Peter Navarro – Substack
By Peter Navarro
Team,
Fauci lied and Americans died.
This is my new piece on Anthony Fauci’s COVID diary, released by Senator Rand Paul, ahead of Fauci’s hearing today before Senator Paul and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
You can also read my piece HERE in The Washington Times.
And Fauci’s diary can be read HERE.
With nearly 60 mentions in the diary, I win, hands down, the title of White House official who most frequently challenged St. Fauci.
I challenged the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases across the board: on the China travel ban, the lab origin of COVID-19, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and Dr. Fauci’s foolish mandatory face masks and punishing lockdowns.
For my opposition to his authoritarian edicts, Dr. Fauci calls me in his diaries “weird,” “crazy,” “arrogant” and “delusional,” along with one colorful anatomical epithet not fit to print.
Ironically, it is Dr. Fauci’s own diary that proves I was right and he was wrong. About everything.
Consider my confrontation with Dr. Fauci in the Situation Room, at the dawn of the pandemic, about the China travel ban. President Trump had sent me to make the case for action. Dr. Fauci was the biggest opponent, repeatedly insisting that “travel bans don’t work.”
Yet Dr. Fauci calls me a liar and insists that he supported the ban.
I write about my January 2020 travel ban confrontation with Fauci in the excerpt below from my book In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year:
Of course, the last person in the Sit Room worth mentioning was sitting right across the table from me at high noon. It was a position that would, as it turned out, have no small amount of symbolism.
This small man with round glasses had a grin or a smirk on his face—I couldn’t tell which. It was none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci. When I looked into his eyes, he promptly averted his gaze, and I thought to myself, This could be trouble.
And trouble it was. Within minutes of [Mick] Mulvaney calling the meeting to order, I immediately got into a heated argument with Fauci over whether to ban all travel from China. As I’m sparring with him and thinking about all of the bodies being burned in Wuhan, I’m thinking to myself like Butch might say to Sundance, Who is this guy?
My clash with Fauci started with a comment from him that echoed several comments he had made a few days earlier. In a radio interview with WABC’s John Catsimatidis on January 26, [2020,] Fauci had described the Wuhan virus as “a very, very low risk to the United States.” Oh, really? thought I when I heard that clip.
In the Sit Room, Fauci echoed that sentiment; and my sharp retort was that even if there were a low risk, there would likely be a very high cost associated with what in his view was an unlikely pandemic. In that case, clearly the best decision would still be a travel ban—better safe than sorry.
In response, Fauci, in his thick Brooklyn accent, tacked toward a different argument. The exchange went something like this:
FAUCI: I’ve studied travel restrictions many, many times, and travel restrictions don’t work.
NAVARRO: You mean to tell me if China is sending us over twenty thousand passengers a day into airports like Kennedy, O’Hare, and LAX, some of whom may have escaped from the Ground Zero of Wuhan, there is no risk that some of these passengers will seed and spread the virus?
FAUCI: In my experience, travel restrictions don’t work.
NAVARRO: Again, let me ask you this simple question. If twenty thousand passengers a day are flying into the United States from China, wouldn’t it be prudent to pull down those flights to eliminate the possibility that at least some of those passengers may be infected with the virus?
FAUCI: In my experience, travel restrictions don’t work.
Of course, that made about as much sense to me as a conversation with Flaubert’s parrot.
Consider next the lab theory of COVID-19. On April 19, 2020, on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, I identified the likely source of the virus as a Wuhan lab leak. Dr. Fauci knew I was right. He said so in his diary.
You can watch a portion of my April 2020 interview with Maria HERE.
Privately, Dr. Fauci recorded on Jan. 31 that scientists had raised the possibility of deliberate laboratory insertion followed by an accidental release. After a Feb. 1 expert call, he wrote that most participants regarded deliberate insertion as possible and that “we could not let this go.”
Yet Dr. Fauci’s diary reveals the beginnings of an institutional cover-up. What had been treated privately as an urgent possibility was publicly downgraded into a conspiracy theory.
What about hydroxychloroquine? Before the politics hardened, Dr. Fauci’s private position was strongly supportive. On March 18, after an Oval Office discussion, he wrote that hydroxychloroquine was “an approved drug” and that “we have tons of experience with it.”
He added, “I am comfortable with the HC plan as discussed in the Oval,” and even suggested leading with hydroxychloroquine through a flexible distribution protocol.
That is not my spin. That is Tony Fauci in his own words.
Less than three weeks later, however, hydroxy had become politically radioactive after Mr. Trump dared to say it might help. That was when Dr. Fauci flipped from cautious openness to the all-purpose dismissal of “anecdotal evidence.”
In the Situation Room, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding, I laid a dossier of studies on the table and made the obvious point: These were supportive studies, not anecdotes.
