A Public Message to Anthony Fauci

by James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, Popular Rationalism, ©2026

(Mar. 25, 2026) — In what can only be described as a New York Times public image rehabilitation attempt, former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci comes across as a Pontius Pilate – his hands washed of any responsibility for his central role as a, if not the primary, driver of public health policies that nearly destroyed the United States of America.

Dr. Fauci, we remember. We ALL remember. Here is my message to help YOU remember. Let’s start with how you helped the Biden administration threaten ALL of our jobs, but the article does not mention that. It does not mention your central role in the lockdown – in fact, you flatly deny that your actions or policies led to any school closings or factories shut down. How is it that governors across the U.S. decided “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, and you stood by and never protested?

In August 2020 you said publicly: “If someone refuses the vaccine in the general public, then there’s nothing you can do about that. You cannot force someone to take a vaccine.” Then on September 10, 2021 — the day after Biden announced the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard covering ~80–100 million workers — you told PBS: “I myself am quite favorably impressed by that and feel strongly that that is what we should be doing.” On November 4, 2021, testifying before the Senate HELP Committee, when Sen. Romney asked directly whether mandates would save lives, you said: “We know that vaccines absolutely save lives. And we know that mandates work.”

Also on record in a Michael Specter audiobook, Summer 2021: “It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.” It was played back to you at the June 2024 hearing. You did not retract it.

The mandate had no testing option for federal workers or healthcare workers — it was vaccinate or lose your job. You were the Chief Medical Advisor sitting in the White House at the time. You did not object.

We all remember, also, your key role as a driver of the lockdown.

• You sent Dr. Clifford Lane — your NIAID deputy — to China with the WHO Joint Mission in February 2020
• Lane returned and wrote: “China has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost. This is the bottom line.”
• Lane told you directly: “From what I saw in China, we may have to go to as extreme a degree of social distancing to help bring our outbreak under control”
• You testified he had “every reason to believe” Lane’s evaluation
• You then admitted: social distancing “even by somewhat difficult means” involving “essentially the entire community” was possible in the U.S.

Your methodological problems:

1. Lane visited after China had already locked down — he could only observe what was happening, not whether the lockdown caused the decline
2. Chinese data was demonstrably unreliable — WHO had tailored confidentiality forms “to China’s terms” (FOIA-obtained emails, Judicial Watch, March 2021) and a January 2020 WHO epidemiological analysis was marked “strictly confidential”
3. The WHO-China Joint Mission report itself was controlled: all activities were “arranged by the Chinese Government’s National Health Commission” (per a Feb. 15, 2020 internal WHO email)

Additionally — and this one is devastating — the March 9, 2020 White House Coronavirus Task Force guidelines were grounded in an Australian preprint posted just four days earlier, March 5, not peer-reviewed, whose own authors acknowledged the underlying evidence was of “relatively low” quality and found limited or no benefit for five of the six social distancing measures examined. You forwarded it to Birx and Redfield the night before the press conference and it was presented as independent scientific support.

There is so much more. So here, Dr. Fauci, is your own record.

Read the rest here.