Devil’s Advocate: Farewell to Fauci

Noble Heart

I watched the emergence of Anthony Fauci into international prominence over the past two years with particular interest. He and I are graduates of the same New York City high school, a commonality that gives me some insight into his intellectual formation. Though it was some years after him, I played on the basketball team, too. Somewhere, there’s a picture of me in those cool shorts, that I promise you will never see.

Regis High School is a unique institution. It is a highly selective, academically rigorous, all-boys Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is widely considered the best Catholic high school (and one of the best overall) in the country. It gave Anthony Fauci (and me) a strong classical rhetoric-and-logic education in the Jesuit tradition —the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid and Caesar’s Wars, in the original Greek and Latin. It’s an education that, at its best, laid the foundation for logical and critical thinking, and prepared students for the best liberal arts colleges. It also fostered Catholic and Jesuit ethical values, which, of course, have changed over the years. 

The Jesuits were formed as the vanguard of the Counter-Reformation and have historically been attached to reactionary politics, but the order is also highly adaptable to the changes in social ideology, while maintaining a consistent commitment to educating the future elite. By the time I was in high school, some good men like Daniel Berrigan, were teaching smart students to see the world through lenses of intellectual and moral honesty, helping them lapse to the left. Like Fidel, who said the Jesuits who ran the high school he attended, “influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. … They influenced my sense of justice.”

Even more unusual for an academically elite school on the Upper East Side, Regis is tuition-free. Unique, indeed. That’s because it was endowed in 1914, by the widow of New York City mayor Hugh Grant, to offer a free rigorous education to the boys from the city’s poor Catholic (Irish, Italian, etc.) immigrant families. Yup, before it was the home of the UN and Gossip Girl, the East Side was a neighborhood of slaughterhouses and the East Side Kids.

So, into the 70s at least, Regis was a school to which middle strata (virtually all white) Catholic families—from dockworkers and firemen to lawyers and pharmacists (Fauci’s father)—throughout the NYC region strove to have their sons accepted. Many kids commuted over an hour each way every day. It was understood as the ticket to a solid professional career. And, indeed, it produced a slew of very smart lawyers, doctors, and professors (not so much bankers) who become loyal alumni. Here's a prototypical testimony—including the “it changed my life” part—from a well-known alumnus:

It was definitely my ticket out of Staten Island, because it got me into a Catholic high school called Regis, which would change the course of the rest of my life. I was extremely lucky to get accepted to Regis, because (a) it’s one of the best high schools in the country and (b) it’s free. For Catholics in New York, Regis is almost like the Watchtower building for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Tens of thousands of kids apply for a hundred and twenty spots in each class. To this day, if a Catholic mother hears that I went to Regis, she will grab my face and say, “God bless! What a wonderful place!” -Colin Jost 

This Regis High School background might help you to understand a couple of things about how I understand the phenomenon of Anthony Fauci. First of all: Think you've seen Fauci worship in mainstream media over the past two years?  Nothing compared to the Zoom meetings with my Regis classmates! Anathema is the precise word for any criticism of Anthony Fauci in that circle. When I sent them the link to my anti-mandate article last year, I got a slew of derogatory responses, including this wish to see me die in agony: "My one regret is not being present in the COVID ICU to witness the author struggling for his final agonal breath." From a medical doctor. At a Catholic hospital. Noble Hearts, as we Regians call ourselves. (“My Ours Be The Noble Heart” is the school anthem.)

But what best explains the relevance of Regis to Anthony Fauci is an anecdote regarding my nephew, who applied to the school some years after me. His father, my oldest brother (who had not gotten into Regis and pooh-poohed it, though unavoidably respecting it) wanted his son to go, but my nephew was more interested in going to high school with his friends in Queens rather than commuting to the geeky school in Manhattan. Having passed the exam, my nephew headed into the obligatory personal interview with a Jesuit, who asked him a stock interview question: "Who is the historical personage you admire most?"  Sensing the chance to shock the sensibilities of the old priest and the old man, and to banish the prospect of four years in nerdville, my nephew replied: "Judas Iscariot."  When asked to elaborate, he pointed out that Judas did the dirty but necessary work that nobody else would, though it brought shame and scorn on him from all quarters, and performed the key act without which the rest of the story would not have been able to unfold in the gloriously celebrated way that it did, yada, yada.

