Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his Attack on Science, Part Two

 

 This is my second entry into a critique of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. The first entry can be found here. 

(Note: I accidentally overwrote a long version of this post with a draft. I have endeavored to restore the long, finished version.) 

Continuing with the Introduction

 I left off midway through the Introduction in the middle of an attack on Fauci and his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps it was a good place to break. Let me begin this chapter in my blog by addressing larger issues. 

I began my life as a scientist from a Christian perspective. There are few more succinct summaries of science than what can be found in the First Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 21: Test all things. Hold fast to what is good.

Kennedy declares in his Introduction: "Science, like democracy, flourishes on skepticism toward official orthodoxies." No, this is closer to the definition of contrarianism. Skepticism toward official doctrines is only half the story. Science uses skepticism to build useful "truths" that become orthodoxies. Contrarianism does advocate testing all things, but it doesn't hold fast to what is good.

Quite often what is orthodoxy is perfectly correct (that's the goal of science). The body of knowledge of aerodynamics provides what is needed to create airplanes that fly. To claim that aerodynamics is an  orthodoxy that prevents people from flapping their arms and flying off rooftops is ludicrous. That it criticizes people who believe in arm flying and censors them from science journals is a good thing.

Sometimes those orthodoxies are based on errors. Fine. Question and continue to question. But not by invective.  You have to build and test your arguments to improve on those that came before. Hurling bombs to tear things down is cheap. Doing it dishonestly is not skepticism.

Invective, noun. A denunciatory or abusive discourse. (This book, denouncing with its very title.) Kennedy doesn't simply set out to construct a villain in Fauci. He seeks to create a supervillain. The following are the loaded terms he uses to describe the response to COVID and to Fauci himself in the Introduction. 

Invectives directed to the response to COVID. (2nd paragraph of Introduction) generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, health experiments with a "novel, shoddily tested, improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability." (They got every government on earth to agree to something?) 

(3rd paragraph.) totalitarianism, mass propaganda, censorship, promotion of terror, suppression of debate, vilification of dissent, forcefully prevent protest. unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions. Objectors faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. Essentially repeating the second paragraph but changing the words. Forceful invective, poor writing.

(5th paragraph) "suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence." I'll keep an open mind about this, but I don't recall violence. Perhaps he will provide examples, later.

(later) carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that left American health ailing and its democracy shattered. propelling our country toward the desolate destination where democracy goes to die.

Invective directed toward Fauci. technocrat who orchestrated a historic coup d'état against Western democracy. power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history. Encouraged his [own] canonization and disturbing inquisition against his blasphemous critics.

Interestingly, Kennedy also attacks Trump. Trump represented an existential crisis. Fauci is contrasted to Trump's desultory, narcissistic bombast. erratic President.

Kennedy says, "Dr. Anthony Fauci spent half a century as America's reigning health commissar, ever preparing for his final role as Commander of history's biggest war against a global pandemic. Beginning in 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), serving as the agency's Director since November 1984."

Okay, half-a-century as health commissar? (He repeats "50-year saga" in the Introduction.) Kennedy can't count and his fact checkers can't check. Fauci's early work in the work in the government before he took over NIAID in 1984, a post that hardly serves as commissar, did not have that much influence. Almost forty years might be honest if Kennedy wants to smear him with that title. Capitalizing "Commander" is a cheap smear. COVID, the world's biggest pandemic? I would have said the forty some years of AIDS with 40 million dead outranks the several years of COVID with seven million dead. (Of course, Fauci did have a large role in AIDS.)

Kennedy cites Fauci as saying "attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science." Rather than those nine words, Kennedy should have at least provided his full sentence. "A lot of what you're seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science."

"Attacks on me" without "a lot of" makes it sound like Fauci is claiming infallibility. And Fauci does go on to explain his assertion. He further stated in that interview, ". . .if you go through each and every one of them, you can explain and debunk it immediately. I mean, every single one."

I don't know if what Fauci says is true. It has been fairly easy to debunk most of the details Kennedy has provided so far. I do know that it is dishonest of Kennedy to take Fauci's comments out of context. (I started this critique being skeptical about Kennedy. I am beginning to get disgusted by his poor writing and how he chooses snark over context.)

Kennedy goes on to say "[Dr. Fauci acknowledged] that he twice lied to Americans to promote his agendas." Kennedy leaves it at that. There is not enough information to determine what Kennedy is referring to. I will be interested to see Kennedy give the details on that assertion. He has yet to win my confidence. 

