Infection and Information

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

Can we talk?

One of the truly great comedians of the last 50 years was Joan Rivers. She had a routine that would start with “Can we talk?” Whenever she said that, you knew that she was going to reveal some embarrassing truth that was somewhat cringe-worthy—but also really funny. So can we talk honestly about Anthony Fauci?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was called before the US Senate to be a punching bag. Long before he was a household name, Dr. Fauci graduated first from Cornell Medical College. He joined the NIH in 1968. Dr. Fauci rose through the ranks at the NIH until, in 1984, he was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

It was through Dr. Fauci’s leadership that we actually figured out how to attack the AIDS virus. He sped up clinical trials for the antiretroviral drugs that are now so widely used today. He helped President George W. Bush develop a global initiative that provided expertise and medicine to millions of people in Africa. Dr. Fauci, George W. Bush, and the NIH are credited with saving over 25 million lives in Africa alone.

Think about all the scary infectious disease outbreaks that have happened over the last twenty or thirty years. Dr. Fauci was at the center of combating all of them—whether it was the anthrax outbreak after 9/11, the H1N1 swine flu of 2009, or the Ebola outbreak of 2014 through 2016. He was looking out for Americans. He was trying to save American lives.

Dr. Fauci worked for seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan all the way through to Joe Biden. The internal medicine textbook that sits in my office is called Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine. Dr. Fauci is one of the major editors, the editor of the infectious disease section. In the United States, there are very few physicians who are as accomplished and as respected as Anthony Fauci.

Scapegoat Mechanism

In psychology, there is a term called the scapegoat mechanism. It is a psychological defense strategy in which a group of people cannot accept their own failure or feelings and therefore have to find a target for their failures. Basically, they project their own failures onto a person or group and then heap scorn upon that person or group to avoid the real truth. The real truth is that they are to blame, not the scapegoat.

If anybody’s been paying attention to Donald Trump over the last 10 to 15 years, you know that Donald Trump has no ability to accept blame for anything that’s gone wrong. So Republicans in the Senate called Anthony Fauci in to make him the scapegoat of the Covid-19 debacle.

One senator went so far as to ask Dr. Fauci how he had the nerve to shut down the American economy. The question on its face is laughable. Dr. Fauci is a physician. He was Director of a division at the NIH, but he was not the President of the United States. He was not an elected official in Congress. He had no ability to shut down the economy. He had no ability to mandate masks. All he could do was make recommendations to the President of the United States. To misquote Harry Truman, “the buck stops with the president, not with Anthony Fauci.”

Let’s be honest. What is it that Anthony Fauci could say that would satisfy a Republican senator who was spewing vindictive falsehoods at Dr. Fauci and trying to impress Donald Trump? Exactly what could Anthony Fauci say to make that senator calm down and say, “Oh, you’re exactly right. I made a mistake”?

Nothing. There was nothing he could say. Therefore, it was in his best interest to assert his right to remain silent under the Constitution’s 5th Amendment. To “take the Fifth.”

Covid-19: A review of the facts

Covid-19 started as a viral infection in late 2019. The infection started in Wuhan, China. Because China is China, the world did not get much information from China about how the virus started. What were the initial treatments? What treatments were successful, and what were the initial treatment failures? As I recall, China tried to cover up a lot of that initial information, which left the rest of the world scrambling.

The first case in the United States was in Washington State in January of 2020. A man who had traveled to Wuhan province traveled back to the United States in mid-January. After he came back to the United States, he developed symptoms. He was admitted to a hospital in Everett, Washington.

There was no universal test for Covid-19 at the time, so the specimen had to be sent to the CDC for testing to confirm the patient had a Covid-19 infection. Interestingly, the patient developed pneumonia while in the hospital and was given remdesivir, an experimental antiviral drug. The patient rapidly improved and was discharged home. Remarkably, he survived. Unfortunately, cases began popping up all over the country: California, Illinois, Arizona.

Donald Trump instituted a travel ban, which he announced on January 31 and which went into effect on February 2, 2020. The travel ban was for anyone who traveled from China to the United States within the prior 14 days. Unfortunately, the travel ban did not come with everything that was needed. We needed to develop facilities to hold these people where they could get tested, released if they tested negative, and treated if they tested positive. Eleven airports were designated for health screening.

But Covid-19 infections began to spread rapidly. As I recall, the outbreaks in New York, New Orleans, and Chicago were devastating. We began to run out of personal protective equipment, hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators. (Anyone who says that we didn’t run out of critical material is lying. I was there. I saw it for myself.)

As more and more Americans began to get sick, the healthcare community began to scramble for answers. We did not have any good treatment for Covid-19. We did not have any widely accepted antiviral therapies. Patients were dying left and right. There were outbreaks at schools, meatpacking plants, and restaurants. Restaurants seemed to be a particularly infectious place.

In mid-March, the Trump administration issued a Voluntary Federal Social Distancing Guideline. The purpose of the guideline was to try to slow the spread of Covid-19. The Trump administration encouraged Americans to work from home, to avoid discretionary travel, and to avoid large social gatherings. We were also told to avoid bars, restaurants, and food courts. This was supposed to be a 15-day ban. On March 29, the ban was extended for another 30 days because Americans were still contracting the disease and dying at a terrible rate.