My nephew was not showing off his knowledge of a recently discovered Gnostic gospel. He was just being a smart-ass. But, "smart" was the operative word. Much to his surprise—though not to those who are familiar with the intricate wiles of the mind that is known as "Jesuitical"—he was accepted. One can just hear the good fathers: "Now that is the kind of student we want at Regis."

And that is what I heard every time Anthony Fauci spoke: The rhetorical skill that crafts a sinuous and compelling narrative that fixes our attention on the best of a worst case and obfuscates the rest. The ability to deceive and dissemble without (for the most) part saying anything demonstrably false, by soliciting sympathetic identification with what his audience likes to think is true about the subject in question, but above all about how smart he and they are. That is the perfect intellectual persona for the apex medical bureaucrat speaking for the most corrupt corporate-captured “public” agency. Pharma is a devil, and Fauci is the Devil’s Advocate. And I know where he developed that rhetorical (in the classical sense of the word) skill and intelligence.

I also know that, per Fidel, that skill and intelligence, learned in the same place, can be put to better use. I hope other Regis alumni, like Edward Curtin and myself, have done so. Our shared intellectual formation has made the sanctification of Fauci a particularly curious thing for Ed and me to watch unfold, as we discussed in our video, “Fauci's Follies, Covid Policy, and the Left.”

As I’ve focused on watching what’s been most real about Fauci for me—his exercise of the intellectual-rhetorical skills we both learned—I’ve avoided any comprehensive frontal attack on the doctor. RFK, Jr. has done an excellent job of that in his book The Real Anthony Fauci. I dare anyone to read the devastating first chapter of that book, which lays out the unprecedented, dishonest, and cruel campaign Fauci led to suppress treatments and punish doctors who dared to try to treat sick patients instead of waiting for the magic-bullet vaccine, without being shocked at how diabolical his enterprise actually was.

Dr. Fauci and Mr. Hide

That said, right now, I actually want to implore you to Listen to Dr. Fauci: He told you everything you need to know. It’s his evil twin, who appears on TV all the time, that you must be wary of. Indeed, Dr. Fauci should listen to himself.

Here, for example, is Dr. Fauci telling us how difficult it would be to jump over “tried and true” methods in order to develop a vaccine of a different type (i.e., mRNA). It would take at least a decade to make sure such a vaccine was safe and effective, said Dr. Fauci, a few months before Covid-19 appeared in the U.S.:

The following clip is Dr. Fauci, after Covid appeared, explaining how, though it normally takes “five, six, seven” years (note: already slip-sliding down from ten) to prove a vaccine is safe and effective, he and his cohort concocted a vaccine and gave the first injection to a volunteer in 65  days (“rocket speed”—or, per Trump, the father and continuing promoter of these vaccines, don’t forget, “Warp Speed.”)

One might notice, with some critical curiosity, how Fauci could carefully explain that the science requires ten years to make sure a vaccine is safe and effective, and a year later change that to as little as five years, and seconds later declare even that “unacceptable” and 65 days will do. One might remark how amazing it is that the ”speed of science” changes at Dr. Fauci’s discretion. One might, if one weren’t so pleasantly beguiled by the personification of “science” himself.

“Speed of science” is a phrase used by Pfizer’s President of International Developed Markets, Janine Small, when she acknowledged at an EU hearing that Pfizer did not know or claim that their vaccine prevented transmission of the Covid virus: “Regarding the question around did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market…No. We have to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.” So, the “speed of science” is really the speed of the market. “The market” is the pace car that determines how fast “the science” can, and must, go. That’s what Ms. Small and Dr. Fauci are saying.