Dr. Fauci never forgave the challenge.
Months later, after another hydroxychloroquine clash, he dismissed me in his diary as my “typical arrogant self” and acidly recorded my warning: “If I am wrong, no one is harmed. If you are wrong, thousands of people die.”
Thousands of people did indeed needlessly die.
I also write about my Situation Room hydroxychloroquine clash with Fauci in the below excerpt from In Trump Time:
FEAR IN HIS EYES, LOATHING IN MINE
On April 4, [2020] I had my second major facedown with Saint Fauci in the Situation Room. Recall that in my first go-round with him on January 28, Fauci had strenuously opposed President Trump’s travel ban on China. If we had not prevailed in that fight, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Americans would have needlessly died due to Fauci’s bad advice.
This time, the facedown with Fauci was over hydroxychloroquine. In preparation, I had Doc Hatfill and my team prepare a large dossier with the hundreds of pages of scientific studies I had reviewed on the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine. I knew that Fauci would play the “there’s only anecdotal evidence” card and wanted to be ready to prove that that assertion was false.
The meeting started off civilly enough. Vice President Mike Pence was at the head of the table, chairing the meeting, along with his chief of staff, Marc Short; Jared Kushner had come to make a cameo appearance; and the big guests of honor were Fauci along with Surgeon General Jerome Adams and the FDA’s [Commissioner Stephen] Hahn.
To my pleasant surprise, at the outset of the meeting, the surgeon general offered strong words in support of hydroxychloroquine along the lines of “The medicine certainly can’t hurt you, and there seems to be some evidence that it may help.”
I greatly appreciated those words because I knew he was taking a risk. His peers—Fauci in particular—might well try to come down hard on him.
Adams was followed by Hahn, and to my surprise, even Hahn had some encouraging words for hydroxychloroquine—perhaps because of all the heat the FDA had been taking for its moronic March 28 directive.
That support from Adams and Hahn notwithstanding, when it was Fauci’s turn, right on cue, he immediately played his “there’s only anecdotal evidence” card. Just as immediately, I stood up from my backbench chair just behind Vice President Pence and walked straight toward Fauci.
As I approached him, I saw fear in his eyes. I’m sure it crossed his mind that I might physically assault him. Instead, I dumped my large dossier of studies onto the table in front of him and said to Fauci as much to everyone else in the room—especially VPOTUS—“Tony, these are not anecdotes. That’s more than fifty scientific studies in support of hydroxy. Fifty! So stop spouting your crap about there only being anecdotal evidence because not only is it counterfactual. You are going to kill people just like you did during the AIDS crisis when you refused to approve medicines that everybody but you knew worked.”
Now, keep in mind that discussions conducted in the Situation Room are generally considered confidential. Yet—and there was only a very small handful of very senior officials attending this meeting—my confrontation with Fauci was immediately leaked to Jonathan Swan at the DC gossip website Axios.
Swanny, as I liked to call him whenever he called to confirm a fact or try to coax a leak from me, gave a detailed account of what he described as an “epic Situation Room showdown” featuring a “heated exchange” between Fauci and me.
His reporting was not wrong. But that kind of leak was just not right—and I told him so.
At least my confrontation with Fauci would shut him up for a couple of days. Then a tragic hat trick of Hydroxy Hysteria would hit Doc Hatfill, POTUS, and me harder than an Alex Ovechkin body check.
Swan’s April 2020 Axios piece about my hydroxychloroquine clash with Fauci.
On masks, Dr. Fauci turned changing judgments into national commandments. His diary acknowledges that the government had been “too strong in saying masks do not work.” He then reversed himself and became the country’s chief mask enforcer even as I continually questioned mask use.
I note in my 2021 book In Trump Time that Fauci was a “pious, wildly overpaid bureaucrat who sabotaged an American president even as he lied to us about masks,” among much other grave wrongdoing.
On lockdowns, Fauci’s diary shows him urging the closure of schools, bars and restaurants; backing a shelter-in-place order for New York City; praising then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s shutdown of nonessential activity; and pushing President Trump to extend national restrictions.
In contrast, I warned on “Meet the Press” that prolonged lockdowns could kill “many more” Americans through depression, alcoholism, deferred medical care, economic ruin and other collateral damage. Public health officials were counting viral cases while ignoring the lives being destroyed by their prescriptions.
You can watch a clip of my lockdown warning on “Meet the Press” HERE in the May 2020 Axios article shown below.
History has vindicated my warning far more than Dr. Fauci’s one-dimensional certainty.
Here is the bottom line: The man who demanded that America “follow the science” was often following politics, panic, ego and institutional self-protection. I did not trust him then. His own diary proves America should not trust him now.
Mr. Paul, let the hard questions begin.
I look forward to your comments. Please share this far and wide.
Peter
ConspiracyAnalyst.org 