Subject: Fauci's testimony and interviews, and the med
From an interview, he said:
I've testified literally hundreds of times over the last forty years in front of Congress and there's always been differences of opinions, differences of ideology, criticisms and things like that. But the level of vitriol that we see now just in the country in general, but just played out during this hearing, was really quite unfortunate, because the purpose of hearings is to try to figure out how we can do better, so that we can, next time, if and when we are faced with a pandemic, we'd be better prepared, and we could benefit if mistakes were made, we could identify them, and we try to correct them for the future.

Uh, huh. This from a guy who arrogantly proclaimed himself "the science" and refused to admit he got anything wrong. He testimony this week was a limp attempt to have it both ways with the "Well, at the beginning we had to do SOMETHING..." nonsense.

Well, yes. You had to do *something*, and that was to act rationally and look at the data you had. But he didn't. He kept his made up restrictions in place for YEARS and followed up the made up masking and distance standards with attacks on anybody who questioned what he was doing. To top it all off if somebody dared bring up the lab leak theory they were labeled a Conspiracy Nut by the media.

https://reason.com/2024/01/10/...
One can debate the extent of Fauci's wrongdoing here—but it's the mainstream media that really dropped the ball in terms of lab leak discourse. The Washington Post was an early offender, accusing Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) of "repeating a coronavirus theory that was already debunked." The article explicitly applied the phrase "conspiracy theory" to the lab leak idea; The New York Times did the same, noting that the lab leak had been "dismissed by scientists." In fact, The Times' lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, went a step further, calling lab leak a racist theory.

The media dutifully carried the water and attacked anybody who stepped out of line.

ollowing this flawed consensus, social media sites—including Facebook—brutally suppressed any and all discussion of the lab leak theory on their platforms. As recently as August 2023, The Journal of the American Medical Association was still counting lab leak discourse online as evidence of the unstoppable spread of misinformation online. And the Global Disinformation Index—a British non-profit that received funding from the State Department, and tarred Reason as an unsafe news website—warned that blaming the pandemic on a lab leak could lead to racist attacks on Asian people.

Bureaucrats like Fauci and Birx, aided and abetted by the tech industry and the Disinformation Industrial Complex managed to destroy the public's confidence in the nation's public health sector. It's going to take years to rebuild.