Indeed, one might also notice that Dr. Fauci warns us that the vaccine is not really “acceptable” after 65 days. It will take another “year to year-and-a-half” to “even know if [the vaccine] works.” And after that, to establish that it is safe, you need to do “an extended study, not in a normal volunteer… but in people who are out there in a risk situation” to make sure the vaccine doesn’t actually make people “worse…… more likely to get infected.” [my italics]

The “other element to safety” Fauci is warning about in this clip is the phenomenon known as Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE). As he says, it “would not be the first time…it happened.” In fact, he tells us, ADE is a known danger with mRNA vaccines and a particularly tragic example of it occurred in trials of a vaccine for respiratory syncytial coronavirus (RSV) in 2019 that Fauci specifically alludes to.

He did not specify that, among 20 infants in the vaccinated group for that vaccine trial, 16 required hospitalization and two died (while only one of the 21 participants in the control group was hospitalized). Indeed, a vaccine that “made the children worse.”

Nor did he mention an October, 2020 study on the safety of Covid vaccines in light of those previous disasters, which determined that the spike protein of SARS-CoV, which the mRNA vaccines make your cells produce, "contains several immunodominant sites that can induce non-neutralizing antibodies, including those associated with ADE, or harmful immune responses.”

Indeed, once the decision was made to administer and mandate these vaccines to everyone, Fauci never again evinced the slightest concern about the fact that clinical trials for these Covid vaccines did not fully test for the very serious danger of ADE, as he himself warned they were obliged to.

ADE is a danger that’s been warned about repeatedly by Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who called the Covid mass vaccination program, "a textbook example for how to provoke antibody-dependent enhancement of the disease." That danger from the Covid vaccines has also been confirmed in a study published this September: “monoclonal anti-S-protein Abs [antibodies]can function as ADE-causing Ab…These results raise the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines targeting the S-protein also induce ADE-causing Abs as well as neutralizing Abs.”

But, once the vaccine is on the market, you just cannot consider if it makes the children or adults worse. The “science” is moving too fast.

Dr. Fauci, or Mr. Hide, his evil alter-ego, certainly did not heed what the authors of that Covid vaccine safety study said, and what Dr. Fauci’s own public statements make clear: “we have learnt the absolute necessity of tracking the comprehensive safety of vaccines before large-scale application, no matter the urgency of the moment” [my italics]. (An admonition that I urge every reader to read again. And again. And sear it in the front of their mind. For the next time. Which is coming.)

This is the science that Fauci knew, told us that he knew, and ignored and contravened—and colluded in censoring and punishing anyone who dared to point out.  Dr. Fauci was called (By whom? we might ask) to become Devil’s Advocate, Rocket Man, Warp-Speed and all. That is what’s “unacceptable.”

This clip is a nice example of Anthony Fauci’s special rhetorical talent: the ability to tell you a truth—that the vaccines he is promoting do not meet the minimum standards of safety that he defined—in a way that avoids recognizing it.  “The vaccines are not safe” becomes “There’s the good news and… the challenge.” No “bad news” about these devils.

Karma Chameleon

Dr. Fauci’s shape-shifting science and rhetorical escapism were well on display in his notorious, blatantly contradictory, public statements about masks. Here’s his famous March, 2020 60 Minutes conversation with Dr. Jonathan LaPook about masks:

There is nothing ambiguous about what Fauci said here: “people should not be walking around with masks.” Dr. LaPook emphasizes how important it is to be clear and definitive with such a public statement: “You're sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.” And Fauci repeats and elaborates: “There's no reason to be walking around with a mask… wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

There is no doubt Fauci meant what he said here, since he had said the same thing in a February, 2020 email to a colleague who asked about wearing a mask while travelling: “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material…I do not recommend that you wear a mask.”

And there’s no reason Fauci shouldn’t have said this, since it is consistent with the known science and the explicit statements of virtually every public health official in the world at the time.

Like the Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who tweeted in February, 2020: “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,” and also said on national television: “Not only are you not preventing yourself from getting a disease, you may be increasing your chance of getting a disease by wearing that mask.” And epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, member of Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board, who told Christiane Amanpour on PBS in August, 2021: “Those cloth pieces you hang over your face…have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out…The science is first…telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.” (My favorite: “It’s like throwing sand at a chain link fence.”) And public-health professor, Lisa Brousseau, who said: “What we're seeing is a lot of magical thinking, a lot of wishful thinking. Cloth masks are wishful thinking.”

