[The below commentary first appeared in The Epoch Times; republished here by permission of the author and The Epoch Times.]
By Peter Navarro
I fought Anthony Fauci across a White House table over the China travel ban, lockdowns, masks, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, and boosters.
Yet one of the most damning pieces of evidence I have ever seen against the man did not surface until six years later, when Senator Rand Paul released Fauci’s private pandemic diary.
It is an entry dated August 15, 2021. The Biden White House was preparing to roll out a broad COVID booster campaign. Behind closed doors, Fauci knew there was a problem.
The evidence was thin.
The case for boosting everybody was weak.
And the administration needed a message.
Here is what Fauci wrote:
“If we are too precise we will be called out because we cannot back it with data.”
Read that again.
This was not Anthony Fauci struggling heroically with scientific uncertainty. This was the President’s Chief Medical Adviser admitting, in private, that the government could not support its public booster message with the data.
Worse, the decision was already moving ahead.
Fauci described himself and the White House medical team as trying to “fashion [a] coherent message to justify the announcement” that boosters would be offered broadly.
The policy came first.
The justification came afterward.
And Fauci knew exactly where the scientific weakness lay.
In the same diary entry, he identified the real question: Did everybody need another shot, or only the elderly and those with underlying conditions?
That was not some question raised later by “anti-vaxxers.” Fauci himself was asking it privately before the universal campaign rolled forward.
Yet instead of insisting that the government stop, gather the evidence, and tell Americans precisely what was known and unknown, Fauci helped fashion the message.
His own words are devastating: precision was dangerous because precision could expose that the government “cannot back it with data.”
Five weeks later, the government’s own scientific advisers effectively vindicated the concern Fauci had privately recorded—but publicly ignored.
On September 17, 2021, the FDA’s outside advisory committee voted 16–2 against Pfizer’s request to give a booster to everyone sixteen and older.
Then, when the proposal was narrowed to older and high-risk Americans, the same committee overwhelmingly supported it.
Same experts. Same meeting. Same evidence.
No to everybody.
Yes to those most at risk.
That was precisely the distinction Fauci had privately identified.
So what did Fauci do when independent experts arrived publicly at essentially the same conclusion he had privately entertained?
He did not celebrate science working as intended.
His diary records that he was “disappointed.”
When FDA officials moved toward the narrower authorization, Fauci called it “a major mistake.”
That tells you what this story is really about.
It is not simply that Anthony Fauci got a medical question wrong. Scientists get things wrong.
It is that the answer Fauci’s Medical Industrial Complex wanted had begun to outrank the evidence.
A recommendation says: Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here are the risks and benefits. You and your physician decide.
A mandate says: Take the product or pay a price — perhaps your job, your military career, your education, or your ability to participate in ordinary life.
The second requires stronger evidence than the first.
During COVID, Washington repeatedly moved in the opposite—and authoritarian—direction.
The more coercive the policy became, the simpler the message became.
Age disappeared.
Comorbidities disappeared.
Natural immunity was pushed aside.
Known concerns such as myocarditis in younger men became inconvenient complications to a universal slogan. Miscarriage risk in the first trimester—mum, not Mom, was the word.
Everybody vaccinate.
Everybody boost.
That is not informed consent.
That is compliance.
My forthcoming book, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict, puts Fauci’s private diary beside the public record and beside my own contemporaneous record from inside the first Trump White House.
Again and again, Private Tony knew things Public Tony did not tell you.
Private Tony had doubts.
Public Tony had certainty.
Private Tony saw complications.
Public Tony sold slogans.
And when the evidence threatened the slogan, the problem became how to “fashion” the message.
That is why this story matters to the MAHA movement far beyond Anthony Fauci.
MAHA must break the machinery that allowed one government official, surrounded by an obedient medical establishment, Big Pharma, compliant media, and censorious technology companies, to convert unsettled science into government dogma.
Science requires dissent.
Medicine requires individual judgment.
Informed consent requires the whole truth.
And no government official should ever again be permitted to hide uncertainty from the people while privately worrying that telling them the precise truth would expose that he could not “back it with data.”
Peter Navarro served as Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the first Trump White House, where he fought Fauci from the first days of the pandemic, and now serves as Senior Counselor to the President. His new book, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict, with a foreword by Stephen K. Bannon, will be published by War Room Books/ Skyhorse on October 13.]
Related Reading
On the Bookshelf: Peter Navarro’s Unapologetic Prosecution of ‘America’s Doctor’
Peter Navarro’s Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison brilliantly prosecutes Anthony Fauci with the man’s own words. Framed as a courtroom drama in which the reader sits as juror, the book is a sustained, highly personal, and relentlessly documented brief against Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“If we are too precise we will be called out because we cannot back it with data.”
Precise + data = science.
"Did everybody need another shot, or only the elderly and those with underlying conditions?"
It wasn't just Fauci who kept harping on the elderly and those with underlying conditions. A lot of MAHA and medical freedom advocates were as well. Where's the data that supported ANY shots for these people? There are reasons why these people are excluded for trials.
I met a new friend in December 2019, but we put our friendship on pause during the pandemic. He was older and cautious because my children had moved back in with me to ride out the pandemic. In February, 2021, he emailed "I also hope you’re in line for a vaccination very soon, if you haven’t yet received one," having just received his first of two. In March, I emailed him back: "We are all taking a wait and see attitude with the Johnson and Johnson as I have friends who ended up in the hospital 4x from Moderna." He responded after his second vaccine on Friday, March 15: "Keep your sleeves rolled up - it’ll happen. Next fishing trip set for March 25. My guide pals have been getting some big Browns. They sent me a picture of a 27 incher being released! Looking forward to reconvening, when it’s safe. You could get the first hug in a year😅." He couldn't wait to get back out on the river after a long siesta indoors. I read that email on Monday, March 18, but by that time, Jack was dead. He had a sudden heart attack on that Friday while making lunch an hour after writing me that email. At his memorial service, I learned that Jack suffered from heart issues. There is no doubt in my mind that vaccination killed him. He had been fed false information not only from the government, but from our zealous town officials, who accommodated him as a senior to get vaccinated. They even had plans to create a plastic-lined corridor into a town building for mass vaccination, but it never materialized. The blind leading the blind?