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2020-03-21 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

Anthony Fauci, the NIH's face of the coronavirus, is a deep-state Hillary Clinton-loving stooge

[American Thinker] Anthony Fauci, M.D., the 79-year old head of the National Institute of Allegy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has become the #1 point man on the government’s role in the coronavirus crisis. Fauci has worked for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) his entire professional life. In the past, for more than two decades starting in the mid-1980s, he was the medical establishment’s face of HIV-AIDS ‐ omnipresent on television when AIDS was hot and ever present at international AIDS conferences well into the 21st century. Always, he was an enthusiastic advocate of throwing more federal money at the problem of AIDS. He's widely praised in the press. He's also held in high esteem by his medical peers. In 2008, President George W. Bush honored Fauci with the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A look back at what Fauci and his colleagues did during their decades of pushing fear and the spending of billions of dollars of funding for HIV-AIDS is instructive.

As an independent journalist, I covered the "war" on HIV-AIDS extensively starting in 1986 ‐ just as the massive effort to combat the condition was gearing up. Eventually, the government’s spending on HIV-AIDS came to eclipse what was spent on the failed war on cancer that began in 1971, which is where my reporting on the politics of medicine and cancer had started.

After seeing a March 9, 2020 tweet by Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., who has four degrees from MIT, I was inspired to take a look back to try to put Fauci’s current work on coronavirus into some perspective.

Related: MAIL - Dr Anthony Fauci facepalms and rolls his eyes as President Trump rants about the 'deep state' during coronavirus press conference

Posted by Besoeker 2020-03-21 06:06|| || Front Page|| [7 views ] Top

#1 Bush honored Fauci with the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom

That went well.

Posted by Woodrow 2020-03-21 08:11|| 2020-03-21 08:11|| Front Page Top

#2 From the article - NIH Research $ Spent, per Patient - 1998
AIDS:..................$2,400
Breast Cancer:.......$230
Heart Disease:.......$108
Parkinson's:.............$78
Diabetes:.................$28

That means Faici's pet project, AIDS research, hovered nearly 5x the NIH research dollars as three diseases that together kill far more Americans each year than AIDS ever did or could. There were 400k deaths caused by AIDS in the preceding 7 years, vs 14 million deaths from heart disease alone during that period. Another disease for which research funding was crowded out by AIDS research, diabetes, now causes, at minimum, 83,000 deaths per year and likely many more. IOW, these diseases are killing far more Americans each year than the AIDS epidemic at its peak killed -- and our betters decided that it was wise to allocate to AIDS 24x the funding (in the case of AIDS vs heart disease) or up to 100x the funding (vs diabetes) allocated to known killers that destroy the general population - as opposed to affecting a tiny demographic.

Granted that the current epidemic disproportionately kills a demographic, the elderly, that is many times larger than the demographic that AIDS disproportionately affected - and, unlike this author, I'm not sure it diminishes Fauci's standing as a medical expert - but from a POLICY standpoint, this data set is very disturbing.

It suggests that our leaders allocate medical and other public health resources in ways that are less than rational and that end up causing far more deaths and misery than they prevent.

Am I missing something?

Posted by Lex 2020-03-21 08:12|| 2020-03-21 08:12|| Front Page Top

#3 After seeing a March 9, 2020 tweet by Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., who has four degrees from MIT

Fun fact - Shiva is a former client of mine. It lasted about a year or so - he was overly demanding and unreasonable and I wound up hanging up on him twice in one day. At that point I knew it was over.

Posted by Raj 2020-03-21 09:17|| 2020-03-21 09:17|| Front Page Top

#4 Actually, Lex, I think you are. I'm not saying the priorities are right--I don't think they are.

AIDS research lets you study details of the immune system--how to turn bits off and maybe back on. It is, from a researcher's viewpoint, both fascinating and far-reaching. Things happen on a faster time-scale, and there are fewer complications like genetic predisposition to breast cancer. We already know ways to treat AIDS, so this may be a little more "pure research."

The problem is, as you point out, that focusing research dollars here isn't apt to return the same public health benefits as more "applied research" on heart disease. True, we already know a lot about heart disease--eat less, exercise, and choose your ancestors carefully. But we could do better.

Posted by james 2020-03-21 16:53|| https://idontknowbut.blogspot.com 2020-03-21 16:53|| Front Page Top

#5 Thanks, James. V Helpful.

Posted by Lex 2020-03-21 18:02|| 2020-03-21 18:02|| Front Page Top

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