It's a point that was made by many others, some of whom can be found here. Fauci’s statement on 60 Minutes was not ill-considered, mistaken, or dishonest. He was carefully and honestly communicating the scientific truth that he and all his colleagues knew.

But then, a few months later, in an interview with Katherine Ross on TheStreet in June, 2020, Fauci said that he had been lying in the 60 Minutes interview—noble-lying, of course, for the sake of the brave healthcare workers:

Well, the reason for [telling people not to wear masks] is that we…were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the … the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way [sic],… we did not want them to be without the equipment that they needed. So there was not enthusiasm about going out and everybody buying a mask or getting a mask. We were afraid that that would deter away from the people who really needed it.

A noble lie from a Noble Heart.

Much of the criticism of Fauci’s contradictions starts with accepting this story—Fauci’s story—that he lied to the public about masks in March 2020, but only did so for the sake of healthcare workers. Bad enough, since, as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—one of the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, against whom Fauci launched a media campaign to smear as "fringe epidemiologists"—said on Jimmy Dore’s show: 

Once you've lied like that, you're done, your credibility is shot, right. He basically is saying he's telling people scientific facts…in order to manipulate their behavior, rather than to tell them the truth…I mean there's not much in public health that you have, what you have is your credibility…and once you've shot that credibility, for whatever purpose—in order to, in this case, to manipulate the public,…I don't know why you would trust him again.

True that. But it’s actually worse. As Dr. Bhattacharya also pointed out: “The irony…is that he was telling the truth” on 60 Minutes. 

We know Fauci was sincere in the 60 Minutes interview because, as we said, he was saying the same thing privately in emails. And we know he—and all the others saying the same thing—didn’t make up all the reasons he was giving why masks are ineffective, because, as Bhattacharya points out, in his exchange with Dore:

JB: Before 2020, there were dozens of randomized trials with masks—including N95 masks, and cloth masks, and surgical masks, in the community and in settings like in hospitals, and it is very difficult to find evidence from…good randomized studies, that masks protect against viruses like [the flu and Covid]...So he was reflecting the pre-2020 consensus on masks, based on a huge body of high quality research. He was telling the truth in that [60 Minutes] clip. [his emphasis] 

JD: So when did the consensus change?

JB: Uh, sometime around April 2020. And not based on any scientific studies. It just changed.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Fauci, giving a first, unprepared response, told us the science he knew, which was the scientific consensus at the time. He was sure of it, and knew people were listening really closely. In the later “admission,” Fauci was actually lying about lying—"confessing” to a lie in order to hide the truth of what he had previously said, which was inconvenient to the case he was now pushing, which involved elaborate charades of double- and triple masking. All of which was not dictated by changes in “the scientific consensus” or a new mass of “substantial data” in the one month from March to April, 2020, but by the newly crystalized profit and political imperatives (more fearmongering to get acceptance for mandatory vaccination, more obsessive Trump-bashing to divide and confuse).

The distinctive Faucian rhetorical signature here is that nobody—at least very few, honest scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and similarly trained rhetoricians like myself among them—even noticed this possibility. Fauci led everyone—even harsh nemeses like Jimmy Dore and Kim Iverson—to swallow the criticism of him that he proferred, sweetened with his noble-hearted “noble lie” defense. Beyond lying, Fauci misleads, and gets away with it.

The bottom line is: No matter when you think he lied or misled, Anthony Fauci’s prime objective was not to tell you the truth, but to manipulate your behavior. Not the work of a scientist, but of a medical bureaucrat. A Devil’s Advocate.

But you have to notice the rhetorical shape-shift. I say again, we should listen to Dr. Fauci, the scientist, who knows and tells us the science that his alter-ego, Mr. Hide, the Pharma-captured medical bureaucrat, misleads us away from. 

