Walensky wins the IDSAs Fauci Award

Until public health is honest, no one will trust it.

If public health wants to regain trust, it has to take an honest assessment of what it got right and got wrong. It can’t celebrate errors. Sadly, it appears that public health is not interested in that task. Take a look.

Walensky wins the Fauci award?! Wow. Here is just a short list of what each of them got wrong

Walensky:

When she was in Brookline, she advocated for school reopening, but when appointed by President Biden, who campaigned on the idea that schools were dangerous, she reversed that stance.

She met privately and discussed CDC guidance with the teachers unions.

She was dishonest about myocarditis. There is no way this was true by the end of April 2021.

The Israelis reported a rate of 1 in 3000 by February, and the EMA would soon confirm the safety signal.

Once she accepted myocarditis exists, she made no effort to lower it. No trials of spaced doses, lower or omitted doses.

She lied constantly about the evidence for masking. She lied to congress stating there was not equipoise for a trial testing if masking worked in children. This was clearly false given that the European CDC and CDC had divergent recommendations— and member states had a range of policies (e.g. Sweden never masked <12, US masked 2+). A divergence of practice is the definition of equipoise.

Walensky supported vaccine mandates, which were unethical, as COVID vaccines had never established a third party benefit.

Walensky pushed vaccines in people who had COVID— a strategy that may even be harmful.

Walensky pushed boosters in low risk populations, a decision that led to the resignation of Gruber/ Krause at FDA.

Walensky’s communication on TV was a constant mess of flip flopping and insecurity; she was a notoriously bad communicator. She even hired an outside consulting firm to help her communications, using taxpayer money.

What did she get right? I am actually not sure. I suppose she was correct that COVID is caused by a virus and that many vitamins don’t work— facts that a high schooler would know— so she got the bare minimum right. But on any policy decisions, particularly those that used the force of the state, she got it wrong.

She famously refused to throw away 6ft of social distancing (a distance pulled from someone’s ass), when when we begged her to do so, as it was stopping school reopening. More on what she got wrong here.

And she gets the Fauci award.

What did Fauci get wrong?

Fauci was of course initially told the truth that multiple RCTs of community masking showed it didn’t help, then he lied about it. He never opposed masking 2 year olds.

He exaggerated the risk to kids. He opposed DeSantis in spring 2020 when DeSantis wanted to reopen schools.

Fauci was wrong about giving 2 doses to fewer people over 1 dose to more people.

Fauci was wrong to not meet with and discuss different ideas with the authors of Great Barrington Declaration.

Fauci was wrong about double masking.

Fauci was wrong about vaccine mandates and ignoring natural immunity.

Fauci was wrong about boosters for young people, vaccines for people who already had COVID.

Most notably, Fauci appears to have used Gmail to evade federal FOIA laws to conceal NIAID’s role in funding the laboratory in Wuhan to conduct gain of function research in sars-coronaviruses.

Public health has a choice. It could actually aspire to have dialog and discussion and pursue the truth, or it could keep promoting the people who were wrong. If it continues to do the latter, I suspect trust will continue to fall.

If I were giving out awards, I would give Rochelle Wallensky the Fauci award for clever and effective propaganda at a time of crisis that polarized a nation and undermined faith in science.