The radical right's lies about those Fauci emails

Every far-right zealot from Tucker Carlson to your local anti-vax tinfoil-hatter has been calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci's head recently because of emails released under the Freedom of Information Act. The emails were made public because of applications from the Washington Post and BuzzFeed News. They covered January through June of 2020, during the earliest period of the COVID outbreak in the United States.

There's nothing new about the lunatic fringe gunning for Dr. Fauci. After all, he's the guy who stood in the breach during Donald Trump's long reign of error and misinformation about COVID-19. It was Dr. Fauci who made sure that the truth was available to us despite the Former Guy's lurid fantasies and self-serving (and self-defeating) campaign to keep the economy open no matter how many human lives it cost. But as Josef Goebbels knew so very well, if you repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough, people are going to believe it. Such is the case with the Fauci emails. The lies being spread about them are whoppers, but they have been repeated so often that they are widely accepted as established facts.

Here are the actual facts, which have been rather severely obscured by the innuendos and outright fabrications of those determined to discredit Dr. Fauci. Unfortunately, this group includes several U.S. senators.

The most widely repeated (and believed) lie being spread by the tinfoil-hatters is that this email from Dr. Kristian Anderson somehow indicates that Fauci "knew" that the virus was, or at least "looked," genetically engineered rather than occurring naturally through the evolutionary process. It is an article of faith on the far right that the email is a "smoking gun," proving that Dr. Fauci "knew" that the virus was, or at least "looked," bioengineered.

True, Dr. Anderson said in the email was that he and several other scientists "find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." But that is where the extremists stop reading. He immediately goes on to say,  "But we have to look at this much more closely, and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change." 

And after further analysis, they did change. Anderson and others published an article in Nature Medicine on St. Patrick's Day, which unequivocally stated that "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin... However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." Apparently, the aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 genome which initially struck Dr. Anderson and others as evidence of genetic manipulation turned out to be shared by naturally occurring coronaviruses!

In fact, Dr. Anderson states that his opinion and that of his colleagues changed "within days" of his email to Dr. Fauci due to further examination of the data. And no wonder! Far-right columnist Laura Ingram explains all this by claiming that Dr. Anderson and the others were "influenced" somehow by Dr. Fauci. In fact, they were "influenced" by professional caution and strict adherence to the scientific method.

But conspiracy theorists gonna conspiracy theorize.

Nobody has ever wholly excluded the possibility that the virus could have been manufactured. But the conclusion finally reached by Dr. Anderson and by the consensus of scientists studying the matter was exactly what Dr. Fauci said all along. Dr. Anderson tweeted on June 1, "As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility. However, significant new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper." 

In short, what Dr. Fauci is actually being criticized for is not immediately going public with a sensational (and, as it turned out, baseless) claim that the virus was bioengineered and escaped from a lab even though those who had noticed a "suspicious" part of the COVID genome comprising less than 0.1% of the genome emphasized that it was far too early to draw such a conclusion!  And in fact, they reversed their position within days of Dr. Anderson's email upon comparing the  SARS-CoV-2 genome with that of other coronaviruses that occurred in nature! Dr. Fauci is among the overwhelming majority of epidemiologists who have consistently stated that the virus's origin is unknown and needs further investigation. But the overwhelming consensus in the field remains that an origin in the laboratory is unlikely.

Gateway Pundit has claimed that Dr. Fauci "knew" that hydroxychloroquine- an anti-malarial drug since conclusively demonstrated to be useless against COVID-19 despite being heavily touted by former President Trump- actually worked. The claim is based on the fact that Dr. Fauci passed emails singing the praises of hydroxychloroquine on an anecdotal basis on to others for "further study."

That's it. Nothing more. And Dr. Fauci's public position had always been that such anecdotal claims should be investigated.

And then, there's the matter of the masks.

Somehow the anti-mask crowd never got the memo that masks were never intended primarily to protect people from getting COVID themselves, despite several studies showing that they have done a pretty good job of it.  In fact, a recent study shows that those who regularly wore masks in public came down with COVID half as often as those who never wore them. The primary purpose of masks was always to prevent those who were, or might be, infected from infecting others.

This email from Dr. Fauci early in the pandemic is consistent with the advice that he, the CDC, and others gave early in the pandemic and which anti-maskers themselves have consistently repeated, though missing the critical point that masks have always been known to be effective in preventing an infected person from infecting others. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is small enough to penetrate the pores in a standard cloth or paper mask, though as Dr. Fauci notes in the email, masks are pretty effective in blocking the droplets which contain the virus. As the pandemic wore on, we learned more and more about the virus, including the fact that it is almost always transmitted through airborne droplets. From what we know now, it makes sense that masks would be more effective in actually preventing a person from getting COVID than Dr. Fauci and pretty much everyone else thought at the time.

No, Dr. Fauci did not "lie" about masks. But unlike the anti-maskers and others on #TeamVirus, he, the CDC, and others did learn. His detractors should try it once in a while!

It is not true, as Rep. Lauren Boebert infamously tweeted, that "Fauci lied." Sadly, the unwillingness of the blind followers of our COVID-denying former president to heed the evidence and learn as Dr. Fauci did has undoubtedly cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans who listened to them and failed to take an effective and straightforward step like wearing a mask or were infected by asymptomatic carriers who thought they knew better than the experts. 

In short, the claims being made by the likes of Tucker Carlson and others that Dr. Fauci was in any way deceptive or inaccurate in his advice are distortions of the facts every bit as egregious as those perpetrated by Donald Trump and his followers during this pandemic. They, and not Dr. Fauci, have blood on their hands.