Here, for example, Dr. Fauci explains—again repeatedly and emphatically, after being asked to confirm—that there is no better immunization than natural immunity gained from infection: “If she got the flu for 14 days she's as protected as anybody can be because the best vaccination is to get infected yourself… She should not get [the flu vaccine] again. she doesn't need it because …the most potent vaccination is getting infected yourself”:

Dr. Fauci is here confirming the adaptive power of the natural human immune system that his evil twin elsewhere deprecates and that the drugs he pushes degrade. He had to change—actually forget and make you forget and not notice the forgetting—a definitive scientific knowledge he emphatically stated, to push the new-model infinite vaccine subscription program. 

Here's the good doctor telling us that there is no danger to the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, or even from the infected—because that’s how actually effective vaccines work:

(Sorry for the goofy video. Best I could find.)

That observation had to be memory-holed by Mr. Hide, lest it lead you to notice precisely that the Covid “vaccines” do not work the way he himself told you to expect, and that mandates for these vaccines are therefore entirely unjustified.

And here is Dr. Fauci, in December, 2021, in response to a question about the number of children’s hospitalizations, explaining how Covid cases are overcounted:

“If you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with Covid as opposed to because of Covid. And what we mean by that: if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for Covid, and they get counted as a covid-hospitalized individual, when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it's overcounting the number of children who are hospitalized with Covid as opposed to because of Covid.” [his emphases]

This overcounting process regarding children that Fauci describes and warns us against is in fact the deliberate policy he and the CDC and public health authorities explicitly ordered for everyone throughout the pandemic. As White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx declared: ”If someone dies with Covid-19, we are counting that as a Covid-19 death.” And as the Illinois Director of Public Health directed: “Even if you died of a clear alternate cause…it's still listed as a Covid death…that does not mean that was the cause of the death [her emphasis].” “Clear alternate cause” included things like intentional injury and poisoning, motorcycle accidents, and gunshot wounds. As one epidemiologist told The Atlantic in September, 2021: “Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.” But there they are.

So, Fauci is revealing nothing new in this clip with MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin. He is telling us what he and other pharma-captured medical bureaucrats knew, and ordered, to be the case all along—that, by deliberate policy directive, Covid case and death counts are completely unreliable and make it impossible to know how many people were infected with or died from Covid-19. It’s just that you hadn’t noticed it, because it was kept from your attention. It’s just that, in this clip, Dr. Fauci and MSNBC were now willing to state it on air, publicly. In the Christmas season of 2021, the time had come to assuage the public’s anxiety a bit—not because there were any new scientific facts, but because the political value of Covid fearmongering played differently in the time of Biden than of Trump.

So, Dr. Fauci told you the truth about the scientifically ridiculous, contrived-to-fearmonger Covid case/death count, a truth that devastates the fundamental rationale for all the radically disruptive social policies he and his cohorts put us through for over two years—but he presented it in a way that discourages you from noticing that that’s what it means, while preserving his ability to manipulate your behavior. And it worked, didn’t it? How many people noticed that?

It’s a sinuous and compelling narrative that Fauci creates, misleading even when true.

Of course, with the omnibus memory of the internet, it’s impossible to hide all the shape shifts. At some point, even a classical rhetorician like Fauci loses the sinuous thread of rhetorical obfuscation and runs into the stubborn bull of a plain-old lie:

“I didn’t shut down anything.”

“I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.”

Devil’s Playground

So, as he leaves the stage, Dr. Fauci’s narrative has become significantly less compelling, and is effectively deconstructed by his own contradictory statements and logic.

My summary take on Fauci is that he’s a self-admitted deceiver, dissembler, and, ultimately, liar. He has played a central role in creating what is a social, political, and epistemological (undermining our ability to know how to know), as well as medical, disaster from which it is going to be very difficult for U.S. society, public health, and scientific practice to recover.

The reality of what may be the worst iatrogenic medical disaster in history is becoming harder to ignore in the wake of multiple reinfections of the multiply vaccinated, all-cause morbidity and mortality statistics, myocarditis and DNA-transcription studies, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, negative vaccine effectivity, evident harms from lockdowns and masking, etc. The appearance of articles like the NYT’s “Why Many Americans Turned on Anthony Fauci,” which ridicules the insistence that “skepticism of the good doctor must have been everyone’s fault but his own,” is a sign of the establishment trying to handle “a growing willingness by mainstream observers, and even the ‌Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to admit that the public health response to Covid-19 was in many ways a failure.”

