Anthony Fauci failed during the coronavirus response

A new paper in Science Advances by Bendavid and Patel shows how and why

The first two weeks of March 2020 were jolting. Governments read the Imperial College London report (modeling a million deaths in the US), watched horrifying scenes in Bergamo (a city with median age in the 80s fyi), and collectively embraced policies that had no precedent in human history: The global closing of borders, schools, business, and the use of the police state to enforce this lockdown. School closure would persist in places like LA and SF for 18 months, devastating poor and minority children.

Lockdown was specifically advocated for by Anthony Fauci (‘15 days to stop the spread’/ ‘hunker down’/ ‘shelter in place’), and Fauci would go on to make hundreds of other specific policy recommendations. Although he initially rejected it, by April 2020, he recommended community cloth masking to slow the coronavirus (an intervention for which we now have randomized data showing it doesn’t work).

Fauci opposed Ron DeSantis in numerous TV interviews in spring 2020 when DeSantis reopened schools. He called school reopening reckless— though it was widely embraced in western Europe at the time, and now clearly the correct policy choice.

Fauci supported vaccine mandates and border closure. He repeated the false statement that 6ft of social distancing had an empirical basis. Many in the media and medicine think criticizing him is unfair— he did the best he could with what he knew at the time—but it is fair to criticize a scientist who presented his views as facts when they were at best speculation. And, moreover, there is one criticism that no one can deny:

Although he was director of the NIAID, and although he controlled a 5 billion dollar infectious disease research budget, he chose to launch, fund and conduct precisely ZERO randomized trials of non-pharmacologic interventions.

No trials of masking vs no masking, or n95 masking vs cloth masking. No trials of 3ft vs 6ft distancing. No trials of staggered school reopening or closure. No trials of cohorting. No trials of varying testing strategies. No trials of masking kids 2 to 5 (which only the US did)). He went on TV and made confident assertions about what was best, time and again, and, though he could have tested any one of his assertions, he repeatedly failed to test them. My full video detailing his performance is here.

This is not how a scientist behaves. Science fundamentally means subjecting your theories to empirical testing— (you can even implement while you test)— but failing to run any studies is a failure. Even people who think randomized trials are difficult and impractical must concede that ZERO can’t be the correct number for a pandemic which is cost societies 20 trillion dollars, and killed 7 million + people, globally.

A new paper in Science Advances shows just how monumental Fauci’s failure, and other global leaders, including Tedros at WHO, has been. Here is the paper:

In it, Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel do something clever. They perform observational, regression analyses to ask which COVID19 pandemic measures actually (a) slowed covid spread (b) increased covid spread and (c) had no effect on covid spread. This is precisely like many other studies that have been performed that have found conflicting results— lockdowns work vs. lockdowns didn’t work.

But Bendavid and Patel don’t just perform 1 study— they perform 100,000 studies. They perform nearly every (sensible) possible analytic plan of the data. Basically, they ask, if 10,000 future research teams, each perform 10 studies on COVID policy measures, what might that distribution of findings look like.

Before I tell you their answer. Let me tell you one thing that makes their study very robust. To validate their method, they asked if measles vaccinations policies slowed the spread of measles in the US. (This is a falsification test that Jena and I advocated for in JAMA). They found that ALL MODELS showed significantly that it did. In other words, if policies actually work, this method is able to prove that they work.

But for COVID policies, Bendavid and Patel’s result was different. Here is the raw data for all analyses (L) and just policies begun in 2020 (R)

Shown another way

Few models showed that COVID policies— closing schools, banning gatherings, shelter in place— helped. A few showed that they did not SPREAD COVID. But the VAST, VAST majority showed no significant effect on transmission. They didn’t work.

No effect is probably the correct answer. Beyond voluntary behavioral change, I doubt nearly any official policy response resulted in different outcomes— neither beneficial or harmful—with respect to viral spread.

School closure was a complete fiasco because while it didn’t slow viral spread (or did so only marginally—we have several papers supporting this conclusion); it robbed a generation of kids of several grade levels— a devastating blow that will shorten their lives. We wrote about this years ago.

And policies like 6ft were based on nothing and used to hamper school reopening.

What does the Bendavid and Patel paper mean?

It means that Anthony Fauci and a handful of other leaders globally who set global pandemic policy did so in a way that we learned absolutely nothing and most likely (at least by sheer number of model results), did nothing to change COVID spread.

Here is what the authors write, “The concentration of estimates around a zero effect weakly suggests that government responses did little to nothing to change the COVID-19 burden.”

We should be embarrassed that we used the police state to enforce border closures, ticket people in parks, arrest churchgoers, and folks refusing to wear a cloth mask, while we had no credible evidence these policies helped others, and while Fauci and others who advocated for them, made literally no effort to test if they work.

All lives were changed by the pandemic response and Bendavid and Patel show that for most of the big questions we will never— not now or ever— have conclusive proof they helped or hurt.

That is Anthony Fauci’s greatest failure. The man who controlled 5 billion dollars in research funding, who called himself a scientist, who went on TV 20 times a day to tell us what would help, and who ran zero randomized studies of any non-pharmacologic intervention.

The COVID19 pandemic did not happen during the middle ages, but we leave it just as ignorant as our ancestors who left the Black Death.

Addendum:

For anyone who thinks my criticism is made only after the fact, here is a list of over 200 opeds, podcasts, videos, papers and interviews where my points were laid out in real time

https://x.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1332349435997679622