Chicago Way w/John Kass: The Fauci Failure

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Well, didn't say much. He didn't, but a lot was asked of him. And so we're returning to our friend and contributor here, the Chicago Way podcast and Johncast News, Dr. Corey Franklin, who may or may not know is written for John in the past and spent 25 years plus working here in Chicago, specifically as a director of medical intensive care at Cook County. hospital and has written more papers than I can count. And it always has a great insight on the world of medicine and science. Dr. Franklin, welcome to the Chicago Way. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. So I'm sure most people I would assume, and what happens when you assume, but most people understand something that happened this weekend or have seen the headlines. But in your synopsis, what do you, what do you say, tell people when they ask you? Because I'm sure people come to you. What's going on with this Dr. Anthony Fauci stuff? Well, you can't understand there's nobody neutral on Dr. Anthony Fauci. You know, you're either a fanboy or you want him thrown in prison. And I try and be objective about it. I don't think you could look at the hearings last Wednesday without reading the diary that was released 1,100 pages from a government computer that used for his personal. musings which is you know that's not good no and so I think you have to put those together Now, if you just look at what happened last Wednesday, it's fairly obvious that he was told by his lawyers, this could be a potential perjury trap. And his best option is to take the fifth for every question, even what day it is or what color tie you wear. The floor, what color the floor is, right? Yeah, you know, all that stuff. I mean, and it's not a good look, but it may be the smartest legal approach for Anthony Fauci. When you put this together with the diary, though, and I don't want to get into things like the lockdowns or the school closing. I mean, we could address those, but the real substance here is what Anthony Fauci did with the source of COVID. Now, we still don't know what the source of COVID is, although it's becoming more and more. apparent that it may be a lab leak. I don't know if you saw today, but Joe Biden's COVID director said he's pretty much convinced it's a lab leak. But when you look at...

What Anthony Fauci wrote, he wrote one very important thing in his diary. And this was on January 26, 2020. So this is when there was the first COVID patients in the United States. That's how it was. And he found out from the genomics, from the epidemiologic data, that the Wuhan marketplace, the wet market was not the source. of COVID. It was an amplifier. It was where people came and got it, but it was not the source. So Anthony Fauci has known that since the very beginning of the pandemic. What I think is the most important thing, and what I think may have colored to a certain extent, his lack of testimony. is that once the Wuhan marketplace was not the source of the infection, he knew in the back of his mind, even though he wrote, well, it still must be an animal source, but he knew in the back of his mind it could be a lab leak. And if it could be a lab leak, it could be associated with an engineered virus that he... didn't directly have any impact on, but he influenced, he championed, he did have some indirect funding, and you could make a reasonable case that he was in part responsible. for an engineered virus that may have escaped during a lab leak, which is, by the way, which is what they were afraid of for many years with gain of function research was just a specific form of viral manipulation. The scientists were afraid that... You know, this could leak and this could kill a lot of people. So the people who, the Anthony Fauci rail around the crew who says, well, is it ridiculous? It's not ridiculous. This was foreseen many years ago by many respected scientists. And in fact, it's the reason that President Obama put in a moratorium on gain of function research in 2014. It may or may not be a coincidence that President Biden's pardon. for Anthony Fauci extends back to that particular year, 2014. But there are many things in the diary that are very suspicious that after that point, Anthony Fauci attempted to steer the conversation away from a lab leak. Right. And for what it's worth, I talked to on January 23rd of 2020, so three days before the first, you know, with one of the doctors and Vice President of Research at Eco Health Alliance, a guy named by the name of Kevin Olivall, who is known as a virus hunter around the world because as my job as a producer was to find information and find people who could talk about this. And he told us at the time, well, you know, there's a lot of information. We go out and find animals and we test them for viruses and then we try to make sure to see what we can do to test those viruses and push them to their limits. And they gave us all that.

