Fauci failures: Lessons not learned from AIDS

October 4, 2021. This article confirms what I have been asking for the past year: If Fauci could be so wrong on AIDS, why should we believe him on Covid? Three key paragraphs follow, italics and bold added. Remember, 70 million people have died from AIDS, and its pandemic continues.

Unlearned AIDS Lessons for Covid - WSJ.pdf

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‘Follow the science,” we’ve been told throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. But if we had paid attention to history, we would have known that once a disease becomes newsworthy, science gets distorted by researchers, journalists, activists and politicians eager for attention and power—and determined to silence those who challenge their fear-mongering.

When AIDS spread among gay men and intravenous drug users four decades ago, it became conventional wisdom that the plague would soon devastate the rest of the American population. In 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show by announcing, “Research studies now project that 1 in 5—listen to me, hard to believe—1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years.” The prediction was outlandishly wrong, but she wasn’t wrong in attributing the scare to scientists. One early alarmist was Anthony Fauci, who made national news in 1983 with an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning that AIDS could infect even children because of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” After criticism that he had inspired a wave of hysterical homophobia, Dr. Fauci (who in 1984 began his current job, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), promptly pivoted 180 degrees, declaring less than two months after his piece appeared that it was “absolutely preposterous” to suggest AIDS could be spread by normal social contact. But other supposed experts went on warning erroneously that AIDS could spread widely via toilet seats, mosquito bites and kissing.

Where is Fauci's credibility? accountability? Baltimore's icon, Oprah Winfrey, should be ashamed. Like the Imperial College of London, citing "research projections" as science is a fool's game, just as with climate change. As Matt Ridley notes, horrific projections are always exaggerated and widely distributed by the press and "expert" pundits because, as the article notes, dire forecasts earn the forecaster attention, admiration and more funding -- but not accountability.