Daniel Greenfield
After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was
ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the
campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone
say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this
country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread
now,” he falsely claimed.
Fauci, as usual, is wrong about everything.
The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.
There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most
bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little
White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands
of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s
heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached
over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the
vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.
Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to
find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties
were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist.
Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science,
played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and
local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a
country where the media had not yet been consolidated.
Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to
mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of
giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and
networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of
different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural
environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because
it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America
has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because
never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now
the case..
There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the
government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but
there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some
credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most
notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in
public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk
and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live
virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and
dangerous.
Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio
vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine
between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in
public creating a sense of transparency and trust.
Democrat revisionists act as if public health, elections, or any
important enterprise can only succeed if dissenting voices are
suppressed. But public trust comes from debate, not from a lack of it.
Americans trusted the polio vaccine more than they trust the coronavirus
vaccines because they were part of a public debate, instead of being
told to shut up and just go along.
And the existence of a vigorous public debate proved vital when
batches of the polio vaccine from one manufacturer not only proved
lethal, but infected children with polio and paralyzed some of them. The
initial response by many in the scientific community and among
corporate leaders was a cover-up. Instead, the Eisenhower administration
chose to be transparent even though it led to a smear campaign by
Democrats.
Eisenhower, instead of acting as if there was nothing wrong, admitted
that the government had failed. It would be incomprehensible today when
no politician ever admits to having mishandled the pandemic. New York’s
Cuomo might have killed countless seniors, but he’ll never admit to it.
Neither will any of the other governors who forced infected patients
into nursing homes
Contrary to Fauci’s lies, the polio vaccine process survived not only
“false information”, but vigorous public debate between its two central
figures, Salk and Sabin, between Republicans and Democrats, (Basil
O’Connor, the vaccine’s biggest champion, was FDR’s old friend and had
brought him on board), and catastrophic failures that included a vaccine
manufacturer who infected 40,000 children with polio, paralyzed 51
children, and killed 5 children.
Finally, Fauci is wrong about there being no more polio in America.
What he really means is that there’s no virus in the wild naturally
spreading “polio” in the United States.
Polio now comes to this country through vaccines taken abroad by
immigrants or travelers. (Fauci would also prefer that we not debate
Biden’s open borders policies which are bringing in illegal aliens
infected by the coronavirus and spreading them around the country.)
After a temporary win by Sabin, the United States switched to a live
virus in its polio vaccine due to an outbreak caused by an inactive
vaccine which turned out to carry the live virus. More recently, we went
back to the Salk inactive virus vaccine. However countries which use
the live virus vaccine continue to spread polio to a percentage of those who are vaccinated.
In 2005, an Arizona woman “contracted vaccine-derived paralytic polio” from South America.
In 2008, the CDC reported that “vaccine-derived polioviruses were
detected in patients from eight countries who had acute flaccid
paralysis.”
That’s why vaccine debates, and any other medical debates, are worth having.
The polio debate still continues today generations later. The switch
from a live to an inactive vaccine happened less than a generation ago.
Historians still argue over whether the vaccine outbreak was the fault
of private industry or government oversight. And that’s a good thing.
Vaccines are an important and powerful tool. Like any other
scientific program, they can go disastrously wrong. The best way to
maintain public trust in vaccines or in any other program is through
transparency, telling the truth and conducting an open and public
debate.
Debates over vaccines or any other subject will not always be
conducted in good faith. But secret planning and cover-ups are always
held in bad faith and destroy public trust.
Fauci is a government employee. And the legitimacy of the government
derives from public oversight and scrutiny. That legitimacy fails when
those employees mislead and manipulate the public. Fauci was showered
with the same outpouring of worshipful attention as Salk, without
possessing anything resembling Salk’s level of accomplishment. But where
Salk also faced harsh criticism and accountability when things went
wrong, Fauci never has.
He glides from one interview to another, changes his story twice a
week, adopts whatever the popular Washington D.C. is, and never actually
confronts any of the difficult issues.
In the 50s, Fauci would have long since faced accountability. And
Americans would have never tolerated the level of control over the
public by unelected administrators. Let alone the calls for the
suppression of free speech that Fauci feels free to indulge in to his
fan base at CNN.
People not only have a right, but an obligation, to debate what their
government does. Their opinions may be right or wrong, but that’s not
for Fauci and the government to decide.
It is not the job of government employees to tell the public what to think, but to serve the public.
When a government administration blames a crisis on the public having
too much of a say in things, it’s either covering up its own horrifying
actions or plotting a coup against the public.
Either one is a warning that the only thing unhealthier than a virus is big government.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left andIslamic terrorism.
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