Dissenting doctors are punching back. Censorship of information that contradicted the narrative pushed by Dr. Fauci and other government health experts was one of the most horrific features of the pandemic response. Researchers and doctors with broader experience than Dr. Anthony Fauci were censored, attacked, and even threatened in some cases.
There were calls to strip doctors promoting inexpensive, generic drugs for early outpatient treatment of COVID-19 of their medical licenses. YouTube took down videos containing dissenting doctors’ opinions. Governors and state medical and pharmaceutical boards took unprecedented actions to limit doctors’ ability to treat patients according to their clinical judgment. In some cases, doctors were under so much pressure they declined to treat COVID-19 patients at all.
On Friday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham had as guests three doctors who had been censored commenting on the revelations in Dr. Fauci’s e-mails. After months of being discounted, ignored, and even personally attacked by Fauci, they did not hold back. The three doctors are:
- Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases) at Yale University
- Dr. Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya, professor of Medicine, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and professor of Economics, Stanford University
- Peter A. McCullough, M.D., MPH, professor of Medicine, vice chief of Internal Medicine, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, TX
Risch, an early proponent of hydroxychloroquine after performing a meta-analysis on available research last summer, told Ingraham that Fauci’s email comments on HCQ are as suspect as his comments on many aspects of the pandemic. He asserted that what Fauci said about HCQ was “part and parcel of delegitimizing it”:
Hydroxychloroquine used with zinc, vitamin D, antibiotics, aspirin, or other medications in a regimen as Dr. McCullough has outlined is good for prevention of bad outcomes in COVID on the order of at least three-quarters, 75-85% or better. So, we know that we are talking about 450-500,000 lives that were lost unnecessarily.
Ingraham recounted some prominent studies that support Risch’s point of view.
Then she moved on and asked Bhattacharya about the mask e-mails, playing a clip of how Fauci had answered questions about his changing opinions. Fauci claims that his positions changed as the facts changed. Bhattacharya said the facts about masks hadn’t changed a ton, noting that they are not effective against aerosolized viruses. Fauci acknowledged that this was the case in his e-mails. Bhattacharya continued:
Yes, you should change your mind when the science changes. But what is that science that changed that convinced him that masks are the most effective way? In fact, I remember the CDC director, Robert Redfield, said that masks were more effective than vaccines. And Dr. Fauci didn’t contradict him when Dr. Scott Atlas said that was nonsense, which it was. I think his credibility is entirely shot.
After playing another clip for Dr. McCullough of Fauci chastising states that haven’t met his vaccine goals, Ingraham noted that Fauci still denies the concept of natural immunity in recovered patients in his analysis. McCullough said that he testified last month in the Texas legislature that his state was already at 80% immunity based on CDC guidance for total infections. He said that it is nearly impossible for the vaccine to impact the epidemic curves at this point.
Risch commented on President Biden’s concerns that the country would become divided into places where people live free from fear of COVID and areas that will see death and severe illness return in the fall. Risch responded:
It’s more fearmongering is what I can tell from this. Don’t forget that going into this fall, we’re going to have a huge amount of the population immune to the current strains that are circulating in the United States. Whereas last fall and last spring, there was very few people that were naturally immune before the epidemic hit.
Risch concluded that it is doubtful we will have significant outbreaks in the fall. Ingraham then brought up the e-mail where Fauci compared the case fatality rate of COVID-19 with the infection fatality rate of the flu. Bhattacharya called this a “rookie mistake that no epidemiologist should make.” It was also the one that drove us into lockdown.
The worldwide infection fatality rate for COVID-19 is 0.2%, according to Bhattacharya, which is an order of magnitude lower than the case fatality rate used by Fauci. He said it was unfortunate that we venerated someone who made such a costly error.
Maybe next time we shouldn’t put an immunologist in charge of epidemic response.
Finally, Ingraham asked the panel about Fauci pushing to vaccinate children. Dr. McCullough was emphatic that this is unnecessary:
Americans should know the registration trial for ages 12-15 of the Pfizer vaccine. They vaccinated 2,300 children and they prevented 18 cases of basically the sniffles. There was no significant illness. There was an antibody rise but it came at a great cost. Sixty to eighty percent of the kids got very sick, high-fevers, muscle aches, headaches, nausea, vomiting. Their parents were scrambling to give Tylenol. Children simply don’t have a risk-benefit ratio that’s going to favor vaccination. It’s not supported.
Astonishingly, no legacy media has covered that story. In an e-mail, Fauci noted that because COVID-19 is an RNA virus, the immunity you get after recovering would be substantial. Ingraham asked Bhattacharya why this seems to have gone out the window. He replied with an observation that I have made and that Steve Deace, author of Faucian Bargain, has also noted:
One of the things that struck me reading a lot of these e-mails, in the early days of the epidemic he [Fauci] was quite a sensible person. He understood immunity, he understood the necessity of not panicking the population. Something happened in late February [2020] where he just flipped on a dime. It wasn’t the science changing. Something else happened where he just changed.
Deace points to an article in the February 28, 2020, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield from the CDC predicted that the infection fatality rate would be on par with a severe-to-pandemic-level flu, 0.1-0.3%, a reasonable analysis.
By the time he testified in front of Congress in mid-March, Deace says the virus had turned into Captain Trips, the ever-shifting antigen in Stephen King’s The Stand that killed 99.4% of the human population. I described it as morphing into the bubonic plague. No one has been able to point to anything in the research or Fauci’s e-mails that would explain his abrupt shift. Any investigation into the pandemic response should start there.
Bhattacharya closed by saying that acknowledging natural immunity is crucial, especially with states adopting different rules for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in accessing commercial services. He asserts that recovered patients have long-lasting immunity and should be counted among the vaccinated. Israel made this determination at the beginning of its vaccination rollout, and all available research supports this view. It is time for Dr. Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA to stop playing stupid games in this regard. Faith in these institutions is on the decline. A little bit of honestly could go a long way.
WATCH the entire segment:
