OF THE UNELECTED BUREAUCRACY THAT HAS SEIZED POWER: Fauci Was Just a Symptom. Jeffrey H. Anderson takes a rigorous look at Fauci’s record, from AIDS through COVID, and the repeated unsubstantiated (or outright false) claims by him and the public establishment about the Covid mRNA vaccines and drugs like AZT, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and remdesivir. He notes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while routinely dismissed as a “vaccine denier” by the mainstream press, has often been spot on with this criticisms of Fauci and the establishment, especially when it comes to their authoritarianism.
The crux of the problem with our public health establishment is the consolidation and centralization of power and money. Such power and money is often placed in the hands of people like Fauci who are either incredibly incompetent or (as Kennedy thinks) appallingly corrupt. The only genuine solution would seem to be to break up the monopoly. Whether it is public health research or “climate change” research, a tiny group of career federal employees should not be allowed to control the purse strings, agenda, and messaging for a nation of 330 million people. Perhaps the solution, at least in the public health vein, is to split the NIH’s $50 billion annual budget among the states on the basis of population, with no federal strings attached.
Whatever the remedy, however, America needs to free its scientists from adherence to bureaucratic groupthink and once again encourage intellectual inquisitiveness and genuine scientific discovery. Such uncorrupted scientific inquiry is essentially incompatible with having almost all scientific funding be funneled through a small cabal of self-interested bureaucrats. It is this arrangement, coupled with the willingness of elected officials to defer to him, that made Fauci so powerful and permitted him to do so much damage.
As uniquely unscrupulous, power-mongering, and slithering as Fauci is, he is more the symptom than the disease—the effect rather than the cause of an overbearing and largely unchecked administrative state. So long as Congress and executive-branch leaders continue to allow the likes of Fauci to wield unconscionable levels of power on the basis of position rather than merit—in a way that is almost entirely detached from voters—American science, and republican government, will continue to suffer.
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