A Glimpse Into Dr Fauci's Brain

In a rambling article that takes maybe 1000 words to get anywhere near the point, Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute finally provides a shocking insight into Dr Fauci's thought processes:

In August of 2020, Fauci co-authored a major article for Cell that received very little attention. The article offers up the general theory that the underlying cause of all infectious disease is human contact, which is another way of saying society itself. “In a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergencies.”

Tucker then quotes Fauci:

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement, catalyzes disease spread. . . . Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. [ellipsis Tucker's]

He quotes another passage:

Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have been threatening humans since the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.

The view of humanity as an invasive species is currently fashionable, and as I've said here, I think it can be traced to Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population predates the 1867 Das Kapital, and whose influence on bourgeois opinion has been much underrated. In fact, I almost wonder if the empirical failure of Marxism-Leninism has revived Malthusianism as a fallback. Mr Tucker comments,

One might suppose it would be top headlines that the man who crafted the Covid response for the world was merely using this as the lever to reverse 12,000 years of human history. Indeed in that sense, “going medieval” is a mere step in a long road back. Forget the Constitution. Forget the Enlightenment. Forget even the golden age of the Roman Empire. Fauci wants to take us back long before there are any actual historical records: a conjectural Rousseauian state of nature where we lived by foraging for food around us and nothing more.

This view is generally consistent with Malthusianism, as outlined by Wikipedia:

Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to utilize abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to war famine and disease, a pessimistic view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe.

Wikipedia suggests that, "As an Anglican cleric, he saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior," such that if the poor were more assiduously to observe the Sixth Commandment, humanity wouldn't find itselt in such a reproductive pickle. But it isn't such a big step to conclude that human beings will overreproduce and be a threat to the planet no matter what. Thus they should be controlled by the authorities just as the authorities exterminate zebra mussels or as they would like to exterminate pet cats.

But I wonder if the neo-Malthusian foundation of modern public health theory contains a contradiction. There was at least a minor theme among environmentalists in the wake of the lockdowns that as long as fewer people went to work, the air quality was improving -- and to some extent, that's the basis of Dr Fauci's argument that we need to self-isolate more as a species. But if we're led to self-isolation as a result of disease, aren't we all better off if more of us sicken and die? But if that's the case, why do public health at all if the planet will improve once more of us are dead?

The question I have is how sincere Dr Fauci is in these views. Mr Tucker raises a relevant question:

And by the way, during the pandemic period, the net worth of the Faucis doubled. The radical reconstruction of human society that is being proposed here turns out to be personally lucrative for its proponents.

The sicker we got, the richer Dr Fauci got. The healthier we are, the worse off the planet, but the poorer are the Faucis.

The problem for Dr Fauci now is that since his retirement, not only are all his policy prescriptions throughout the pandemic, lockdowns, mask mandates, closures, vaccines, coming under criticism, but so is his claim that COVID's origin was not a lab leak -- which is to say in different words that the whole crisis was the fault of Fauci and his favored grantees for conducting gain-of-function research in the first place. Thus his latest logical pretzel:

In the months after the pandemic began, Fauci had discounted the theory that the virus had emanated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The 82-year-old now said he was still keeping a “completely open mind” to the origin of the virus, while explaining how a lab leak still could be considered a “natural occurrence.”

“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab and was being studied in the lab and then came out of the lab,” Fauci told anchor Jim Acosta.

I don't think he really knows what the heck he believes about anything.