Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci and conspiracy theories (part 1)

‘Come and see your friend Fauci again o.’

This was from Kamar, a friend with whom you shared a WhatsApp group, calling your attention to a link he had just forwarded to the group page.

Kamar was a brilliant, high-flying Lagos lawyer. His invitation gave the air of a counsel who had found evidence that would finally nail the accused, and you clicked the link to read the offering.

You might not have bothered. It was much the same stuff as usual, snippets of a Congressional Committee querying Anthony Fauci on the sinful criminality of ‘mask and vaccine mandates’ during COVID-19, asking him for the umpteenth time if there was ‘really’ any such illness as ‘COVID-19’, and capping it all with the image of a dead dog, tagged with a question ‘Is this the evidence of your noble Science?’ The question presumably referred to animal trials that were a regular part of pharmaceutical research for new drugs or vaccines.

One of the features of COVID-19 was how its suddenness temporarily blindsided humanity, forcing a frantic scramble in laboratories all over the world to understand the illness and find drug and vaccine remedies in an abbreviated time frame. That rush itself, and the output it generated, especially the m-RNA vaccines that emerged and got approved for use in a fraction of the time it normally took to develop standard vaccines, have become grist to the mill of people who believe there is some sinister undertone to the ‘success story’ of the containment of COVID-19. They cannot be convinced otherwise.

“The real Fauci is a short man of lean build and the bespectacled appearance of a wizened nerd.”

To some people Fauci was the man who created the ‘lie’ of HIV/AIDS ‘to benefit Big Pharma’. To some others he was the one who did a whole lot of terrible things surrounding COVID-19, even if the ‘terrible things’ could not be concisely identified. The eye might search for a fierce-looking giant. The real Fauci is a short man of lean build and the bespectacled appearance of a wizened nerd. Born in 1940 in New York to parents who were themselves children of Italian immigrants, he was a very bright kid who studied Medicine at Cornell University and came top of his class. After his medical residency in 1986, Fauci joined National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a Clinical Associate in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’s Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI).

In time he became the head of LCI.

Fauci eventually became head of NIAID in 1984. His official position required him to lead the battle against viral diseases such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, Swine flu, MERS, Ebola, and, eventually, COVID-19 in the USA. He played a leading role in President Bush’s highly impactful PEPFAR initiative, which helped many African countries to contain HIV/AIDS. His research contributed to scientific knowledge on the human immune response, and he helped to develop therapies for formerly fatal conditions such as polyarteritis nodosa and lymphoid granulomatosis. As a researcher, his scientific publications were often quoted by other scientists.

Fauci served as a government scientist under seven US Presidents.

Although his scientific career will always be defined by his discoveries and interventions in HIV, his public ‘notoriety’, which started mildly early on with complaints from the LGBTQ community that he was not looking out for them in his HIV work, became a conflagration when he became a spokesman for the White House Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020, under the Presidency of Donald Trump. Trump, of course, recognised no boundary between Science and Politics. Fauci, the little man who spoke in a croaky voice, beside the burly and ebullient President who knew nothing but could explain away everything, taking the accolades and blaming everybody but himself for problems, could never hold his own, especially before an audience of Trump ‘Republicans’ obsessed with conspiracy theories about sinister scientists, ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Deep State’.

Fauci has since retired from government office. He is held in high esteem by colleagues in Research and Public Health. On the other hand, he remains an object of sporadic vilification and sheer hatred by his enemies.

Robert F Kennedy Jnr, scion of the famous Kennedy clan, a nominal ‘Democrat’ who has just abandoned a hopeless race for the Presidency of America to join the Trump campaign, recently wrote a bestselling book titled ‘The Real Fauci – Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health’.

That ‘Bad News is good news’ cannot be proven with a better example than the way the book has fared in the market. It has sold more than a million copies, becoming a New York Times bestseller.

There is general agreement among the scientific community that Robert Kennedy’s writing is as substantial and logically coherent as his politics. Despite heavy referencing in the book, most of the authoritative assertions are wrongly quoted, and much of the ‘definitive information’ cited to make the case against Fauci and the other principal ‘bete-noire’ of the piece – Bill Gates, are lacking in substance.

But this line of thinking has a strange appeal to the public imagination, even in the face of continuous factual refutation. It is, sadly, a sign of the times, and not likely to change anytime soon.

Fauci is 82 years old, and may yet live to win more accolades – for new research on viruses, for PEPFAR, for cracking the nut of vasculitis, for saving lives during COVID-19 – to add to his many existing laurels, which are already a daunting lot. Albany Medical Centre Prize 2002. Presidential Medal of Freedom 2008, National Medal of Science for Biological Science 2007, John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award 2016.

Despite all of this, as far as some people are concerned, sadly including your friend Kamar, Fauci should be in jail. Some might even say his grey head should be separated from his wizened shoulders, permanently.

‘One man’s meat,’ as they say in Lagos, ‘is another man’s poison’.