Victor Davis Hanson: What Fauci Was Writing While America Lived in Fear

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Thursday’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

This episode was recorded before Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance on Wednesday at a Senate hearing, where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times.

Sami Winc: So Victor, I wanted to look at it since you and Jack talked a little bit about Fauci. I know that there’s been a lot of news out about the origins of the virus. 

He says in his diary: 

“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country and one of the most recognizable people in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I’m so busy. Seriously, POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I’m taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire Secret Service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it’s all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.” 

And I’m reading that like a little kid because that 80-year-old sounds like a little kid here, Victor. 

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Victor Davis Hanson: So, he’s an academic of sorts. I mean, he left medical school, and he wasn’t really a practicing doctor. He went right into the bureaucracy and worked his way up. Then he turned what was a somewhat obscure agency at the time, the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. I mean, we do have the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, and we have the FDA, and we have the National Institutes of Health. But somehow, because he was there 40 years, he built an industry and got all this power. 

He had all this power within a kind of closet community. So, when he got out, he got a little bit of fame during the AIDS crisis when he was in his 40s, and that was a narcotic that addicted him to it. Then when the influenza came out in 2013, in those diaries there’s mention that he feels shorted, that he doesn’t get enough airtime. 

So this was his big bonanza, and the problem he has is not just that he was wrong. I mean, he said masks have no utility, but then later you have to wear a mask, and then two is better. Then he said, “If you get the double sequence, Moderna, Pfizer, you will not be infectious and you will not be infected. It’s that simple. It’s that clear.” 

Then four months later, after his vaccination, he not only got infected, but he hid that he had a pulmonary infarction. So he had an embolism, basically, and that was a recognized side effect in some elderly patients who had the vaccination. 

But the biggest problem he’s having is he went to Congress, and he went into the public domain. He said things. You mentioned he went after Jay Bhattacharya, and he went after Martin Kulldorff, and he went after [Sunetra] Gupta, the doctor from Oxford, and he went after Scott Atlas. 

So why did he go after them? He went after them because he called them the Three Stooges. And then he called Atlas. He actually called up the woman, Alyssa Farah Griffith, that’s working on The View. He called her up, or she called him up. It’s unclear who called first, to fire Scott Atlas. She was working for the Trump administration. 

So they hated Scott Atlas because he was not impressed by Fauci or Deborah Birx. I’ve known Scott for 20 years. He just kept bringing in data and data and data and saying, “Here’s a study, here’s a study, here’s a study, here’s a study. If you shut down the schools, you will lose years of education at this key moment. If you put people and stuff them into houses and apartments, expect higher suicide, familial abuse, substance abuse. If you do this, expect alcoholism. If you do this, expect when you let them out, they’re going to go crazy.” 

And he went on and on. 

“You will destroy livelihoods. You will destroy small businesses. You’ll bankrupt the country, and people will not go to the doctor to get PSA tests, breast exams, you name it, and the cancer and death rate will go up.” 

Then he said, most radically, “Go ahead and get the vaccinations. We think that might have some utility, but it doesn’t stop the virus.” 

They got very angry at that. And who’s they? Birx and Fauci and Francis Collins. 

In addition to that, Atlas, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta were also saying that when you let people out, they’re going to go crazy. And that’s what happened with George Floyd. Four months, everybody was cooped up. He said it’s unenforceable anyway, and he was proven to be a Nostradamus. 

And Fauci was pictured at a baseball game with his mask down, you know. He said you had to wear it everywhere. Then we had, of course, [Nancy] Pelosi at her hairdresser, Gavin Newsom with athletes in LA and at the French Laundry with lobbyists, and we had Fauci himself admitting that he was going to dinner festivities at Jake Tapper’s house. 

This is a time when people could not go to Christmas. They could not go to Thanksgiving. They could not. That was against the law. 

So he says all of these things in the public domain, and he said them under oath. Then we realize that all the time he was communicating with the opposite narrative. He goes into panic mode when he hears about the Wuhan virus because he knows he had a hand in Wuhan. 

