Kennedy versus Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci is a scientist/physician/immunologist who spent more than 50 years at the National Institutes of Health, nearly 4 decades as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and served as key advisor to multiple US presidents,

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s qualifications, experience and achievements amount to less than a bag of peas. Yet, he presents himself as a fearless truth-teller in all things medical. In attacking Fauci, he said, “Because of Dr. Fauci’s leadership and other reasons, we had the highest mortality rate from covid of any country in the world”.

That statement is clearly false, extremely vicious and hugely libellous! Total deaths and mortality rates are two different things – and if Kennedy is too uneducated to know the difference, he has advisors who should tell him.

Kennedy seems to view public health as a conspiracy, claiming that experts “lied,” that dissent was “marginalized, vilified, demonized, censored,” and that Fauci’s focus was “on promoting himself, on getting on TV and not doing public health”. Those are polemical charges, not evidence-based arguments, and they fit a broader record of COVID misinformation that fact-checkers have repeatedly challenged.

Kennedy’s method is to seize on uncertainty, exaggerate it, and then present his own misinterpretation as proof. That is not merely intellectually sloppy, but medically irresponsible. The pandemic exposed real failures in communication and policy, yet Kennedy’s response has been to convert legitimate criticism into sweeping accusation, which only deepens public mistrust without improving understanding.

Here are a few further falsehoods by Kennedy about Fauci and his considerable achievements:

• “We literally did worse than any nation in the world.”
• “…we were lied to.”
• “There are many things that [Fauci] said that we know are lies.”
• “His bizarre and inexplicable actions give credence to the suspicions held by many Americans that Dr. Fauci is working to prolong the epidemic in order to impose expensive patented drugs and vaccines on a captive population…”
• “While Dr. Fauci held us hostage waiting for what turned out to be imperfect vaccines, his own agency attributed over half a million deaths in America to COVID.”

I find it bewildering that there are some US citizens who trust Kennedy, and I find it even more bewildering that they believe he is more reliable than Fauci.