Orf vs. the Memory Hole: The Heartless Shaming Campaigns of Covid-19

American officials viciously demonized ordinary people for making what turned out to be a prudent choice, for most. On the years of vicious rhetoric we’re being asked to forget

On March 9th of last year, former chief medical advisor to Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to Neil Cavuto on Fox News expressing mirthful astonishment that anyone could say he pushed a zoonotic “spillover” theory for Covid-19. “That’s totally bizarre,” he said. “First of all, I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other. I’ve always kept an open mind.”

Two days later he was on CNN, telling Jim Acosta that he didn’t start off in one place or another, but was influenced by “two very important, well-written, peer reviewed papers in Science magazine strongly suggesting that in fact it was a natural occurrence from an animal to a human.” As Racket’s Matt Orfalea goes on to show above, Fauci didn’t just repudiate the substance of what he’d said about Covid’s origins across three years, but the specific language, down to the word “strongly,” dating to the beginning of the pandemic.

I’m recovering from a particularly violent bout of Covid-19, so perhaps as a vaccinated person I’m a bit frostier on the subject than one might normally be, but Orf has put together a clip I hope future historians will bother to review. It’s now clear one of the biggest, if not the biggest single sources of misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic was Fauci himself. Incidentally, as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just noted, Fauci just admitted the six-foot social distancing rule “just sort of appeared,” and was likely not based on any data. So there’s that.