This Just In — In September 2011, President Barack Obama gave an overview of his deficit reduction plan that explained quite clearly that America had to make some changes that were manifestly necessary.
We needed to change the tax code, he said, to allow companies that make investments in American manufacturing get tax breaks and not just companies with the best lobbyists. We need to make sure that the companies that received help from the taxpayers during the financial crisis of ‘08 paid all that money back.
”This isn’t class warfare,” he said, “It’s math.”
I was reminded of this while watching an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci. He was asked about the origin of the COVID-19 virus (a favorite conspiracy topic) and he said these things that were simple and irrefutable.
He was asked if it’s possible that the virus was created in a lab and deliberately unleashed on the world as well as the natural occurrence of a virus coming into existence (which the World Health Organization says is the most likely).
He answered, that yes, both are possible. Before continuing, he explained a critical point to examine the origin of COVID-19. “We don’t know,” he said. This is critical to understand, said Fauci, because as a scientist, he wants to examine what is known and what is not known. “We do not know the answer to this,” he reiterated – rather emphatically.
”But it is possible, right?” He was asked. Indeed so, said Fauci. Then he invoked the math and the intersection with conspiracies and social media was made clear. Television and social media tend to hold two things up together, making them appear equal when often they clearly are not.
“The fact that two things are possible doesn’t make them equally probable,” he said. He could have gone on and on giving examples of this from the scientific world, I’m sure. Going back to Perry Mason himself, we know that such a question is an established defense counsel device, aimed at suggesting reasonable doubt.
Citing far fetched scenarios, the defense counsel proffers that perhaps it was a lightning strike on that clear sunny afternoon and not arson that caused the fire.
So, it comes down to the evidence, says Fauci. I’m awfully glad that young Anthony Fauci decided on medical school as his career path, but he would have been a pretty good lawyer, too.
In the 1980s, Fauci took the unusual step of meeting with and listening to activists who were protesting against him and the medical community because access to drug treatments for HIV/AIDS patients wasn’t coming fast enough. With that collaboration came a fast track method of access to patients with few or no other options.
Through his research, Fauci was a champion for people living with AIDS, moving treatment away from toxic and complicated drug cocktails and into the management of the immune system that today is generally a chronic illness, not a death sentence.
He did this with science and math. He did this with facts and evidence. This week, he faced a ridiculous political exercise in a Senate committee hearing that was plainly designed to create a split screen of screaming US Senators and a stoic, unresponsive American physician whose career of unselfish public service puts him on a level probably unequalled in our history.
These feckless, desperate politicians would like to hold up to the public that this man lied, cheated and deceived the American public during the COVID-19 pandemic and that he did so to enrich himself. They would like to hold that possibility up on a split screen and say “This too is a possibility.”
I know it was painful to Fauci to not use that Senate hearing to educate the public about the origin of COVID-19, which killed more than a million Americans. I know he wanted to scold these politicians for abusing their platform to try to trap him into some inconsistency in his testimony, then scream “Perjury!”
In such an environment, the only thing to do is exactly what he did — invoke his right as a citizen to say nothing.
This was the work of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, chaired by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who has repeatedly made public statements about wanting to see Fauci jailed. The stink of GOP desperation is wafting through the halls of Congress. I suppose they’re enjoying their closing months of running the show.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – [email protected] and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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