From Buzzfeed News: Anthony Fauci’s Emails Reveal The Pressure That Fell On One Man
More than 3,200 pages of emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed News — covering the period from January to June 2020 — provide a rare glimpse into how Fauci approached his job during the biggest health crisis of the last century, showing him dealing directly with the public, health officials, reporters, and even celebrities. (The Washington Post also received more than 800 pages of emails and published a story about them on Monday.)
(Featured image is “email” by miniyo73 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
Jason Leopold is attached to the story which may be why it is a somewhat different tone than the aforementioned WaPo piece:
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From Rand Paul:
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Jaybird, I have referenced this more than once, but I’m gonna go ahead and be explicit.
This place? Is not Twitter. If you want to just retweet stuff with no context, no thought, no point — USE TWITTER.
If we wanted random retweets in favor of actual comments, we’d…be on Twitter.
For instance, you quoted “told you” from Rand Paul. Told us what? What emails proved whatever he told us? What do you think? Why did you post it? What’s your POINT?
We don’t know. And you could actually type out what you mean, because THIS ISN’T TWITTER.
Stick to Twitter if that’s the crap you want to do.Report
Oh, I’m sorry.
Rand Paul’s tweet was in reference to the email dump of Fauci’s emails that were released as part of a FOIA request.
If you’d like to read more about Fauci’s FOIA request, there are two articles linked above. One from Buzzfeed News and one from the Warshington Post.
Rand Paul seems to be indicating that he feels vindication over his line of questioning when he was asking questions of Fauci at a recent hearing about the Coronavirus.
You can watch the questioning yourself with this embedded video from C-Span.
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It actually is a damning indictment of Paul, and a vindication for everything the liberals were saying all along.Report
I imagine that the accuracy of “actually” hinges on what we believe today that the liberals had been saying all along.
Can you clarify?Report
The emails show that Fauci was behaving like a responsible and committed public health expert, while Paul was behaving with belligerent stupidity.
I mean, really. Just scan a few of the emails and compare them to Paul’s video buffoonery.Report
2 minutes into this and no questions asked, just a statement of an unsubstantiated, and that cannot be emphasized enough, theory about Frankenvirus creation.
I read on Twitter, and it may have even been Andrew’s suggestion, that cameras be removed from the hearing rooms so congressmen can’t grandstand for them. This is prima facie evidence for that suggestion. Paul all but says kung flu.Report
Can we get a Constitutional amendment for no dufuses in high office? It would go a long way.Report
There’s an email from Kristian Andersen in the documents that says:
To take that email seriously is to take the “Frankenvirus” hypothesis seriously.Report
Except that Paul didn’t know any of that when he made the original claim.
There’s enough scientific hedging in this email to satisfy me. I really find it hard to believe that if this virus was found to be engineered that it wouldn’t have made it into the press.Report
Is there a later email where they found something?Report
I do not know.
I suspect that, if they did, such information would either be in the redacted portions (and thus unavailable) or would probably qualify as sensitive enough to be classified on some level.Report
They redacted the smoking gun but left the clue that it exists?Report
Here’s another thing to bake your noodle:
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“By, the way, I overheard Ron Paul and DeSantis plotting against you. I recommend not eating anything that isn’t factory-sealed.”Report
Its a tradition, really.
Like a secret cabal of artists, architects and writers, who are in possession of a secret so devastating and shocking that they will kill anyone who divulges it.
So of course they plant clues to the secret in frescoes, tapestries, books and sculptures all over the place.Report
It’s like Snowden never happened.Report
It’s like a code left by one of the Ninja Turtles.Report
It is an amazing example of the different worlds inhabited by rightists and the rest of the world.
In our world, these are thousands of mostly banal emails describing the life of a bureaucrat handling a chaotic situation.
To them, this is the smoking gun 18 minute tape, the Verona cables, the Zimmerman Letter, the Da Vinci code all blowing up the world.
What’s weird is that none of them can describe what’s so shocking or scandalous here, but boy they are sure it is just awful, and the awfulness is just obvious.
Its of a piece with how the right has become just a mass of secret signals, where they just have the codewords that have an obvious meaning to them, but are illegible to the rest of us.
Benghazi, Fauci, Cancel Culture, Wokism..they just recite the words and are convinced they have made some sort of killer argument.Report
The guy mentioning it was a researcher, and two months later released a paper that, summed up, was “no it wasn’t in any way engineered”.Report
What’s his tweet reference? What emails proved his point? What was his point? What do you, the actual person here, think?
Nothing? You’re just randomly linking tweets? GO TO TWITTER AND DO THAT.Report
You can read the emails for yourself here.
There is at least one email in there that discusses the potential for the virus to have been partially engineered.