The part that becomes, pulls Anthony Fauci into it is that they knew at the time and this, you know, Dr. Oliver knew at the time that what they were doing was gain of function that was dangerous. Because we know, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Dr. But gain of function is a big umbrella that covers a whole variety of ways, doctors and researchers. go after seeing what viruses can do, what we can do to stop them, what we can do generationally, how they mutate. And there are different things, there are different worlds within that. But the ones that we're really worried about is the one that taking something like a known, you know, a COVID virus and making it a super virus or letting it become a supervirus without the proper precautions. Is that, is that fair to kind of summarize? Yes, it's fair. This is viral manipulation. It's a specific type of viral manipulation. And when Anthony Fauci dueled with Rand Paul a couple years ago about whether it was gain of function, he was relying on a technicality. So it technically might not be gain of function. It's clearly, they were clearly working in viral manipulation. People who were associated with Anthony Fauci or who knew Anthony Fauci. And whether it's gained a function, I think it's a sort of a smoke screen. Yeah. Because you talk about Eco Health Alliance. Well, the Eco Health Alliance got $600,000 from the National Institutes. And that's not that much money, but the important thing was they got technical help. And they got technical help from a man named Ralph Amy Coney Barrett, who's a virologist at North Carolina, who worked with the head virologist at Wuhan to show her how to insert a specific cleavage site into the COVID virus. that probably made it more infectious. With over three decades of serving up streetwise insight and local perspective on page two, the voice of John Cass has a home at Johncastnews. There's a new sheriff in town. This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to have. But as he settles in, can you deal with the hysteria, the meltdowns, the constant whining? I don't know what to do. You know what you need? You need a good cup of common sense. It's just common sense. Like the kind of common sense. you get when you subscribe to johncastnews.com. I'm John Cass, 40 years a journalist in Chicago. I opened this website, Johncast News, so that you could have a decent cup of common sense. This great country of ours was built on its entrepreneurial spirit. It's time that you join the frontier of independent journalism at Johncastnews.com. Subscribe today to get access to great columns from John Cass, Dan Proft, and others. Don't be a chum alone, and subscribe at Johncastnews.com. And the loophole where it was that they were doing it.

offsite they were doing it through a third party and it wasn't making it you know in the u.s and so that it all of it smells you know like a fish kind of looks like a fish and dr fouchy was telling us it was you know a gopher and that was that's really kind of what we come to is the fact that it's very apparent by what he was writing about being a celebrity and feeling excited and pushing people to push this narrative and tamp down and push away, like you said, deflect from this idea because the line goes right back to him if we draw that conclusion that, well, if this was happening, how did it get here and it comes back to that point where this pardon begins? Exactly. And I think that was a primary motivator for him. Once he found out the wet market was not the source of the virus. So what they did was they engaged in a form of censorship. They canceled scientists who were suspicious of a lab leak. They promoted both in papers and they actually promoted to the intelligence community, psychologists who were very, very pro animal transfer. And, you know, if he was being objective, he would have given equal attention to both sides. But he didn't do that. He wasn't close to doing that. And like I say, there were a number of scientists who were canceled for that. On top of that, you have, even today, even at this late day, you have a lot of people who are still quoting the Wuhan wet market. And again, he knew in the first week of the pandemic in the United States, it was not the Wuhan wet market. And what was telling is that you know, he running that idea, you know, at the time everyone wants to think he's a, you know, a brilliant mind, which is hard to refute. But he was doing the right way, doing it the right way. So kind of being, you know, unbiased, being objective to the possible causes here. And how would that change things if we, if he had come out and said, well, yeah, this does actually not look like a wet market. It looks like it came from this lab that, oh, by the way, I may have helped focus funding toward. Well, it's clear. It's inarguable that he had a conflict of interest. Right. And had he done what you said, had he cop to that conflict of interest. he wouldn't have been the director of the COVID response for 24 hours after that. I mean, it just wouldn't have happened. You know, would it have been different? Would lives have been saved? I can't tell you that. I can tell you that if that is what happened, and there's a reasonable chance that is what happened, that an engineered virus escaped in a lab leak, then yes, a whole lot of people's lives would be saved. But after the fact,

