‘Peer-reviewed science offered anaemic if any support for masking, quarantines and social distancing, and Dr Fauci offered no citations or justifications to support his diktats. Both common sense and the weight of scientific evidence suggest that all these strategies, and unquestionably shutting down the global economy, caused far more injuries and deaths than they averted.

‘During a speech to HHS [Health and Human Services] regulators, Fauci explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people. “The one thing historically people need to realise, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”

‘Dr Fauci observed in March 2020 that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better”. Perhaps he recognised that what masking lacked in efficacy against contagion, it compensated for with powerful psychological effects. These symbolic powers demonstrated strategic benefits for the larger enterprise of encouraging public compliance with draconian medical mandates. Dr Fauci’s switch to endorsing masks after first recommending against them came at a time of increasing political polarisation, and masks quickly became important tribal badges – signals of rectitude for those who embraced Dr Fauci, and the stigmata of blind obedience to undeserving authority among those who balked. Moreover, masking, by amplifying everyone’s fear, helped inoculate the public against critical thinking.

‘By serving as persistent reminders that each of our fellow citizens was a potentially dangerous and germ-infected threat to us, masks increased social isolation and fostered divisions and fractionalisation – thereby impeding organised political resistance.

‘The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis”. By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in appropriations.

‘Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science-backed. The process for making that policy choice, Gottlieb continued, “is a perfect example of the lack of rigour around how CDC made recommendations”.

‘Finally, the lockdowns of the healthy were so unprecedented that the World Health Organisation’s official pandemic protocols recommended against them. Some WHO officials were passionate on the topic, among them Professor David Nabarro, Senior Envoy on Covid-19, a position reporting to the Director General.

‘On October 8, 2020, he said, “We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of controlling this virus. We may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We’ll have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe, actually, and so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method . . . lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle – and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”

‘Dr Fauci and other officials made no inquiry or claims as to whether lockdowns would cause more harm and death than they averted. Subsequent studies have strongly suggested that lockdowns had no impact in reducing infection rates. There is no convincing difference in Covid infections and deaths between laissez-faire jurisdictions and those that enforced rigid lockdowns and masks. Dr Fauci’s mask deceptions were among several “noble lies” that, his critics complained, revealed a manipulative and deceptive disposition undesirable in an even-handed public health official. Dr Fauci explained to the New York Times that he had upgraded his estimate of the vaccine coverage needed to insure “herd immunity” from 70 per cent in March to 80-90 per cent in September not based on science, but rather in response to polling that indicated rising rates of vaccine acceptance.

‘He supported Covid jabs for previously infected Americans, defying overwhelming scientific evidence that post-Covid inoculations were both unnecessary and dangerous.’

Under questioning on September 9, 2021, Dr Fauci conceded he could cite no scientific justification for this policy.

‘In September 2021, in a statement justifying Covid vaccine mandates to school children, Dr Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade-school measles and mumps vaccines – an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr Fauci [who is 80 years old] attended grade school in the 1940s. Dr Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda.’