When Science Is Not Science

We’ll be a long time recovering from the evidence-free ‘science’ pushed on the public during Covid.

J ust 22 percent of all adults and 41 percent of those 65 and older — the most vulnerable group — have received the updated 2023–24 Covid-19 vaccine. The numbers are nearly identical to those of the previous updated (bivalent) Covid-19 booster — 21 percent of adults and 43 percent of people 65 and older. But both updates showed a marked drop-off from the original two-shot vaccine series that 79 percent of adults and 94 percent of the elderly received. Senior FDA officials Doctors Peter Marks and Robert Califf argue that despite the proven benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, we have reached a “tipping point” where this new vaccine hesitancy will result in thousands of preventable deaths.

But low vaccine uptake is not, as Marks and Califf suggest, a result of misinformation, at least not misinformation in the way they mean it. Rather, it is the product of science, specifically public-health science, as practiced during the pandemic, that was evidence-free, politically and personally motivated, dismissive of other points of view, and that ended up undermining public trust.

As time has gone by, it has become clear that public-health pandemic science, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci — who famously declared, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — was far removed from the scientific method of unbiased observation and experimentation to ascertain truth about natural processes.

Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the guidelines he championed to keep people six feet apart were not based on scientific data. “They sort of just appeared,” he said. Testimony from the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, confirmed Fauci’s assessment that the six-foot distancing recommendation was not evidence based.

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant.

And who can forget Fauci’s flip-flops on masking? In a February 2020 email, Fauci advised that masking would not protect against infection while traveling because the typical mask “is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.” Similarly, in a March 8 interview on 60 Minutes, he said that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” This advice reflected the scientific consensus: Before Covid none of the pandemic plans from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, or the United Kingdom recommended generalized masking. A systematic review of randomized controlled trials available through March 2020, published by the highly respected Cochrane Library early in the pandemic, concluded that medical/surgical masks have little or no impact on disease from respiratory viruses.

But a month after his first appearance, Fauci was back on 60 Minutes advocating for masks, including cloth ones, which he implausibly claimed were as good as surgical and N95 masks. In fact, no study has ever shown that cloth masks protect against respiratory viruses. Fauci later explained that he had originally discouraged mask use not because they don’t work, but to preserve an adequate supply of masks for health-care workers.

Fauci later advocated wearing two masks because “it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.” Hardly what one would expect from a scientist.

Fauci had company leading the pubic astray. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommended masks, including cloth ones. Yet the CDC based its guidelines on a few, small, non-randomized, observational studies. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) — the gold standard in science — showed no benefit for generalized masking. An RCT of hospital workers actually showed higher infection rates with cloth masks than medical masks. A study of infection rates with mask mandates and mask use in all 50 states during the first year of the pandemic concluded that “mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-19 growth surges.” Nevertheless, the CDC, apparently with input from teachers’ unions, continued to recommend masking for years, long after it was clear that the policy was ineffective for controlling disease and was impairing schoolkids’ psycho-social development. And it later became apparent that teachers’-union boss Randi Weingarten had direct input into CDC’s evidence-free guidance on the reopening of schools.

Fauci and company did not just disregard basic science. Collins admitted in a recent interview that he and other prominent figures had been narrowly focused on a “really unfortunate,” “public-health mindset” that ignored the side effects of their recommendations:

If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens. . . . You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.

Fauci expressed similar sentiments in a New York Times interview after he left office. “We looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments. . . . Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

Both Fauci and Collins were so committed to their “public-health mindset” that they were unwilling to allow others’ viewpoints to be expressed. My former colleagues from the Council of Economic Advisers tell me that when they told Fauci at the Covid task-force meetings in March 2020 that the lockdowns would lead to a recession or worse, Fauci ignored them and sought reassurance from Vice President Pence (who was the task-force leader) that Fauci and company were still in charge. Fauci disparaged those who were concerned about the economic fallout of lockdowns as having “an anti-science bias.”

Fauci and Collins also organized what Collins advocated in an email to Fauci as, “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. The GBD expressed concern about the damaging physical and mental-health and economic impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns that would lead to excess mortality from non-Covid causes; instead, the authors proposed “focused protection” of vulnerable groups such as the elderly. When the GBD was published on October 5, 2020, it was already clear that people over 65 and with those with multiple medical problems were most at risk and that generalized lockdowns were harmful and unnecessary.

