Robert Kennedy Jr. is hardly alone in wondering how the individual who performed so poorly in handling the nation’s last public health emergency—the AIDS outbreak of the 1980s—could possibly be in the running as the authority to turn to in our current difficulties. Dr. Anthony Fauci though has indeed accomplished that.
In his just released The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy lays out the details, over a truly exhaustive range of missteps, flip-flops, mischaracterizations and blunders, of how and why Dr. Fauci’s career hardly warrants his being selected as pandemic czar. To the contrary, Anthony Fauci has been a central figure involved for decades with a chilling history of drug experimentation, profit windfalls, and pharmaceutical bullying—much of it taking place in developing countries amid vulnerable populations with lackadaisical government oversight. The hype, drumbeating of impending doom, demonization of all dissenting voices, and above all else treasuries being emptied for whatever new drug being peddled, are the routine tactics Kennedy exposes to be a winning strategy trotted out over and over again—swine flu (1976), bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009), Zika virus (2016), etc.
Yet for RFK the incongruity of Dr. Fauci at the nation’s helm does make some sense, in the worst sense. Kennedy for decades has been more than candid in shining a piercing light on the dangerous alliance of convenience among government, pharmaceutical giants, mega-corporations, mass media conglomerates and other influence brokers, holding up to view what it’s starting to become: a uniquely blood-chilling global power grab by entities having realized that our uber-sophisticated high-tech society can be used as a weapon to diminish, bind, disempower, demoralize, and threaten us. Kennedy is certainly one of the few among the world’s intelligentsia who doesn’t genuflect unswervingly to the idea that all emerging technology without exception will most certainly improve all our lives. He in fact sees scenarios in which some new advances will ruin quality of life by unwanted and pernicious micromanagement of personal and private volitions and choice.
The son and nephew of both an assassinated senator and president, Mr. Kennedy should know about secular power juxtaposed against belief. When asked by the Vatican News in 2018 what influence his father’s faith had on him and his politics, Kennedy responded that his slain father’s creed was that of the Gospels. He told the Catholic Voice in Oakland that his mother and father both read stories to him about God, Earth’s creatures and the beauty of creation, his father viewing Christianity as “an instrument of justice and kindness around the world.”
There’s nothing Christian, or just and kind, about using Africa as the venue of choice for new drug trials in countries with lax regulations, corrupt governments and disposable volunteers, and little religious piety in pharmaceutical profiteering. And while at it, there’s nothing even remotely “progressive” about it either. Whatever Kennedy’s personal failings and/or political shortfalls he’s enough of an American, a Christian—and a liberal with the courage to place his faith and persona above the group thinking, anti-religionist leftist hivemind—to realize that and feel obligated to confront it. If more of the two hundred million Christians in America had equal courage the United States would be a far better nation.
David Nabhan is a science columnist for both Newsmax (“Shaking Up Science”) and the Times of Israel (“Tectonic Shifts”).