Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

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And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role?

Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.

That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.

Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].

Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].

This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...

[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...

This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.

It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.

The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.

Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.

What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?

> This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.

> It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.

By dissuading an investigation into the cause at the time, he might have shot down our only chance of ever knowing for sure. I sure as hell don't trust China to be truthful about it. There's no incentive on their part.

> The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.

He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.

> Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.

Past good behavior doesn't get you out of a trial. At best it's a factor during sentencing.

> What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?

The book deal looks like a last minute cash grab before he gets sacked.

The argument is that China is covering up the origins of COVID-19 to protect Fauci and ensure he gets rich?

> He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.

That very advice was offered here in Belgium as well and it smelled like BS. Obviously they had to make a hard choice: tell people they need masks, stocks get plundered and medical professionals have none. Or, say the opposite and grab every mask you can find for medical personnel. The second option was probably the best, hopefully you can understand that these kind of hard choices need to be made and this guy shouldn't lose his job over it.

Interestingly, in Jan / Fed before it really hit Europe and nobody was wearing masks in public they were already sold out in most places. At the time it was probably Chinese plundering EU stores and govt must have picked up on it.

No, this is the problem. Fauci and others in public health have confused everyone with their lies so badly now they're being defended.

There was never a mask crisis. Masks don't work, they have never worked, this had been known for a long time partially because the world went through this exact process with the Spanish flu. And scientists knew that which is why they originally said masks don't work.

This all fell apart quickly because they are collectivists at heart and were being lobbied by political forces that wanted something they could tell everyone to do. The WHO actually admitted this to the bbc! Masks seemed like a good fit, so the scientists promptly jumped on board and started saying masks worked. Problem: how to explain their prior position? So they came up with this double layered lie: we said masks didn't work because it was a noble lie to protect healthcare workers.

But it was never the case. All the documents before March 2020 are consistent on this, including the new Fauci emails.

There's plenty of peer-reviewed evidence that masks are aerosol barriers and that aerosol barriers help reduce transmission/infection.

The term "collectivist" has no particular meaning other than to those who have what they consider to be an opposite worldview.

This is just several lines of misinformation, the same nonsense that's been an issue since SARS-COV-2 emerged. It's all be debunked hundreds of thousands of times, both on HN and elsewhere.

But "peer reviewed evidence" is frequently either wrong, or irrelevant (e.g. lab studies without external validity), or both. The whole discussion here is that scientists have been engaged in political manipulations since the start.

Mask mandates don't work. If they did then the removal of masks would have caused a noticeable spike in cases in Texas, to pick just one example of many. The complete uselessness of masks has been "debunked" in the same vein the lab leak theory was "debunked" - a bunch of people asserting that scientists cannot be wrong, even as they say things that are clearly and very obviously wrong. Anyone can see the truth just by looking at government data sets for a while. It is ridiculous that people still aren't learning to think for themselves, even after all that's happened.

Source on masks not working?

Their usefulness in non crowded spaces in open air is probably debatable but if you're in an elevator with 10 people sneezing wouldn't you rather wear one? Why does every surgeon in the world wear one?

So the question is in what exact circumstances are they useful. I'd say during a pandemic it's probably better to err on the safe side.

The internet is full of them but my favourite source is just the raw data. Look at case graphs for different regions. Look at the dates when mask mandates were added and removed. There should be very sharp, inorganic looking drops and spikes but there are none.

Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example

https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/

That site is old now but there have been many since.

You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-masks-fewer-positive-tests...

Wore mask at all times: 11% got infected Wore mask never: 23% got infected

Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them. Maybe in shops they did cause it was illegal not to. If people kept having gatherings with friends & family then a mask mandate is meaningless.

And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

A poll by a news website that relies on self-diagnoses? Really? I was expecting at least a scientific study. Come on, you could try harder than that - it's easy to find peer reviewed published scientific studies that conclude masks "work" yet which are wrong.

Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them.

Well, people do wear them, that's been studied quite extensively. Compliance >95% in the studies I've seen. If mask mandates don't affect the data even with the very high levels of compliance seen during COVID times then they will never work, because compliance won't be higher in future.

But even if "not enough" people wore them or didn't wear them 24/7 or whatever, that still means mask mandates failed. People were forced to wear masks a whole lot, in any crowded space, and they had no impact on the data at all. Affecting the data was the only justification for mask mandates, so their failure to do so is fatal to the concept - why they failed might make for an interesting debate, but given how tiny viruses are, how much airflow can occur around masks and that most transmission happens inside homes, care homes and hospitals where mask wearing 24/7 is not practical, their failure is no big shock.

And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

Look in the mirror, my friend. I've linked to examples of actual case curves, which is what matters. Mask mandates aren't intended to affect opinion polls on obscure news sites, they're meant to affect whole countries. They do not. Therefore they have failed.

Google will easily point you to mountains of evidence that they do work, from scientific studies. If you don't want to look at them or convince yourself you know better than the people who conducted these studies then that's unfortunate.

I've looked at a lot of COVID related research papers over the last year, which is exactly why I don't take them seriously anymore. The quality is extremely low and they routinely do things that aren't scientifically valid without any obvious repercussions for the authors.

Fortunately, again, one more time. You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here. The goal of mask mandates was to change case curves. That was their only justification. In a large number of places mask mandates were added or removed without the case graphs changing. Therefore, they do not work. Everything beyond that is irrelevant and frequently confused, e.g. studies on masks are not relevant to the question of mask mandates.

> You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here

Mind if I frame that on my wall?

Please do. Perhaps after a few more years of articles like the one this thread is originally about, you'll look at it in a new light. The sort of "scientists" who inhabit our universities have no monopoly on the truth, as the world is slowly coming to accept.

Nailing public figures who lie for personal gain to the cross serves a very important function by dissuading other public figures from doing the same. Otherwise, the math suggests that every public figure should be lying for personal gain since they can just get away with it. At least in the US, there are far too many politicians who think they can get away with lying through their teeth to the public.

However, it looks like Fauci has outlived his usefulness to the ruling class, and they are currently in the process of throwing him under the bus.

> Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires

Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."

If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.

And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.

Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.

(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)

I don't think anyone is claiming anyone wanted it to escape, only that it was very likely, they know it was likely, that's why it had been banned but Fauci overrode the ban then started constantly lying about it and many other things for career and financial reasons.

You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.

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