I don't think you can point other than Anthony Fauci not retaining his position. I don't think you can point and say, well, this lives would have been saved or that lives would have. There's a lot of people who argue about lockdowns and school. Yeah, sure. But those arguments are going to persist, you know, for a long time. The key is, had they not done that, there's a good possibility. We wouldn't even be talking about there would be no such thing as COVID today. And that's a realistic possibility. I can't tell you for certain it happened, but I'm pretty sure in the back of his mind, Anthony Fauci, was worried about that disclosure. And that may be, by the way, another reason he did not want to testify on Wednesday. Yes, he was concerned with a perjury trap in the league, what he calls. But, hey, that's the kind of thing. There's no way you can tell the truth about that congressional committee. That's not going to fly. There's going to be all sorts of blowback. Right. conflict of interest and the idea of removing him. It's not so much specific to him, sure, yeah, you know, he shouldn't have been there. But it's the idea of eliminating that even that field or that pathway to understanding the virus and understanding, well, if we know it was engineered, then we can unengineer it in theory. And, you know, if this is a natural thing, well, then it's a whole different ball of wax that you've got to pick apart and figure out. But if we know if there was... If it came from a lab, the lab was doing, you know, it's not a good lab. If you're not documenting everything you're doing and every change you're making. And so that's where you're saying is that we kind of would have had a better me job or easier job of putting a lid on this before it became, you know, what we all lived through. Right. What we know, what we will not find out very easily. is we won't find out the answers you think because it's a pretty sure thing, Anthony Fauci's not going to talk now. It's a more sure thing that the Chinese are not going to talk now. And the Chinese were obviously heavily involved in this. And you want to watch and see what happens with this assistant David Morens, who is under indictment. It's possible he'll flip and you'll get some information there. But it's going to be very, very difficult to find out the answer to these questions. But, you know, there's one of the science journalists that I really like Matt Ridley, he just wrote, researchers haven't found a single infected animal in any market or any people who bought COVID from an animal. The evidence for the lab is overwhelming. We knew they were doing precisely the right kind of experiment on precisely the right strain of virus at precisely the right time. in precisely the right city, and in precisely the wrong biosafety conditions. Again, you know, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, probably a duck. Exactly. And so let's kind of run this down, though, if, you know, say that that is, because there's a lot of conspiracy theories, that's kind of one of the things that's muddying this. Because, you know, the obvious. In my mind, the obvious question or point to make is that if Anthony Fauci has a federal pardon, sure. But there are plenty of Republican-controlled states where if there was a smoking gun, if we had something, he'd be charged already. But because, like you said, he's not talking. Maybe his assistant now is going to talk and then something comes out of that. But the Chinese are not going to let this out. That type of stuff.

has kind of made this a circus that it will probably not ever give us, you know, hard evidence. Is it going to go down as like an Area 51 kind of thing? We're like, well, everyone's pretty sure, but no one really knows. Well, I think that's possible. You know, and look, Anthony Fauci is a very, very smart guy. He did a lot of very good things in his life, but it's sort of my opinion that he flew too close to the sun. Sure. And his wings melted, and he suffered the blowback. I don't see any point in prosecuting him. There's no point in that. You're not going to learn more from that. You're going to look vindictive. So I don't see that. I do believe we have to know what happened. We might not find out what happened or we might find out what happened a long time. The people who are calling conspiracy theory, that's simply a flimsy or an empty defense. Because, again, lab leaks are an established fact many times. Anthrax leaks, biosafety leaks, and ever. And again, if you were messing with viral manipulation, especially to make a virus more contagious, The fear of a lot of scientists is that it could leak and kill a lot of people. I think Obama was definitely right in instituting a moratorium on that, and Anthony Fauci was against that. And I think they may have tried to get around that in part by outsourcing to China. All right. Third party manipulation there. And so, Doc, let me ask you as a professional as a doctor. The idea of this type of manipulation, it has, again, I'm not only a physics teacher, so I don't know, I'm not a doctor, but my understanding of the type of restiler research, it's a really high risk for nominal reward because of the things you kind of laid out that the uncontrollability of something. is a possibility and the higher probability of leak because leaks happen. You know, that you said that it's not, this is not the first time, it won't be the last time. And it's, it's something that people try to mitigate, but there's no, there's no way to completely 100% do anything. So do you ever see, or do you see any benefit or any point where we would ever have something like this, be, not have a moratorium on it? Well, you know, the risk reward, Jeff, is uncertain. I mean, that's the essence of the debate over gain of function. What is the risk and what is the reward? You know, from our standpoint, we were probably looking for a defensive bio weapon. You know, that's probably what they would say. We want to, in case somebody develop something, we want to be able to counter it with a vaccine or whatever. The reward, so that's the reward. The risk, well, again, if you're using biosafety level five techniques, the risk is probably not that small. But there's another group that agrees with what you said. The risk reward is not worth it. That is perpetually going to be a debate. I don't know what will happen in the future. It'll probably depend on a lot of things. It may depend on what we find out about this, but that's always going to be a debate, and it's not an easy question to settle.

