In a court deposition just before Thanksgiving, Dr. Anthony Fauci had trouble remembering his response to the COVID pandemic.  As the fallout from that pandemic continues, people might remember a few things about Dr. Fauci, including his talent for evasion. 

In early 2021, a report by New York attorney general Letitia James revealed that thousands more nursing home residents may have died from COVID-19 than New York governor Andrew Cuomo had publicly acknowledged.  Cuomo claimed that he was only following federal guidelines.  Jim Sciutto of CNN asked Fauci to comment on Cuomo's claim. 

"You know, Jim, I can't," Fauci responded, "I mean, excuse me.  I really am — I'm honestly not trying to evade your question, but I'm not really sure of all the details of that, and I think if I, if you make a statement, it might be wrong or taken out of context.  So I prefer not to comment on that," and so on. 

In reality, Fauci had already clarified the details.  As Fox News recalled, Fauci told PBS that, unlike other parts of the country, New York responded "properly" and "correctly" to the pandemic.  That is part of what Fauci now claims not to remember.

Fauci's policy was to quarantine the healthy and lock down schoolchildren, those least at risk from the COVID virus.  In the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), and Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and many other medical scientists called for an end to Fauci's draconian lockdown policy. 

Instead of debating these scientists on the facts, Fauci collaborated with National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins in a "quick and devastating published takedown of its premises."  Last week, Fauci forgot that he came out strongly and publicly against the declaration. 

Fauci promoted vaccines and boosters that failed to prevent the acquisition and transmission of COVID but proved quite profitable for pharmaceutical companies.  That marks a departure from the Salk vaccine, 90 percent effective against polio, and which creator Jonas Salk gave away.  Albert Sabin also declined to patent his very effective polio vaccine. 

In June, Sen. Rand Paul asked Fauci if anybody on the vaccine committee "ever received money from the people who make vaccines."  Fauci failed to answer and claimed that his own royalties averaged less than $200 per year.  As Americans might recall, the jury is still out on the long-term effects of the vaccines Fauci wants administered to everyone, including children.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree at Cornell in 1966, but if he ever practiced medicine, it was only for a short time.  In 1968, to avoid service in military hospitals, Fauci became a "yellow beret" with a cushy job at the National Institutes of Health. 

Fauci's bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, but by 1984, he was heading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID).  Back in the 1990s, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR),  said Fauci "doesn't understand electron microscopy and he doesn't understand medicine.  He should not be in a position like he's in."  

Fauci still holds the position and now claims, "I represent science."  What he does represent is white coat supremacy, rule over the people by unelected medical bureaucrats. 

As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has pointed out, the NIAID boss controls public health policy and spending on medical research, a dangerous concentration of power.  Joe Biden even jokes that Fauci is the real president — but he never has to face the voters. 

Fauci will soon step down and claims he will "cooperate fully" with a congressional investigation.  His sudden memory loss doubtless previews what such cooperation would mean in practice.  To adapt the famous saying of Milan Kundera, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting. 

Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Oakland, California–based Independent Institute.

Image: National Archives.