Then he gets 12 experts together. Ten of them tell him the sequence is impossible in nature. It didn’t jump from a dead pangolin in a wet market. It didn’t go from a bat 100 miles away. There’s no evidence of animal-to-person transmission. It came from that lab. 

And then he admitted that was the consensus, and then he went out into the public sphere and said just the opposite. 

Why did he say just the opposite? He said just the opposite because he had a hand in green-lighting gain-of-function research in China by allowing and encouraging U.S. scientists to communicate with Chinese researchers, to go over to China, to send critical instrumentation and know-how to China, and to give money through Peter Daszak, his EcoHealth buddy. 

So he was saying one thing and doing the other, and what he was doing was illegal. It was barred in the United States. 

So the question now is, his reputation is ruined. 

There were also two things that people didn’t like. He was a pathological narcissist. All he did while people were dying at the rate of 9,000 a day some days was sit there writing about whether he has a bobblehead toy and how neat it is, and that he’s going to be on all the network news. He’s the most famous person in the world. 

So he thinks. He’s bragging that he is edging Scott out. 

He meets with Scott Atlas and says to him, “You’re probably right about the schools. There’s no evidence that you can stop the spread by shutting them down. And you’re right that the damage outweighs the benefits.” 

And then he also says, “Yeah, you never really said, as was quoted, ‘Let it rip, herd immunity.’” 

Then he goes out and says just the opposite and trashes Scott Atlas. 

And so, he had Trump’s ear because Trump thought he was the most popular man in America and all the media loved him, so if he treated him well… 

Then Fauci basically took over all of COVID policy. This little bureaucrat from one obscure agency suddenly was running the United States with Deborah Birx, who nobody had ever heard of. 

And people who had long careers in public health policy, like Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya, were demonized. 

They say, “Well, Scott’s a radiologist. He’s not…” 

Well, no. He’s been studying and writing hundreds of articles on public health policy. He wrote the definitive book on the MRI and the brain. It’s huge. God, it weighs ten pounds. 

And then Jay. They said, “Well, he didn’t get his medical license.” 

Well, he has a PhD and an MD degree. 

So they were desperate because they knew they were wrong. They were mean and spiteful. 

One of the methodologies that comes across in this vast trove is that he had his hands on billions of dollars of grants to academic institutions. Everybody knew him. His fame came from going to conferences. 

“There’s Anthony Fauci. I just saw him walk by. This is the annual meeting of thoracic surgery. This is the annual meeting of virology. There he is. I have a grant with him. I have a grant for seven million dollars for my lab at Stanford, Duke, and Vanderbilt, whatever. I’m going to go talk to him.” 

“Hi, Dr. Fauci. You are so brilliant on TV.” 

“Well, yes, I am.” 

And that’s how he rolled. 

Well, everybody was scared. So if you said, “Dr. Fauci, I just want to tell you that you were wrong about the Wuhan lab. It’s demonstrably untrue that it came from…” 

Then they knew he would go back and call and say, “Who’s that blank-blank that confronted me? I don’t want to give him a grant.” 

So he was using our money to punish and reward people based on their fealty to him. 

And that’s all going to come out. And the question is, will he say things that are demonstrably untrue or contradict things he said in the past on Wednesday when he’s under oath? 

Because that blanket pardon is for everything up until the pardon. It’s not a future pardon for anything he does afterward. 

And I have a feeling that he will do a James Comey. Before the House Oversight Committee, James Comey said 245 times, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. That was not in my purview.” He just flat-out lied. 

Or he will say, “I’m going to take the Fifth Amendment.” 

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: He’s 85. What are they going to do to him? By the time they indict him, it would take years. 

But he’s suffering now. 

And then the worst thing: He was conniving to get all these awards. He knew all the people on the different award committees. He’s angling to get a million-dollar award from Israel. He’s angry that the ethics people think that maybe he’s using his platform as public trust to leverage it for money, so he has to get permission. 

And he’s got all these awards. He’s made millions of dollars. His wife had a high salary. They just raked it in. 

He comes across as really grasping and greedy and narcissistic and self-centered. In his diary, he doesn’t have any meaningful discussions about the issues or the moral problems or anything. He comes off as heartless. 

When he said, “I am the science,” he discredited science. 

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