Recently updated guidelines from the CDC for vaccinated individuals have caused many people to take a step back and question the reliability of the information being peddled by health experts. Even the New York Times is calling out Dr. Anthony Fauci for intentionally peddling Covid misinformation specifically regarding gain-of-function research in Wuhan funded by the U.S.
The Times columnist Bret Stephens published a piece titled, “Covid Misinformation Comes From the Top, Too” where he called out Fauci for using misinformation to hide information about the origins behind COVID-19.
According to Fox News:
“Fauci is almost certainly right on the technical merits … But the larger truth — obscured until recently by fervent efforts (including by Fauci) to dismiss the lab-leak theory for the origins of the pandemic — is that the U.S. government’s scientific establishment did support gain-of-function research that deserved far more public debate than it got,” Stephens wrote. “Also incontrovertibly true is that beneficiaries of that funding engaged in deceptive tactics and outright mendacity to shield their research from public scrutiny while denouncing their critics as conspiracymongers.”
“If millions feel that some public-health experts are not as heroic or as honest as their media stenographers make them out to be, there’s a good reason for it,” Stephens wrote.
Liberal media figures have attempted to claim Covid misinformation only comes from the right but Stephens notes that it’s figures like Fauci who constantly change his stance and advice that cause confusion and the opportunity for misinformation to spread like wildfire.
The Times columnist then called out Fauci over his comments about herd immunity, insisting he “lied” “about what he saw as the threshold figure” because, according to Fauci’s interview with the Times in December, because of “his gut feeling that tthe country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” He also listed the CDC’s faulty overestimation over the outdoor spread of COVID and its study that claimed Black and Hispanic children were “at greater risk of being hospitalized,” which became a contributing factor to schools being closed despite consistent evidence that schools were never a superspreader for children.
“The impact of this misinformation on everyday life has been immense … The credibility of public-health experts depends on the understanding that the job of informing the public means offering the whole truth, uncertainties included, rather than offering Noble Lies in the service of whatever they think the public needs to hear,” Stephens argued.
Fauci has famously changed his mind on nearly every aspect of the virus and how Americans should protect themselves from it. Now as some cities reimpose mask mandates citizens have begun to wonder if a second lockdown could be coming soon.
