Don't Forget: There Are Two Multi-Trillion Dollar Pseudoscience Scams

The news this past week has been filled by Rand Paul’s Senate hearings exposing the extent of the scientific fraud perpetrated by ex-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci in the matter of Covid-19. First Paul released Fauci’s “diaries,” otherwise known as personal musings recorded in various places on the government’s servers. Then Fauci was compelled to testify, whereupon he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege more than 100 times and never provided a word of substantive testimony.

However, the diaries on their face revealed numerous instances where Fauci’s public statements were blatant deceptions. As just one example, on January 20, 2020, Fauci wrote "Now we know the market was not the source [of the virus], it was the amplifier." But even as he admitted that in private, he was going to extraordinary lengths in public to cover up that conclusion, apparently in order to deflect blame from himself for having funded the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that actually unleashed the pandemic. Among other things, Fauci induced the writing of papers to promote the theory that the virus arose in the Wuhan wet market — a theory he knew was wrong. From Matt Ridley, writing in Spiked on July 31:

[A] week [after his January 20, 2020 entry, Fauci] convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so. . . .

Similar levels of deception characterized everything about Fauci’s Covid-19 regime, from the promotion of lockdowns, to masking, to mandatory vaccination, and more. Dissenters were silenced and ostracized. The overall cost of the deceptions reaches easily into the multiple trillions of dollars. As the level of blatant deceptions has been revealed, millions of people have realized that official government “science” cannot be trusted to any degree. As likely as not, it is no more than a convenient cover story to justify protecting or enriching the politically powerful interests of the moment. As the amount of government funding backing a particular “scientific” narrative rises, and reaches into the hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars, the likelihood that that narrative can be trusted declines until it approaches zero.

So therefore keep in mind that the Covid-19 “science” narrative is not the only recent narrative cloaked with the mantle of “science” that has been showered with government funding into the multi-trillions of dollars. There is a second. That second narrative is the “climate” scare — that is, the claim that human use of hydrocarbon fuels and release of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere is leading to some kind of existential climate crisis.

Is there any reason to believe that the still ongoing climate scare narrative is any more trustworthy than the Covid-scare narrative has proven to have been? Both have been backed by a vast research apparatus, almost entirely government funded, which looks to lose most of its funding and associated careers and promotions and prestige if there really is no underlying existential crisis.

Fauci’s disgrace came from a world of perverse incentives. His goal as a public servant should have been to get the public through the pandemic with the least possible death, costs and inconveniences. But his personal fame, funding and wealth could be maximized by exaggerating the danger of the virus, deflecting away from himself the blame for the origins of the problem, and demanding sacrifices from the public in the form of lockdowns, masking or the like.

Very comparable perverse incentives bear on the “climate scientists” who continually proclaim a climate crisis and demand sacrifices from the public. Without a manufactured crisis, there is no need at all for 95% of them. In my recent post on the litigation concerning the Endangerment Finding, check out the list of some of the dozens of organizations trying to preserve this underlying basis for hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding, supposedly to “solve” the climate crisis.

In fact, we’ve known at least since the Climategate emails were released from the University of East Anglia way back in 2009 that the whole climate scare has been characterized by data manipulation, orthodoxy enforcement and suppression of dissent. Fauci’s embarrassment from his conduct as to Covid-19 serves as a timely reminder to remain skeptical at all times about government-funded science, and even more so when the money involved reaches into the trillions.