Kennedy says, "Dr. Fauci's acolyte [meaning devoted follower]—CNN's television doctor Peter Hotez—published an article in a scientific journal calling for legislation to "expand federal hate crime protections" to make criticism of Dr. Fauci a felony." Kennedy goes on to call Hotez a "high visibility henchman." 

From Kennedy's writing so far, let me make a prediction: the above is a wildly dishonest statement. It doesn't pass the sniff test. The actual paper "Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States" does not nearly come close to suggesting criminalization of criticism of Fauci. Fauci is not even the focus of the article. Out of 13 paragraphs in the article, Fauci is mentioned only in the context of a "Fire Fauci Act" introduced in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Jim Jordan claiming Fauci is hiding something. 

The article does address "expanded protection for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States." To address this targeting, "Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections." Hate crime protections do not extend to criticism. Nowhere does it suggest that people not be allowed to criticize Fauci. 

"Dr. Hotez, who says that vaccine skeptics should be snuffed out." Ooh. How ominous, how violent. No, Hotez said that "An American anti vaccine movement is building and we need to take steps now to snuff it out." From: Will an American-Led Anti-Vaccine Movement Subvert Global Health? 

Kennedy goes back to giving Fauci superhuman status. "Dr. Fauci's direct and indirect control—through NIH, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust of some 57 percent of global biomedical research funding. . ." What is this precisely saying? "Global research funding" is a term given for US funding of projects outside of the US. Is that what he means? Or the total funding of biomedical research around the globe? Which sounds like what he is suggesting.

Fauci was in charge of NIAID, not NIH. NIAID has 15% of the budget of NIH. And then there are other US agencies involved in research which total in budget, around 80 billion (NIAID is 8% of that total.) Research America states that industry (Big Pharma for example) in the United States spent $161.8 billion in research in 2020 far more than the government or private foundations. 

Fauci was the head of NIAID. That doesn't mean he single-handedly controlled its research. I have served on panels to decide which projects are funded. I never once heard a word from the top bosses which projects should be chosen or rejected. Serving on the board of Wellcome Trust or the Gates Foundation doesn't make Fauci the big decider, or as Kennedy puts it, that he had "direct or indirect control."

Fauci did have a lot of influence beyond his government position, but more like a pebble tossed into a rock pile: not nearly "control." If Fauci did have control of the COVID epidemic response, it would have gone differently. He would have put a muzzle on Trump and perhaps vaccinated Trump for rabies. I would argue that Kennedy and his skeptics had more influence in driving the COVID response disaster. People listened to him. 

Fauci and Deaths Due to COVID

Kennedy transitions to discuss "Fauci's" record in regards to COVID. "As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet." He goes on to cite deaths by percentage of population. 

Kennedy presents the figures of death rates from COVID per million population as of September 30, 2021, presumably the cutoff time at which he turned in the book. 

He begins with the United States: 2107 deaths per million. The subsequent countries are Iran 1449 deaths per million, Sweden 1444, going on, selecting 16 more countries, citing Japan with 139 per million and ending with Tanzania 0.86 deaths per million. 

I followed these numbers closely as they came out. Kennedy's list represents an odd assortment of countries, avoiding those with the worst numbers. I'll get to those numbers in a moment. 

First, what is remarkable is how Kennedy's table totally undercuts his arguments. Throughout his introduction Kennedy has been decrying how Fauci had a huge influence over the world. Japan, among others, essentially, followed his advice. They had fewer than 7% the US death (as of September 30, 2021). Japan did quarantines. Japan did masking. Better than the United States did. 83% of people in Japan were fully vaccinated (as of November 2022, I couldn't find September 2021 figures) versus 64% in the United States. Some people in the United States listened to anti-vacciners.

Furthermore, what is left off the table are countries that did poorer than the United States and pursued policies counter to Fauci's advice. As of September 30th, 2021, Peru had 5880 deaths per million. Those countries that didn't follow his advice? Brazil, through its leader, Jair Bolsonaro, famously rejected Fauci's advice. They had 2708 deaths per million. Hungary through its strongman, Viktor Orbán, had 3095 deaths per million. (Use the above link, go to the country, the cumulative death charts and select date.)