Given the amount of vitriol given against the lab leak hypothesis (and now the fact that that hypothesis has strange new respect) is something that Paul seems to be taking as vindication.Report
I have, and there’s nothing there. Including the “engineered” reference.
Which I know you understood, so why you’re trying to shit-stir with it is beyond me. Did you hope no one read it at all?
Blah. Obvious troll is obvious. At least a few years ago you worked at it, instead of basically treating this place as a place to re-tweet.
What’s the matter, not enough followers on Twitter for you?Report
I wondered about whether it was a chimera more than a year ago.
Given the range of responses to it being a chimera includes some seriously horrible things, I understand why the immediate response would include wanting to keep a lid on that sort of thing.
You look and you see nothing there. That’s fine.
I see people wondering the same thing that I wondered and saying that there are indications that don’t falsify that thing but call for even closer examination.
I mean, do this thought exercise:
Assume that what happened over the last year was deliberate to some extent.
Who benefited?
Make a Venn diagram that includes the people who benefited and the people who would have been behind various theories of this happening deliberately.
How many of these diagrams have people in the overlapping circles?
Now, this doesn’t mean that what happened was deliberate… but I do find it interesting to see things and then be told by others that there is nothing there. And the reasons they give for why there mustn’t be.Report
Eh, I was just ripping on the coy “I find it interesting” move on another thread.Report
I can’t say that I think it’s true, because I don’t know.
I do know that the certainty with which it can be dismissed doesn’t seem to be a well-founded certainty.
“Interesting” is the best term that I have for the in-between for where I am.Report
Here’s Vanity Fair:
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“This place? Is not Twitter.”
ok boomerReport
This place isn’t network TV. This place isn’t the Washington Post. This place isn’t Slate. This place isn’t a lot of things. What’s your point?
You seem surprisingly angry that someone quoted a public statement by a highly-placed official commenting on a recent news story. Is there some reason that this should be discounted because it was posted on Twitter instead of an Official Press Release or said on a network-news argument-scrum show?
“Oh, what are we supposed to take from it” figure it out for yourself, you idiot. or don’t, if you don’t feel like it. you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.Report
There is nothing that gives me greater confidence in Dr. Fauci than Rand Paul.Report
Vanity Fair has dropped the investigative reporting on the matter:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
“As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.”
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“Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places.”
Oh, and 528 contributes with these weighty thoughts from science journal editors:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-it-matter-if-there-was-a-lab-leak/
“You know, I think it is important, and I’m, like, super interested in this stuff. But I don’t know if knowing the source of this emerging pandemic is going to stop us from preventing the next one, because they seem to come from different animals for different reasons. ”
~Amy Maxem, Sr. Reporter for NatureReport
comment in mod for double link.Report
Jonathan Chait has a provocative title on his new New York Magazine article:
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Absolutely, the scientists who were working on fighting the virus should have put that aside to investigate the lab-leak theory.Report
They shouldn’t have and they didn’t. The scientists have nothing to apologize for. The journalists, ensconced in their twitter group think, however, should have and didn’t. I agree with Chait- it should be cause for introspection on the part of left and mainstream media figures*.
*It should go without saying that right wing media figures shouldn’t be paid any mind on this matter considering they’re the reeking fate that we are hoping the mainstream media can show enough self awareness to avoid.Report
He lost the election.
He’s not going to be re-elected. Probably.
You don’t have to keep fighting him as if he were still in office.Report
“”Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection,” Fauci wrote. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a vey low risk location.””
So we spent the last year wearing masks and it was only the infected people that needed to when they were in public, huh? Well I’m glad that got settled. So he lied about the masks. Trust the science.Report
Another reason TPTB might be hoping it comes from wet markets rather than the lab:
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And this is surprising because…? WIV was the first, and for several years the only, level-4 bio-containment facility in China. They consulted with the Galveston National Lab on design and training for the level-4 facility. They publish joint papers with US researchers. They have access to unique coronavirus reservoirs that no one else does. Something a bit over $100K per year for services and samples doesn’t seem outlandish.
Just to note, it is not illegal for me to start conducting gain of function experiments on coronaviruses in my basement. Stupid, certainly, but not illegal. The only time the federal government would get involved just on the basis of the experiments would be if I applied for grant money.Report
If I communicated that I was surprised, that’s on me.
I was hoping to communicate that I absolutely understood why, if it was a lab leak, there were going to be people in the government who would push against that story getting out.Report
I find the term “lab leak” problematic. People seem to use it to cover every possibility from “someone intentionally released a coronavirus that had been weaponized for military use” to “an intern was sloppy about mask precautions while collecting bat guano and got a lungful of dust with enough of a naturally-occurring coronavirus to become infected.”Report
I merely use the term to distinguish from “a guy in the marketplace ate some bat soup and that’s where it came from”.Report