Let me start this off with the understanding that I’m a very big fan of vaccines and have no patience for, or understanding of, anyone who isn’t — in particular our clueless Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr.
Just as a quick refresher, diseases like polio and smallpox used to kill and badly cripple people by the millions. The vaccines effectively eliminated them from the list of maladies plaguing humankind. This is not opinion, it is fact. Hundreds of millions of lives — maybe billions — have collectively been saved by vaccines. Period. Full stop.
Considering the above, the “antivax” movement is insane. It posits that illness is preferable to health — that death is better than life. It’s like favoring cancer over the surgery to remove it.
I know this sounds completely absurd to even have to point out. Those who rail against immunization strike me as among the least-informed and (let’s just say it) idiotic people in our midst. The worst part is that they don’t harm only themselves and their families, but the larger population with their crackpot notions of health.
This was why in 2020, when word came down that a COVID vaccine was in development that would potentially greatly curtail a viral scourge that was at that moment killing people by the thousands every week, I never hesitated to sign up for the Pfizer vaccine clinical trial.
I became one of the first group of 30,000 volunteers to get jabbed with that early COVID vaccine. Friends and family members praised me for my “courage,” which sort of confused me. I didn’t see it that way at all. Instead, I felt incredibly lucky to have jumped the line. To me, it was like winning the lottery.
I emerged none the worse for wear from my clinical trial experience. I didn’t get sick. In fact, I felt protected from a pandemic that was still raging globally — because I was protected. I gambled at that early stage that getting the vaccine would be safer than getting the disease. And it was. Imagine: a vaccine that worked as it should.
This is not to say there aren’t risks in getting shot up with any vaccine. Medical science isn’t perfect. But to pretend that the idea of immunization is somehow, in the main, potentially more hazardous to public health than getting nothing at all gets it precisely backwards.
The truth is we live in an age of medical miracle, when receiving a shot can prevent disease and extend lives. Any other conclusion is madness. Why are so many compelled to question it?
With this as background, let’s take a look at what happened to the great Dr. Anthony Fauci this past week when he was unfathomably grilled by a disrespectful and downright hostile Republican establishment led by the execrable Senator Rand Paul.
I will admit to you right here that I don’t even get it. At all. I still don’t understand what Dr. Fauci was being accused of. Was he being blamed for the purported COVID lab leak in Wuhan, China in 2019? Was he somehow held responsible for the estimated 22 million deaths from COVID worldwide? It wasn’t entirely clear.
Here was a now 85-year-old man who, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had been the only person in the Trump administration to, early on, fight COVID with science. His knowledge was backed by decades of experience battling infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, Ebola and SARS. He used that lifetime of expertise to save countless lives, rallying for the vaccine that was believed to have spared several million from COVID deaths in its first year alone.
How is it that this guy became a villain? It’s inconceivable. By any measure, he is an American hero who deserves a medal, not a witch hunt.
Instead, Dr. Fauci’s personal, unredacted diary got leaked, and Sen. Paul — who has, for whatever reason, had it out for Dr. Fauci for years now — came after him to make him answer for his imaginary sins against pandemic infection. He had to take the Fifth over a hundred times to prevent prosecution that could have sent the doctor to prison.
Again, all of this is simply unimaginable. In no rational world should Dr. Fauci be held accountable for anything except helping get the vaccine out to the world in record time. But it seems he committed the unpardonable sin of describing the president in his diary variously as “rambling,” “crazy,” “desperate,” “bumbling,” “incompetent,” “an idiot,” “a true embarrassment,” “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”
In my world, this would mark Dr. Fauci’s primary sin as being entirely too mild in his diary assessments. But, in order to demonstrate absolute devotion to their audience of one, Sen. Paul and his cohorts put on a show that denigrated only themselves. The doctor emerged without a mark on him.
I return to the question, however, of what this salacious sideshow was even all about. In what way did Dr. Fauci purportedly harm civilization? Are they still pissed off that we had to wear masks? Are they upset that schools got closed, businesses shut down, gatherings restricted for a couple of years due to the COVID threat? Do they continue to resent having vaccines be mandated to reduce severe illness, prevent hospitalizations and save lives?
Dr. Fauci used his best understanding from what was known at the time to keep people as healthy as possible during a frightening outbreak and spread of a virus whose origins and transmission remained largely mysterious for many months.
Yes, a lot of us went overboard with disinfecting groceries and mail and steering clear of anyone with a sniffle. But the guidance evolved as more became known about it. Dr. Fauci’s gravest sin, if you want to call it that, was to err on the side of caution. Yeah, let’s lock him up for that.
You know we’re living in mighty insane times when the associates of Jeffrey Epstein roam free while the man who did everything in his power to minimize and halt an international pandemic is held out as a pariah.
The level of shame and injustice here are nearly impossible to calculate.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