Now, what were the Chinese doing? Were they doing the same thing with a defensive bioweapon? I don't know. They may have been doing it for an offensive bioweapon, but there's no way to tell. Sure. Okay. So let's step back. So we've established that, you know, at best, Anthony Fauci was trying to cover his ass and that led the pathway and things kind of, you know, went off the rails. At worst, as some would say, he was criminally trying to create something and do something to get rich and be damned anybody who died. So there's a problem there. What do you think is? Big picture of the implications to the health system, to how people interact with their own doctors, how doctors inform politicians and public policy. What do you think the damage there is? Well, and let me say, again, I... don't think that Anthony Fauci was acting in a particular criminal manner. I was just laying out the spectrum there. Right. And I do think he was acting in a dangerous manner. And I do think he had a conflict of interest and was trying to cover up. What are the implications? The implications is no matter what, ams, are profound because Anthony Fauci and the public health community have misused our trust. And that's something that will take decades to get back if ever. Now, what the public should take out of this, I don't know if they will or not, is that they need a much more involved voice in what is happening. They need to ask more questions. They don't just need to listen to an occasional news report or occasional talking you had. They should be much more aggressive in asking questions about things and not parroting a planted story or something like that. From the public health standpoint, and this was even before the testimony and before all that, the consequences of this have been profound because the public health community has to a large extent lost the trust of the public. Not everybody, but a lot of people. And once that trust is lost, very hard to get back. Surely. I don't think people see it, especially, you know, in Chicago way, how things are, politics are local. We had a governor here who used, you know, thin reliance on what Anthony Fauci and the administration was saying as. the reasoning behind lots of lives being disrupted. And when it came down to it, we saw a lot, especially with our own governor, J.B. Pritzker, you know, his family gallivanting and being off and doing things and our own mayor giving a haircut and being out in public and doing things. It was this, you know, for you, for thee, not for me situation. Do we do we do we?

worry or I don't even know if worry is a question. Do we have any way to counteract something when, you know, a governor says to us, well, these doctors said this, so I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and it's, you know, believe me, do we have any protocol to counteract that? We don't have any protocol. What we need is more reporting. We need more disclosure. We need more open discussion. Remember, one of the things they did was they attempted to suppress the discussion on a lot of us. That's never a good thing. Never in science. You know, never in science is a good thing. I mean, if people want to propagate wrong information, look, that's the price you pay, but, you know, you counter that with good information and you counter that with honest information. This has obviously become political. You can blame both sides. You can bring the left and the right for that. But one of the tragedies of this is if there was one person in the country from 2020 to 2025 who could have prevented it from becoming so political, that person was Anthony Fauci. And that's... That's the crux. That's what, unfortunately, he is going to be remembered as, well, you know, hopefully, because we'll see who writes history. But that, you know, illustrious career, great researcher, got into a position and, you know, the politics of it, you know, reared its ugly head and essentially tarnished. What seemingly was a very... Good career. I mean, a good career that benefited, you know, thousands and thousands, if not millions of people. What do we look for in the future when we're electing people to offices or trusting people? I mean, is there, you know, you probably are better than most at sizing someone up when they're telling you something. Is it that? bipartisanness, is that their willingness to hear the other side? I mean, what do you feel I should look for? Say, I go to my doctor. Well, that's certainly, it's certainly an important thing, and it may be the most important thing, is willingness to hear the other side. The Anthony Fauci story is definitely a Greek tragedy. I mean, you know, it's definitely a, you know, this is hubris writ large. What do we look for in the future? Again, I think we look for People who are willing to discuss things, people who are willing to acknowledge the other side. You get this name-calling conspiracy theories and all that. That's never a good thing. especially in science. It's never a good thing. And you have to realize there's a reporter, science reporter, who I liked from the New York Times, who said, you know, and he was a very, very sharp guy. And he was told by a lot of the experts, no, this is an animal thing. And the lab leak is ridiculous. And around 2024, he realized that they were giving him a line. And he made a very good point. He says, look,

When politicians give you a line as a journalist, okay, you can ask questions and you can get your BS detector out there. But what do you do when experts give you a lie? You know, if Albert Einstein says, don't worry, nuclear fallout isn't dangerous, what expert do you go to that says, no, Albert Einstein doesn't know what he's talking about? That's the problem with experts. It's not the same as politicians. Yeah, and I know there. We almost expect politicians to lie. We don't expect experts to do that. No, and that's, and that's something John and I've kind of harped on for, certainly since the pandemic, I'm not earlier, this overreliance on on the, the educated class, or not even educated class, but the, the, the, um, scientific elite. Well, yeah, the scientifically, right, right. That group, if you will, but it's not even the scientific. I mean, there's people who are professionals or are the, of all these groups. Bipartisan nature helps and kind of keep things on the rails and gives us a covered balance back and forth. Where, you know, where do we go from here in the world of, keeping people safe. Because it seems like, and this is just my interpretation of it, but it seems like the hyperbolic nature of politics today has led us, led us Trump's administration, current administration, to... neuter parts of the CDC that in my mind, you know, clearly showed that the top leadership was, was flawed in Anthony Fauci, and there was some trickle down there. But there were a lot of things in place that were keeping people safe. I mean, we have record numbers of diseases in this country that we haven't seen before. And, you know, it points to me, from my opinion, points to that, this idea that, well, there was this bad apple or a bunch of bad apples, so let's just blow the whole thing up. Again, I want to harp on the fact that we need more information rather than less. We need more open-mindedness rather than closed-mindedness. And we need a public that's willing to ask questions. We need journalists who are willing to ask questions. I mean, those are critical. And we do need a certain amount of intellectual honesty from our scientific experts, whether they're doctors or environmental specialists or whatever. I mean, we need a certain amount of intellectual honesty. Yeah, I think. I wish there was a pill for that, but I don't know what there is. Right. If only we had a shot for that, we'd all be much better off. That would be a good vaccine. That would be a stellar vaccine. Yeah, you know, they say sometimes you can't fix stupid, but you can, you know, lead it to a nice ham sandwich. Well, I think it was a, I think it was Einstein who said there were only two infinites. The universe and stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe. Well, Dr. Franklin, I can't not mention your book. It's one of my favorites because you did spend so much time and see so many interesting things. I'd love to get one of your favorite stories from your time here working in Chicago. It's just good or bad. I mean, we've been pretty depressing news of late, but if you have something maybe uplifting, an uplifting story from your time.

