Anthony Fauci: Master of Medical Crony Capitalism
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Skyhorse Publishing, 2021; 449 pp.
The Real Anthony Fauci is an iconoclastic book which slays enough sacred cows to keep McDonald’s freezers stocked for years. While Kennedy has often been labeled an “anti-vaxxer,” there is no logical inconsistency in supporting the idea of vaccines in general and also seeing problems with specific vaccines. His direct criticism of the covid vaccines, however, is a smaller part of this book than one might think.
More than critiquing vaccines, this book exposes Anthony Fauci’s career as a case study in crony capitalism. The key players are the government regulatory agencies headed by Fauci and the major pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma pursues Fauci’s agenda and he pursues theirs. Kennedy lays out in painstaking detail the nuts and bolts of this process. One key mechanism is the PI (principal investigator) system. PIs are physicians acting for drug companies who are hired to conduct clinical trials. Through PIs, Fauci controls the direction of most US biomedical research (pp. 135–36). Those who disagree with Fauci are either denied funding, greatly diminishing if not destroying their careers, or keep their heterodox ideas to themselves as the price of maintaining their careers.1
As to the covid vaccines, Kennedy definitely finds fault with the process by which they were brought to market. He correctly points out that the breakneck speed of that process made it all but impossible to determine their long-term safety. Clinical trials designed to last three years were declared successful after only six months. At that six-month point, control group members were all vaccinated, thus eliminating further comparison of adverse events with the test group (p. 72). This criticism is the opposite of the more typical one leveled against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that it drags its feet in approving new products, leading to needless suffering and death that could be prevented by earlier approval.2
Suppression of off-label use of existing therapies hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat covid is another tool utilized by crony capitalists.3 Off-label use of prescription drugs approved by the FDA is perfectly legal. The real reason for the suppression of such drugs is not that they are being used off-label but that they are off-patent and thus do little for their producers’ bottom lines. The elimination of off-label competitors to patentable therapies lets the latter reap massive profits.4 There is nothing wrong with profits, even massive profits, earned in free and open competition. Thanks to Fauci, the market for covid treatment was anything but free and open.
Fauci suppressed off-label use of hydroxychloroquine by encouraging discussions of it to be pulled from social media, by sabotaging its clinical trials by testing doses six times the recommended levels (p. 26), and by pulling sixty-three million doses of the medicine off
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