Anybody who, at this point, does not see, based on what Fauci himself has told us, the incompetence and incoherence of the whole Covid project of which he was a prime director, including how unsafe and ineffective the vaccines are and how scientifically ridiculous and politically pernicious the mandate and passport policies were and are, is a stubborn and dangerous fool, who will be fooled again—by their attachment to effectively religious, anti-scientific ideologies about magic potions and omniscient saints.

But it is not over. Multiple responsible parties, including Fauci himself, are trying to pretend they didn’t say and do the things they did. Meanwhile, the worst of the policies—vaccine mandates and passports that fire people from jobs, eject them from schools, prevent them from moving about freely and travelling—are still being enforced for no good reason, preventing, for example, women travelling to get an abortion and 30-50% of black kids in D.C. from going to school. If more people are coming to understand that these mandates are not justified, few are willing to admit that they never were. People are still rushing to get an insufficiently tested, still-officially-unapproved genetic therapy treatment for themselves and their children that will not prevent infection or transmission, will have to be readministered (because it will make them more likely to get Covid) after a few months, and does carry significant risks of harm that were never tested for. People still think censoring Jay Bhattacharya, Robert Malone, and Joe Rogan is a good idea, Ivermectin is a horse dewormer, and there’s something “progressive” about California making it illegal for doctors to disagree with Dr. Fauci or any of his successors.

And, sorry, “If only we knew then…” won’t wash. Fauci and his fanboys and girls helped to hide, ridicule, censor, and punish the science and scientists that were available, and to which they’re all turning now, Great Barrington Declaration and all. I’m pleased to note that the article I wrote over a year ago, which was based on science that was available before mandates were instituted,  and was greeted by derision and death wish by my and Fauci’s fellow alumni, has stood up quite well—better, in fact, than Fauci’s train of contradictory pronouncements.

Per Kim Iversen’s excellent take: You don’t get away with “If only I knew then…,” when you rejected the knowledge then, when a) You were presented with, and superciliously dismissed, the data and the analyses that were available, and b) Your attitude was actually: “I don’t want to know!” or “There’s nothing else to know, and you’re a moron for suggesting there is!”

Fauci is not the only pharma/government-approved expert to tell you, in their own voice, what you need to know about how wrong they were. 

Here is Dr. Science’s partner, the Vaccine King, in May, 2022, telling us clearly the truth that Covid was never the apocalyptic threat it was fearmongeringly presented as, and would have had to be to justify the draconian and discriminatory policies he and Fauci championed. Rather, it was “a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu.” Something Gates pretends not to know was demonstrated early on by scientists like John Ioannidis (as I noted by me in my article a year ago):

And here’s Gates again, at the World Economic Forum in May, 2022, telling us the simple truth (and again pretending not to know that many of us said this early on) that the radically discriminatory and disruptive vaccine mandates and passports are pointless, because the vaccines do not prevent transmission:

The urgent question is how not to get fooled again, by deceivers and dissemblers who make the best of a terrible case, obfuscate the rest, and skillfully play to what we like to think is true about complex scientific questions, and about ourselves. To avoid that, we have to notice it’s happening.

Because this incidence is not yet over, and it is going to happen again.

The state—including this American capitalist-imperialist state—is adept at finding “emergency” reasons that seem socially reasonable to force-extract enormous profits and take tighter control of our lives. And the best educational institutions of this state are adept at producing smart spokespersons who can, with all sincerity, appeal to our sense of rationality and social responsibility, and convince us that resistance to their emergency measures is stupid and selfish. 

Specifically, having tasted this level of profit, the pharmaceutical industry and its captured state agencies will find another “emergency” and another sympathetic character with a  harmonious (though forked) tongue to present as “America’s Doctor” and “the most trusted man in America,” who’ll tell you—and force you—to take your medicine. 

The best way to deceive people is not to lie all the time, but to tell enough of the truth to effectively manipulate their behavior. As Bob Dylan sings “Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.” In my metaphor above, the devil of Pharma comes as a healer (for profit). Or a philanthropist. And sometimes his advocate comes as a man of science. 

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