Well, I mean, what was uplifting was taking care of the people at county to see how many people just had a fighting spirit and were just wonderful people, great patience. You know, you always have, in any hospital, you always have your reprobates. But I have to tell you that my experience with county with my patients and most of the health care professionals was just, it was an uplifting thing. It was a wonderful thing. And, you know, we should be proud of that. There is, by the way, I don't know if you know, Jeff. There is a COVID monument. It will be the largest COVID monument in the world that is opening in October on the west side right near county. And it's a tribute to the health care workers and not just the health care workers, but anybody who had to go to work during COVID. And it's going to be, I think, a 25 or 35 foot. uh, statue. And hopefully it will become, uh, an attraction for tourists and a sense, a source of pride in Chicago. I believe it opens in October. Oh, that, that is, that's something we need. And, and that is what I think I wish the biggest takeaway from. The pandemic was, was this understanding and realization that nurses and CNAs and AIDS and doctors and EMTs, I mean, these people are not doing it for the paycheck that it helps, but they're doing it. for the benefit, for the good it brings to the world. And those are the people who unfortunately seemingly got vilified at times when they certainly shouldn't have. And it kind of all stems back to, you know, Anthony Fauci's role in causing this, not causing, but in amplifying this mistrust. And so I think that's a good place to end because I do think. that we need to really realize that there are, there are certainly our villains in the world, but they're not as many as we like to believe there are. Right. And I don't want to forget, you know, Jeff, the janitors, books, and the launderers, all those people who had to come into work during the pandemic. Those people are heroes too. So absolutely. Well, the book is Cook County, ICU, 30 years of unforgettable patients and odd cases. Where you can get to pick it up where all fine books are sold to the internet. And I recommend it because it's a good read. And it's certainly enlightens you to the just the chaos and beauty of people who are working to save lives and better other people. Can I can I just add one thing? Absolutely. This is a little, you know, self-promotion here. That's what we're here. Another, another book that I wrote, which was a compendium of articles for the Tribune and other places.

is the COVID Diaries, and that was contemporaneous with what was going on. And I'm not going to make a lot of money out of it, but it's important because those articles will tell you what we were thinking at the time. And for people who are interested in COVID, I think it's a good book. It's the COVID Diaries. Oh, put it on the list. I love it. Well, Dr. Thanks so much for joining us. I know it's happy again soon. And when John's... back at it, we'll probably regroup on this because I cannot do John's thoughts and justice here in the Chicago way. Well, let me tell you, Jeff, we need more journalists like you. Yes, good questions. And please send my regards to John, and I hope he's better soon. Yeah, he'll be back at it very soon. Right, that's good news. Take care. Thanks again. Thank you, Jeff. So for Dr. Corey Franklin, a... Long time physician, 25 plus years in the Cook County Health here in Chicago. And, of course, check out this book. The latest COVID Diaries 2020 to 2024 anatomy of a contagion as it happened, a collection of great articles and pieces published about what was going on and what we knew about it and what we were acting to it from physicians, from people in the know, from people who understood it at a much better level than the average person, including myself. And of course, for myself, Jeff Carlin, executive producer at WGN Radio, faker of pies, friend of cats, and of course for John Cass himself, executive editor, executive of director, executive of executives at Johncastnews.com where you get for less than a dollar a week, a big cup of Midwestern common sense. Join us again next time, won't you, on the Chicago Way podcast on WGN Plus.