The Kennedys have great hair. My counter argument will probably make RFK Jr.'s stand on end. The failure of the American response to COVID is because we didn't listen to Fauci. He was undercut every step of the way. By Trump declaring the infection wasn't that bad. By declaring the infection would be gone by summer. By holding mass political rallies that served as superspreader events. Trump declared that the infection was all a political game and would disappear the day after elections. 

I will examine one such superspreader event and its consequences in detail, partly because I had run the numbers myself at the time. Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, permitted a Harley-Davidson bikers rally in August 2020 and August 2021 attended by a total of nearly a million "vehicles." (Attendance cited by vehicles, not people. Presumably at least one person per bike.) 

Back during 2020, when I had to stay at home, I took up a project of ranking states and the District of Columbia weekly by their COVID-19 statistics to see which states were doing better and which ones were doing worse, adjusted for population. The two graphs below show the increase in hospitalizations in South Dakota and, because many bikers were not local, I added North Dakota (the same were true for other bordering states. I'll go into their statistics briefly, but will mainly focus on the Dakotas). The 2020 Harley-Davidson rally took place from August 7 to 16. The delay in hospitalizations (and ultimately deaths) is because the rally merely seeded infections. The real problem came from those who became infected infecting others, and those, in turn, infecting still others. I will presented infection numbers and deaths after the hospitalizations.

South Dakota, 2020

 

North Dakota, 2020

I would argue that hospitalizations best describe the toll of COVID infections. Deaths can be related to improvements in therapy or negatively by having hospitals overwhelmed. Cases are often underestimated with those who are asymptomatic or who have minor symptoms not being tested and counted. Other states that border South Dakota:

Nebraska, 2020

Wyoming, 2020

Montana, 2020

Iowa, 2020

Minnesota, the one other state that bordered South Dakota, I don't have a snapshot of its hospitalizations in my archive. Here are two states over the same time period that did not have dramatic increases in hospitalizations. 

Georgia, 2020

California, 2020

In the week before the South Dakota rally, South Dakota ranked 15th among states (and DC) in having the lowest rate of increase in COVID-19 infections. North Dakota was in the middle of the pack. By the week ending September 5, North and South Dakota would take up the last two places, positions they kept until the week ending November 21. 

North and South Dakota, dead last, week ending October 17

State rankings, week of July 27, before the rally.

Here is the beginning of the uptick of cases in South Dakota (left) and North Dakota (right). You might almost say some happened around the middle of August.

First come infections, then hospitalizations and then deaths. The increase in deaths in the Dakotas was not immediate, but over time became overwhelming. For South Dakota, on August 17, the day after the rally ended, the death toll stood at 153 statewide. In four months that number was up to 1300 (and still on a steep slope of climbing) an increase of 750%. In North Dakota, over the same time period, the deaths increased from 126 to 1195, an increase of 848%. In contrast, nationwide, between August 17 and December 17, the deaths increased by 89%. Numbers source. 

The Sturgis bike rally superspreader event is presented only as an example. There were others. So, did this motorcycle rally and other superspreader events occur because people were listening to Fauci? 

By downplaying the infection, Trump created a resistance to public health care precautions and ultimately had a lot of people reject the vaccination, a vaccination that Trump's policies helped create. If we did listen to Fauci, the U.S. numbers would be like those of Japan and not closer to those of Brazil. 

Furthermore, Trump gave credence to worthless therapies. I see by the chapter titles that Kennedy will discuss some of these therapies. I will deal with those arguments as they come.

A last point as I come to the end of this post. In my first entry into this series of blogs, I skipped over the Acknowledgments, suggesting that it had little to do with a critique. Now, I would like to note that Kennedy thanked eight individuals as fact checkers. That is significant. They did a poor job. His editors did a poor job. I have no fact checkers and I can usually quickly find errors (or perhaps just conscious falsities) in what he presents. 

I am about halfway through the Introduction. I cannot give you a page number. The book has no page numbers. This is in spite of referring to page numbers in the index and the table of contents. It has the feel of being self-published, even though it went through Skyhorse Press.

To be continued. (Note: I apologize for multiple versions of this post. I posted a long version and then accidentally overwrote with a shorter draft. In this post, I have endeavored to restore what I lost.)

Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of several novels including most recently the thriller, Floor 24. 

Floor 24
Oliver-Heber Books

"From the mob underworld to the tops of new skyscrapers, Floor 24 is a heart-thumping New York 1920's historical mystery!" - Holly Newman, bestselling author of A Chance Inquiry mystery series.