Unmasking The Consensus – OpEd

In December 2019, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), got word of a strange coronavirus on the loose in China. The virus made its way to America and in 2020, the face of the government’s response was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

To combat the spreading COVID virus, Dr. Fauci announced a rigid lockdown regime, closing schools, restaurants, businesses and so forth. For Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, that didn’t square with tested epidemiological practice, nor with the response of Florida and countries such as Sweden. Dr. Bhattacharya teamed with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which called for a more open approach.

Instead of debating these medical scientists, the government medical establishment attacked the GBD.  The Lockdown Dissidents, a new documentary by Palladium Pictures, in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal, lets the dissidents tell the story. 

Dr. Bhattacharya explains how National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins branded the GBD founders “fringe epidemiologists” and tapped Dr. Fauci for a “devastating takedown.” As Dr. Redfield notes, calling for a “takedown” is not a scientific procedure. 

The GBD drew a million signers, but Bhattacharya et al were still attacked in medical journals and the establishment press. Dr. Scott Atlas, brought in by President Trump as an alternative to Fauci, even received death threats, which Dr. Redfield had also received when he spotted evidence of a laboratory origin for COVID. Dr. Fauci contended that it emerged in the wild, which is speculation, not science. 

The Lockdown Dissidents actually goes easy on Dr. Fauci, whose bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. According to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, Dr. Fauci “should not be in a position like he’s in.” Even so, Dr. Fauci proclaimed that he represented science, and his critics were only criticizing science. As the documentary shows, the NIAID boss took that to another level. 

“Pushing back on authority,” Dr. Fauci said, “is pushing back on government, is the same as pushing back on science.” For the NIAID boss, a government bureaucrat since 1968, this was not a new concept. 

“I think what people have to appreciate is that indeed, you do have personal liberties for yourself and you should be in control of that,” Dr. Fauci told reporters in 2021. 

But you are a member of society, and as a member of society—reaping all the benefits of being a member of society—you have a responsibility to society. And I think each of us, particularly in the context of a pandemic that’s killing millions of people, you have got to look at it and say there comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society. (emphasis added) 

That’s the basic totalitarian ethos, and the dissidents find traces in the government campaign against free speech. Joe Biden told reporters the lockdown dissidents were “killing people,” and the Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor their posts. Their views were smeared as “misinformation,” which in practice meant any departure from the government medical establishment and the opinions of Dr. Fauci. 

The Lockdown Dissidents also tracks Dr. Deborah Birx, whose mantra was silent asymptomatic spread. In Birx’s view, basically everybody was a COVID carrier, so we needed masks, social distancing, and lockdowns coupled with propaganda campaigns against those who opposed such measures.  

For Scott Atlas, this was more like a totalitarian state than a nation that had codified freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and so forth. Dr. Bhattacharya, now director of the National Institutes of Health, makes it clear that free speech is vital to science. The states and nations that resisted lockdowns did better than those that followed Dr. Fauci, who claimed to represent science. 

The struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The Lockdown Dissidents is a superb aid to memory, and there’s plenty of material for a sequel.   

Joe Biden joked that Dr. Fauci was the real president and on his last day in the White House, Biden pardoned Fauci without naming any crime he committed. As the people should know, the government’s first spokesperson on COVID was not Anthony Fauci but Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). 

In a series of telebriefings in early 2020, Dr. Messonnier traced the “novel coronavirus” to the “Wuhan market” in China. When asked about travel from Wuhan, Dr. Messonnier told reporters she was “not at liberty” to discuss it. Messonnier is a veteran of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) a medical CIA tasked to prevent malevolent viruses from arriving in America. With COVID, the EIS obviously failed. 

Maybe Dr. Messonnier could explain how that happened. Was anybody discharged, demoted, or disciplined? And was the origin of COVID the “Wuhan market” or the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), funded by Dr. Fauci to perform dangerous gain-of-function research? The people have a right to know and Dr. Messonnier received no presidential pardon. 

Meanwhile, on Dr. Bhattacharya’s watch, no self-proclaimed authority will be attacking medical researchers. 

“The only effective way for scientists to check one another is through replication,” writes the lockdown dissident. “If I am right, other scientists should be able to replicate those same experiments and come up with the same answer.” Replication, along with reproducibility, is the basis for a “Second Scientific Revolution,” good news for the people moving forward.  

• This article was published at the Independent Institute