In an op-ed, “Fauci Fooled America,” published Monday in Newsweek, two scientists accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of bungling the government’s response to COVID by getting “major epidemiology and public health questions wrong.”

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, and Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine wrote: “Reality and scientific studies have now caught up with him.”

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, both senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute and signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had this message for Newsweek readers:

“The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes. After 700,000-plus COVID deaths and the devastating effects of lockdowns, it is time to return to basic principles of public health.”

The authors ticked off a list of “key issues” Fauci got wrong, including failure to recognize natural immunity, protecting the elderly, school closures, masks and contact tracing.

“By pushing vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci ignores naturally acquired immunity among the COVID-recovered, of which there are more than 45 million in the United States,” the authors wrote. “Mounting evidence indicates that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than vaccine-induced immunity.”

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya cited a study from Israel, which concluded the vaccinated were 27 times more likely to get symptomatic COVID than the unvaccinated who had recovered from a prior infection.

They pointed out that the scientific community has known about natural immunity from disease “at least since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC.”

On Fauci’s dictates to mandate the vaccine for healthcare workers, the two argued:

“Under Fauci’s mandates, hospitals are firing heroic nurses who recovered from COVID they contracted while caring for patients. With their superior immunity, they can safely care for the oldest and frailest patients with even lower transmission risk than the vaccinated.”

On school closures they wrote:

“Considering the devastating effects of school closures on children, Dr. Fauci’s advocacy for school closures may be the single biggest mistake of his career … While children do get infected, their risk for COVID death is minuscule, lower than their already low risk of dying from the flu.”

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya pointed to Sweden, noting that during the 2020 spring wave of COVID, the country kept daycare and schools open for all 1.8 million children ages 1 to 15, with no masks, testing or social distancing.

According to the authors, Sweden’s strategy resulted in “zero COVID deaths among children and a COVID risk to teachers lower than the average of other professions.”

The authors argued contact tracing “was a hopeless waste of valuable public health resources that did not stop the disease,” and that Fauci failed at protecting the vulnerable.

“After more than 700,000 reported COVID deaths in America, we now know that lockdowns failed to protect high-risk older people,” they said.

On collateral public health damage, they argued that a “fundamental public health principle is that health is multidimensional; the control of a single infectious disease is not synonymous with health.”

They wrote that Fauci:

“ … failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have on cancer detection and treatment, cardiovascular disease outcomes, diabetes care, childhood vaccination rates, mental health and opioid overdoses, to name a few. Americans will live with — and die from — this collateral damage for many years to come.”

In private conversations, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya said, most of their scientific colleagues agree with them on these points but few have spoken up out of fear of “financial censorship.”

“Many are afraid of losing positions or research grants, aware that Dr. Fauci sits on top of the largest pile of infectious disease research money in the world,” they wrote.

In his forthcoming book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. includes a comprehensive discussion of Fauci’s influence and power over the scientific community, revealing how Fauci uses the “financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals and thousands of influential doctors and scientists — whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance or reward.” Kennedy’s book is due out Nov. 16.

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