailing, played a lively game of Wiffle Ball with the kids, and swam until we got goosebumps.
Even without a mobile phone, I managed to stumble upon a breaking news story from an unusual source: television. (It was pretty much the only means of communication I had there.) Naturally, I had to share this news.
“Fauci has Covid,” I said to some of my colleagues, who were filling the fridges with beer.
An argument quickly broke out as to whether the news was relevant.
“So what?” a friend replied. “I’ve long since accepted that everyone is going to have this thing.”
I partly agreed with my friend. Even during the early phases of the pandemicharbored a suspicion that the virus would spread regardless of what interventions politicians or bureaucrats enact, and those interventions could prove destructive, perhaps more so than the virus itself.
But I told him not to underestimate the importance of Fauci contracting Covid.
Why it is important that Fauci has contracted Covid
It’s important to understand that Fauci is not just the president’s top medical adviser. Fauci, whose official title is Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is “America’s doctor“, as described The New Yorker in April 2020.
And more importantly, for better or worse, Fauci became the architect of the US response to Covid.
It was Fauci who, early in the pandemic, proposed a Covid strategy that was both radical and simple: keep Americans apart from each other, using the force of the state, if necessary.
In March 2020Fauci told “Face the Nation“That the strategy was working.
“The types of mitigation that are taking place right now, the things that we’re seeing in this country, this physical separation at the same time that we’re preventing an influx of cases coming in, I think it’s going to go a long way to prevent that we become an Italy,” Fauci said.
The “mitigations” Fauci was referring to were closures. Schools closed. Closed parks. Closed businesses. Any business or activity not deemed “essential” by state authorities was illegal.
The Americans were told that these efforts were only temporary. “Fifteen days to stop the spread”, became a mantra national.
However, six months later, nothing had changed. In fact, Fauci said now which would have to continue until 2022.
The idea that human beings could hide indefinitely from an airborne pathogen if government bureaucrats turned the dial in the best way has more than a touch of madness, but what few seem to realize is that for Fauci, this was just the first step in a larger revolution.
In the Brownstone InstituteJeffrey Tucker points out a Article written by Fauci in August 2020 in which the doctor explains his ideological vision, which sounds like Rousseauian idealism.
“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior, as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes and workplaces, from water and sewage systems, and places of recreation and meeting.
In this transformation, it will be necessary to prioritize the changes in human behavior that constitute risks for the appearance of infectious diseases. The main ones are reducing crowding at home, work and public places, as well as minimizing environmental disturbances such as deforestation, intense urbanization and intensive livestock farming.”
The article, Tucker points out, makes clear that Fauci’s response to the pandemic was not just about Covid, but about a broader technocratic revolution, difficult to define and to which Americans had not signed up.
“It’s not socialism or capitalism. It’s something else entirely, something very strange,” Tucker writes. “Nobody has ever voted for something like that. It’s something that Fauci and his friends dreamed up on his own and used all of his enormous power to enact it just as a test, until it fell apart.”
And this is what makes Fauci’s infection – which comes more than two years after the first lockdowns were imposed – so important.
“It is a sign and a symbol that the whole theory [de Fauci] about virus control was wrong,” writes Tucker. “He got away with the measures and they didn’t work. The virus ended up falling on him, as if he wanted to recreate Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional story about the prince prosperous in his castle that he believed would protect him.
a fatal deception
In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speechthe economist FA Hayek concluded with a warning: he urged human beings to act with humility in the face of the immense power of modern science.
“There is a danger in the exuberant sense of ever-increasing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered,” said Hayek, “and which tempts man to try, ‘dizzy with success,’ to use a phrase characteristic of early communism , to subject not only our natural environment but also the human environment to the control of a human will”.
And continued:
“The recognition of the insurmountable limits of his knowledge should, in effect, teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should prevent him from becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal effort to control society, an effort which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”
a careful look to Dr. Fauci reveals that humility is not one of his strongest attributes and his actions display the fatal conceit that Hayek warned against infecting public health officials as well as economic planners.
Despite all his efforts, Fauci was no more successful in staving off the plague than Prince Prospero. But his insane and arrogant effort to extinguish the virus by force is a story worthy of his own parable.
This article was adapted from an issue of the e-newsletter FEE Daily. click here to subscribe and receive free market news and analysis like this one in your inbox every day of the week.
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