This week the US Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Tony Fauci in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth when he testified before the committee. What a mess.
At one level, this is embarrassing to me because it represents a very public brawl between two physicians – Senator (and Doctor) Rand Paul, who is an ophthalmologist and the son of a obstetrician-gynecologist, and Dr. Tony Fauci, who is an internist, infectious disease specialist and immunologist.
I’m embarrassed because I’m silly enough to believe that doctors should be able to treat one another with dignity and respect. I’m old enough to remember the days when physicians didn’t criticize one another in public, and certainly never to patients. Back then, there was even something called professional courtesy. We didn’t charge when we saw one another as patients, because we were trusted colleagues, not combatants – and we worked out our differences quietly, with dignity, behind closed doors. Once upon a time.
I’m no fan of Dr. Fauci’s, especially since seeing his self-serving diaries. I was never comfortable with his big media pronouncements, because I never thought he was honest enough about what we didn’t know. He was big on pronouncing the answer, as if from on high, instead of telling people to talk to their own doctor, who knows them, their families and communities best. He was at NIH, a researcher. So I always thought he was an ivory tower guy, one of the academic and researcher colleagues who have been missing the boat for years – who are more interested in answering twitchy little research questions than they are in making sure our science gets to everyone, so it can prevent disease and save lives.
That said, this fight is a tornado in a teapot. In June of 2020, when lots of recent information was still available, I carefully reviewed the history of Covid 19, and this is what I found: we’ll likely never know if SARS CoV-2 (which is the name of the virus), crossed over from an animal host or was created in a lab and escaped, because the Chinese destroyed all the evidence. It’s clear that no one should have ever been doing gain-of-function research, which is what Dr. Fauci is accused of funding and then covering up. I have no way to know if it was actually funded, or if a lab in China that was funded for other virology research used some of that money for gain of function research – with, or without the tacit wink, wink and nod knowledge of NIH and CDC funders, which is what Dr./Senator Paul apparently believes. But all that doesn’t matter now, because we’ll never know if there was a lab leak or not.
(See https://www.michaelfinemd.com/_files/ugd/579302_80c1d2727df74efd8ecb7e749d593ec0.pdf for the whole story)
What matters is that the Chinese completely mishandled their public health response to this new cause of pneumonia, and let people move about, and travel internationally, when population movement should have been locked down in China, likely by mid-October of 2019. Instead, the Chinese balked, shucked, and slow-walked a response for internal political reasons, not that our response, which should have been all hands-on-deck by January 1, 2020 or earlier, was itself slow-walked and bungled, in part because our then Trump appointed second CDC director wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and in part because of the political culture then present in Washington.
But make no mistake. It was the Chinese who blew it. They caused something like 20 million deaths around the world and contributed to more than 1.1 million unnecessary deaths here. I still think we should have boycotted Chinese goods until China paid reparations and changed its public health culture. Instead, we got a go-along -to get-along response, because no one wanted to give up cheap TVs and ordering from TEMU, because we now value stuff more than we value human life.
To me. Dr Fauci is an old man with an ego problem, but no one should want to put an 85-year-old in jail, regardless of how we disappointed we were and are or how ashamed we might be about our failed public health response. Dr. Fauci helped run NIH –and not CDC — while a whole bunch of media folks pushed him forward to be the government spokesperson, but while no one was fixing a very disordered CDC culture. The hearing this week in DC feels like a media circus, not a reasoned public debate about how we can and should organize and fund public health.
What’s the helicopter story? While this circus was going on in Washington. I saw an amazing little video on LinkedIn, made by Alister Martin, MD, the Health Commissioner of New York City, about a helicopter the New York City Department of Health uses to drop larvicide that kills mosquitos in the marshlands of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, which is where the mosquitos that transmit West Nile and Eastern Equine Encephalitis breed. You, and most New Yorkers, probably didn’t know that New York City has acres and acres of these marshlands, just like you probably don’t know the Rhode Island Department of Health is instrumental to making sure Rhode Island’s cities and towns have access to similar larvicides. Most New Yorkers have no idea how their Department of Health is working quietly, sight unseen, to prevent the transmission of these diseases and a zillion others, just like most Rhode Islanders don’t know how our Department of Health prevents the transmission of diseases most of us can’t spell, let alone pronounce, because when prevention succeeds, nothing happens. Nothing. No public hearing. No blame and pointing fingers. No threatening jail. Nothing happens. Which is the opposite of what happened in China, when public health failed, and 20 million people died.
Here’s the truth about what’s been going on in Washington this week. Two renowned physicians weren’t talking about how to give public health the resources it needs to work behind the scenes and make nothing happen. Instead, two big egos were distracting us from honoring the work of thousands of public health workers, who work in obscurity day in and day out, to prevent disease so nothing happens, so you and me and our kids can sleep well at night and wake up healthy the next day.
That’s heartbreaking. And crazy.
You can find Michael Fine’s commentaries and short stories on
https://michaelfinemd.substack.com/and on http://www.michaelfinemd.com
