Fauci Didn’t Test

From Alex Tabarrok.

"I am not a Fauci hater but I think this criticism of Facui from epidemiologist and oncologist Vinay Prasad hits the mark:

Lockdown was specifically advocated for by Anthony Fauci (‘15 days to stop the spread’/ ‘hunker down’/ ‘shelter in place’), and Fauci would go on to make hundreds of other specific policy recommendations. Although he initially rejected it, by April 2020, he recommended community cloth masking to slow the coronavirus (an intervention for which we now have randomized data showing it doesn’t work).

Fauci opposed Ron DeSantis in numerous TV interviews in spring 2020 when DeSantis reopened schools. He called school reopening reckless— though it was widely embraced in western Europe at the time, and now clearly the correct policy choice.

Fauci supported vaccine mandates and border closure. He repeated the false statement that 6ft of social distancing had an empirical basis. Many in the media and medicine think criticizing him is unfair— he did the best he could with what he knew at the time—but it is fair to criticize a scientist who presented his views as facts when they were at best speculation. And, moreover, there is one criticism that no one can deny:

Although he was director of the NIAID, and although he controlled a 5 billion dollar infectious disease research budget, he chose to launch, fund and conduct precisely ZERO randomized trials of non-pharmacologic interventions."