That same October, Fauci boasted that he had advised the president to shut down the country and bemoaned the fact that we “did not shut down completely, the way China did.” He criticized decision-makers who considered the negative consequences of lockdowns in states such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia that had “tried to so-called ‘open up carefully.’” In fact, an empirical study I co-authored with colleagues from the Paragon Health Institute showed that states that stuck with severe lockdown measures had no better health outcomes but far worse economic and educational outcomes as compared with states that lifted lockdowns.

Other actions seemed to be motivated less by science or the public-health mindset and more by a desire to protect personal and institutional reputations. When prominent virologists expressed concern that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 might have been engineered at and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Fauci and Collins helped draft, publish, and promote a letter/article refuting the lab-leak hypothesis, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” on March 17, 2020, in the prominent journal Nature Medicine. The article unequivocally stated “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Fauci and Collins would repeatedly cite the article as proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a natural origin, as if the article had been published independently of their efforts.

In fact, the lead author of the letter, Kristian Andersen, of Scripps Research Institute, emailed Fauci on January 31, 2020, about the new virus, saying, “One has to look really closely at the sequences to see some of the features (potentially) look engineered. . . . I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson], and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” (emphasis added).

The next day, February 1, 2020, Fauci and Collins held a telephone conference with Andersen and other virologists, including Holmes, Garry, and Andrew Rambaut, who were concerned that the virus had been engineered and leaked. The following day, February 2, Garry wrote in an email, “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV. . . . I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy.” That same day Rambaut stated, “From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.” The furin cleavage site makes the virus more transmissible and is not found in any other SARS-like coronavirus. And two days later, February 4, Holmes indicated that he was “60-40 lab.”

Remarkably though, within days of the February 1, 2020, call, Anderson, Holmes, Garry and Rambaut — four of the five authors — produced a first draft of their influential “proximal origins” letter rebutting the lab-leak theory and sent it to Fauci and Collins for approval. The final draft was published online February 16 and the print version a month later.

The authors appeared to be concerned that the possibility of a lab leak would reflect badly on Chinese scientists. On February 2, Rambaut wrote via Slack to Andersen, Holmes, and Garry, that, “given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.” Andersen responded, “I totally agree. . . . Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”

That same day, Dr. Collins wrote that experts needed to publicly support the natural-origin theory of the virus, “or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony .”

Fauci and Collins seemed intent on suppressing the possibility of a lab leak for another reason. The U.S. government, and NIH in particular, was funding coronavirus research at the WIV, including some that could qualify as “gain-of-function virus research” — laboratory manipulation to enhance the transmissibility or virulence of organisms. This raised the possibility that NIH was partly responsible for the pandemic.

The Government Accountability Office reported that three Chinese entities that conduct work on infectious diseases, including pandemic viruses — the WIV, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and Wuhan University — received more than $2 million of funding from the NIH and the U.S. Agency for International Development between 2014 and 2020 through sub-awards made from American institutions. Approximately $600,000 of NIH funding was funneled through EcoHealth Alliance to the WIV between June 2014 and May 2019 to extract bat-virus RNA and conduct experiments to assess transmission of bat coronaviruses to humans. This included combining naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses (known human pathogens), resulting in hybridized coronavirus strains. Additional NIH money was granted to the WIV through the University of California, Irvine, but was never paid, because the NIH suspended the sub-award in May 2020 over biosafety concerns.

Fauci has repeatedly claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research. But after speaking with the concerned virologists on the February 1, 2020, email, he immediately emailed colleagues saying,

They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.

Fauci was referring to the fact that the WIV is a leading center for research on bats and coronaviruses; the lab is headed by Dr. Zhangli-Li Shi, known as the “Bat Woman.” WIV was actively engaged in gain-of-function research to modify bat coronaviruses to attack human cells as “part of an active and highly collaborative US–China scientific research program funded by the US Government” that U.S. State Department inspectors reported was conducted with sub-par safety controls. Shi published NIH-funded gain-of-function work that she had performed with Ralph Baric, the world’s leading authority on gain-of-function research, to enable SARS-like bat coronaviruses to replicate in human airway cells.

Moreover, a letter from Lawrence Tabak, NIH’s principal deputy director, to Representative James Comer (R., Ky.) confirmed that the agency, during 2018–19, funded research at the WIV that grafted spike proteins from other coronaviruses onto a bat coronavirus called WIV1 to see whether the modified virus was capable of binding to human ACE2 receptors in mice. ACE2 is the same receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds. The modified virus reproduced more rapidly and made the humanized mice sicker than unmodified viruses did.

Over a million Americans are believed to have died from Covid-19. But another major casualty of the pandemic is the public’s trust. It succumbed to the public-health establishment’s persistent scientific misinformation and will take a long time to recover.