Remember, Donald Trump was telling us that Covid-19 would go away in the warmer summer months. He told us that we needed to inject ourselves with bleach or use some sort of high-intensity light to kill the virus. He resisted masks and social distancing. As Covid ripped through New York and the Black community, Trump suggested allowing Covid to run rampant. Remember that? Trump even stated that Covid didn’t infect healthy people as the virus was devastating nursing homes. Of course, Covid infected all Americans, whether they were healthy or not.

Covid-19 Deaths Per Month, 2020

January 2020 …………………… 5
February 2020 ……………….. 21
March 2020 ………………. 3,901
April 2020 ………………. 59,207
May 2020 ……………….. 47,107
June 2020 ………………. 16,985
July 2020 ……………….. 25,780
August 2020 ……………. 35,577
September 2020 ………. 18,226
October 2020 ………….. 27,285
November 2020 ………. 48,398
December 2020 ………. 85,203
Total …………………….. 367,695

Data from the National Center for Health Statistics

Trump wanted states to take the lead on how to treat and combat Covid-19. During this time, we needed a president who provided clear leadership. Instead, Trump provided the spectacle of meaningless news conferences.

Meanwhile, in the Department of Health and Human Services, Drs. Marks and Kadlec wanted to speed up vaccine development, which could take 5 to 10 years on average. They wanted to fund multiple vaccine technologies and accelerate the trial phases. They pitched their idea to Alex Azar, the Secretary of HHS, then to the military, and then to President Trump. In May 2020, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed. It sounded stupid, but this was incredibly important for saving American lives.

We, healthcare workers, were overwhelmed. For the first time in my lifetime, we had too many patients. There was no place to put them. I remember going to a hospital in the Midwest, and they had purchased or rented five or ten of these large mobile temporary buildings. Doctors and nurses were seeing patients in these structures. Some of them had small dividers so that nurses and doctors could care for 10 or 15 patients in small, cramped areas.

Walking through the emergency room was a surreal experience. A horror show. Every bed was full. Patients were suffering. Every chair in the waiting room was full. The hospital was using a temporary waiting room, also full. They had these overflow buildings, which were also full. Patients were waiting hours and hours and hours to be seen. No one could be admitted to the hospital because it was also full. It was simply awful.

You might remember—I do—that many ER physicians who were on the front lines of this battle began wearing “moon suits,” which had their own air filtration system. These suits helped prevent Covid-19 infections but made it difficult to hear patients and their families because of the fans embedded in these suits.

Fauci wasn’t perfect. He seemed to make the best decisions with the data available to him at the time. We were learning about the virus as we went along. The major medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet) were publishing studies on their websites almost every week. (These studies were not behind a paywall but were free for all to read.) We were all scrambling to get information, to see what would be the most effective way to take care of these patients.

It turned out that early intubation, which is a standard medical practice, was probably not the best way to take care of a patient who had Covid-19 pneumonia. For a physician, this is completely counterintuitive. On the other hand, masks were proven to be beneficial and decrease the spread of Covid-19. Social distancing was also helpful. But the most important thing to combat Covid-19 was vaccines. Antivirals like remdesivir were also helpful, but vaccines were the key. And through his diligence, honesty, hard work, openness to new ideas, and improved techniques, Dr. Fauci led the effort to limit, slow, and ultimately bring to a halt the ravages of Covid-19.

Why Fauci, Why Now?

Now, six years later, the midterm elections are almost upon us, and unfortunately the Republicans have done nothing to help the American people. They promised lower grocery prices. The prices at the cash register have steadily increased. Donald Trump frightened the American people by telling us that Kamala Harris was going to start a war in the Middle East when, in fact, it was Donald Trump who started a war in the Middle East—and for no good reason.

Now we’re in one of those forever wars in the Mideast. Trump has no idea how to get out of this war. His “experts” like Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Secretary of State Rubio, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and real estate crony Steve Witkof have no idea what to do, either. Even his military leaders are begging enlisted men (but not women) to come up with ideas.

Trump also promised that on Day 1 he would deliver all the Epstein files, which instead are still being hidden, kept under wraps, redacted, and lied about.

Benghazi II

Anthony Fauci has provided the GOP with a convenient distraction. Dr. Fauci allows the GOP to deflect from their responsibility for over a million Americans dying from Covid. He provides them with a way not to blame the president, who was in charge, but Anthony Fauci, who has done nothing wrong and who has been a great public servant for over 50 years.

This is going to be a rehash of Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. Remember that the GOP found that Hillary Clinton had done nothing wrong as Secretary of State, but they held multiple hearings over Benghazi so as to rehash the problems over and over again. The result was to keep their false accusations in the news for months, weaken Hillary’s candidacy, and keep the media’s attention off their party’s failings.

It’s going to be the same with Dr. Fauci. I suspect the Republican-led Senate will hold him in contempt. They’ll do this because they’ve got nothing better to do. The Department of Justice will bring charges against Fauci, and he will be put on trial.

They’re not going to pass any legislation that puts more money in the pocket of Americans. They’re not going to deliver better health care to Americans or make gasoline more affordable for Americans. They’re not going to come up with a “solution” to the war against Iran—which Iran has already won by gaining complete control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The bottom line: this is a disgusting spectacle in which they will continue to punish a good American because he is now the GOP’s scapegoat.

Don’t Be Distracted!

I hope that in November Americans will see that the emperor has no clothes and vote Republicans out of office in droves. I pray that thoughtful, rational Americans get elected to the House and the Senate.

America, can we talk? Here’s what I want to say: VOTE.

Check your registration. Check it again next month. And again at the beginning of October. Then vote early, and then check the Board of Elections to confirm that you’ve been recorded as having voted.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.