Fauci Finally, Falsely, Invokes the ‘Spanish Flu’

Ten years ago I published an article called “No More Crying ‘Spanish Flu,’ ” in part because with every pandemic or potential pandemic that’s exactly what public health service gurus and the media were doing. And in part because the comparison to the 1918–19 flu was always ludicrous, based not on science but primal fear.

Well, it’s happened again. And this time the klaxon-ringer is no less than the nation’s top health official, National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Even a virus far more deadly than that of the Spanish flu would not pose a similar threat because of tremendously different conditions then and now.

Fauci’s advice and counsel during the coronavirus pandemic has been “uneven,” to say the least. Most recently, he said of New York, the state with the second-highest COVID-19 deaths per capita, that the state did it “correctly.” But he’s never been particularly reliable. In 1983, he made a huge splash with a medical journal article stating that AIDS could be transmissible through casual contact. Fauci repeated the pattern during successive disease panics, such as when he declared 16 years ago that we’re “due” for “massive person-to-person” spread of Avian flu H5N1.