Given that you are in DC, and this is the topic du jour, I'd like to ask you about Fauci. So, first, what do you think that the Fauci diaries revealed?
Well, it revealed the inner thoughts of somebody who is a tremendously powerful figure at the NIH. And it showed his, frankly, the way he was thinking in private regarding all of the advice he was giving to tremendously powerful people and what he showed in public were very different. And it's disturbing to me to see that disjunction between the private ideas of someone like Tony Fauci and the advice that he gave. I mean, I saw him once give a speech or an interview where he said he never recommended school closures. Yet, in black and white, there is in the diary a recommendation to people in California to close down schools. My kids stayed out of school for a year and a half. It kind of hurt to see that.
You made clear that these were private notes in a diary. Should private notes be held differently than public statements? And would you want your diary put out there for the world to see?
Well, you know, the thing is, this is a private diary that he kept on government servers. And they reflect someone who had a tremendous impact on the lives of every single person in the country and in the world. I think it's in the public interest for those notes to be released. And the notes that I keep on my public computers are absolutely available to anybody through FOIA and other means.
Okay, so to put it bluntly, do you think that Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about COVID and its origins?
I think that Dr. Fauci's role in the COVID origins is much more complicated than he let on in his public statements earlier. I leave it to other people to say one way or the other.
Senator Rand Paul has called for Fauci to face prosecution over his handling of COVID. Do you think that he committed a crime and if so, what crime?
You know, I'm not in the legal system, I'm not the NIH director. To me, the key thing is that the institution of the NIH is a tremendously important institution. It's advanced the health of so many people. I don't think that you asking me to stand over judgment on Tony Fauci is the right thing. What I will say is that the reforms that we put in place at the NIH will help restore it to a place where people like Tony Fauci cannot abuse their power in the way that he actually did, as is revealed in his diary. And restore the NIH to its real purpose, which is to support research that actually advances the health and well-being of the American people.
What would you say were his abuses then? Let me ask it differently because I think it is actually fair to qualify that. What would you say are his alleged abuses in office and would you say that he practiced medical malpractice against the American people?
Again, malpractice is a legal question. The abuse that I saw, probably the primary abuse beyond the one which is privately thinking one thing and then publicly saying another, is that he shut down scientific debate, denigrated scientists that disagreed with him, including myself and many others, simply for the sin of disagreeing with them. Instead of, as is his obligation as the head of a large institute, the NIH, to open up scientific debate, to encourage it, to allow people to have detailed scientific discussion where evidence was the focus rather than the kind of shutting down of discussion and debate. The evidence is in the diary.
Is it fair to judge his actions during COVID during the fog of war with 20/20 hindsight? Maybe he was trying to just keep the country on an even keel and not to sow panic.
Well, now I think the right way to deal with that is to embrace the fact that there's uncertainty rather than speak to the public as if there's certainty in a time where many people are looking to you as the head of the NIH or the head of the NIAID as he was for answers when the answers aren't actually clear based on the scientific evidence. You shouldn't pretend that you know them. You should instead speak with humility. You should instead invite scientific discussion and open conversation among scientists where the focus is on developing the evidence. I think that's really where he failed. I mean, I think really I just want to move on in one sense. I think it's very important for the public to hear that the NIH is now focused on actually doing scientific work that advances health and longevity. I think the way that Tony Fauci acted during the pandemic, he was the head of a research institute. He wasn't the head of public health. Yet he acted as if he were the head of public health in this country. I think that kind of conflation of roles as well as the fact that he frankly abused the place of power that he'd been given both by the media and by powerful politicians. I think that's really the problem.
But he was invited into that place of power by the administration of President Trump.
Yeah, I mean, I think that.
Asked to be essentially the even keel, the person to deliver the best practices for an unknown situation without sowing panic.
I mean, I think that's the problem, right? So, it's not a problem that he was invited. That's fine. The problem is that when you are in a position like that, and I personally have been in those positions, it is absolutely imperative that you convey clearly what's known and what's not known. That you don't step outside or beyond the role that you actually have based on the expertise you have. So, he was making decisions about closing schools, in my view against what the actual evidence was saying at the time. Like the European countries opened their schools in the fall of 2020 based on a lot of that evidence that he ignored. But be that as it may, there was legitimate scientific debate. Instead of conveying that actual scientific discussion that was going on at the time, he conveyed a certainty that it turns out even in his diary he didn't even feel himself. So, I think the issue here is one of, leave aside the legal aspects, that's not my expertise. It's one of if we're going to talk to the public in times of uncertainty from positions of power like being the head of the NIAID or head of the NIH, head of the CDC, it's incumbent on us to accurately reflect what's known and what's not known. And where there's uncertainty to convey that, and I think he pretty fundamentally failed at that.
To encapsulate what you've been saying, basically it is that the message was not clearly defined, it may have been wrong, and he failed to invite a greater discourse among scientists about something that he acted as if was known, but really remained an unknown. Is that correct?
Yeah. I mean, I think that's true. But there's also questions about the origin of COVID.
Which I was going to ask you next.
Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, to the issue.
Originated? Do we yet know?
Well, we don't know for certain, but it seems really quite likely given the evidence that I've seen that it originated in a Chinese lab. And I think that the NIH under Tony Fauci made decisions to support research that actually might have led to the creation of COVID. I believe inadvertently, but with a lab leak that caused tremendous damage around the world. It's very clear from the diaries that Tony Fauci understood that this was a possibility. And at the same time, his public utterances treated that idea as if it were just a conspiracy theory. And so as a result, the American people were denied the honest debate and discussion that they deserved regarding the evidence of where the origins of COVID actually were.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Dr. Fauci's research led in any way to the development of what became COVID-19?
I mean, I think there's evidence that Tony Fauci authorized research that happened in the Wuhan lab with American taxpayer money. Despite the fact that there were other scientists who thought that this kind of research was too dangerous to do. In fact, President Obama put a pause on such research, and Tony Fauci found ways to get around that. That's clear from the evidence that I've seen. So the question is just did it cause the pandemic or not? That is going to be hard to tell until the Chinese actually give us their lab notebooks, which they won't do. What I do know is that the decisions made by Tony Fauci in the years leading up to the pandemic very well could have led to the cause that caused the pandemic. It's this kind of dangerous gain-of-function research that he supported. Many scientists said was too dangerous to do. And this is why we've undertaken reforms to try to make sure that those kinds of experiments never again happen under the support of the NIH or the rest of the federal government.
So, explain what gain-of-function research actually is.
Well, it's where you take a virus or some pathogen or some bug and then you manipulate it genetically to make it more transmissible, more dangerous, more infective to humans or even more lethal. You might ask, 'Why would anyone want to do this?' It's because the idea was that we have lots of pathogens, we want to see which ones are most likely to potentially harm humans and then make vaccines in advance for them. The problem with that is that if you have a lab leak with a pathogen that's never infected a human and it circles the earth infecting billions, and it may take a while to actually test the countermeasures that you developed, you can cause catastrophic harm as we saw during the pandemic. That whole paradigm of trying to stop pandemics by this kind of dangerous gain-of-function I think never made any sense. And I'm really glad that we now have in place tools to make sure that that never happens again.
