Victor Davis Hanson: Fauci Called Them ‘Three Stooges’—Now His COVID-19 Critics Are Looking Vindicated

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: I think we should leave [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. The news stories that have come out the last few days of some of his text messages and phone records.  

And only 11, I think only 11 messages have been released by Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. They’re very troubling about the Moderna vaccine for pregnant women. This seems like a big stinking lie there.  

But I’m sure more information will come out in the next day or two, and I would hope that you, Victor, and the great Sami Winc would take that on as more information comes out. 

Jay Bhattacharya is just one of the greatest guys, as you know, and he is running the National Institutes of Health. And he went on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, and Margaret Brennan, who is the host of the show, tried to essentially make him a stand-in for the right wing responsible for a murder that happened a year ago. 

And he’s such a good man. His studies early on about what COVID was really happening, of course, were rejected. And he was vilified by Fauci, as you know, and many people at Stanford, actually. 

But anyway, what’s your thought, Victor, of that performance, more so on Margaret Brennan and the media and—

Victor Davis Hanson: She’s not very bright. I think JD Vance, that was another one of her victims that he eviscerated. You know what I mean, when she was a moderator. It was either him or [President Donald] Trump. She’s pathetic. And the idea that, of all the people who work in the Trump administration, there’s not a more magnanimous, kinder person than Jay.  

He’s soft-spoken. He’s polite. He’s very principled. And his crime was, very early on, along with [Martin] Kulldorff and Dr. [Sunetra] Gupta from Oxford, they just said, as Scott Atlas was doing from the inside, they were doing from the outside, the Great Barrington Declaration. 

And all he was trying to say, and Margaret Brennan did not want to bring that up or defend the opposite Fauci view, is three or four things. The vaccinations may have initial value for people who are immunocompromised or are elderly, but they do not stop being infectious or being infected, and we should keep that in mind in a cost-benefit analysis. 

And keeping all of these children out of school for two years will ruin the education system and have lasting damage to it and to the students. 

Three, we’re gonna destroy a lot of small businesses, entrepreneurial families. We’re gonna increase child abuse cooped up in apartments, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse. 

There’s going to be … We have told the American people they need to get a breast exam every four years, a PSA every year, a colonoscopy. These are not gonna take place, and people are gonna die at a higher rate from cancer and heart problems because of this, and they laid it all out. 

And Fauci called them The Three Stooges. That was what he said. These are The Three Stooges. 

And then he tried to vilify them because he knew in his dark heart that he had transferred money to break U.S. law that said no gain-of-function research was allowed in the United States. I should say to skirt it by surreptitiously funding it in China on the stupid idea that they would share the results with Fauci. And then a whole league of co-conspirator scientists were either going and visiting there or giving them instrumentation or expertise remotely. 

And so, he had helped birth this monster, and yet a lot of his efforts were to suppress it. 

You know, [Robert] Redfield, the head of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], is on TV now almost every day, and he’s basically … And he’s no left-winger. I mean, he’s basically saying no one was closer to Anthony Fauci. 

And they say, “Well, what happened?” 

He said, “Well, he had some involvement with gain-of-function research, and he was wedded to the idea that he would say and do anything to get people vaccinated, and that caused calamity and death.” 

He said that, essentially. 

You know, Jay was treated terribly by Stanford University, and it was kind of strange that at the time this thing broke out, you could argue that the three most prominent scientists, doctors, medical public health experts in the entire United States were right at Stanford University. 

There was Jay Bhattacharya, whose publication record was sterling. I’ll enlarge that. I’ll say four. 

And he was issuing warnings not to shut down the economy. 

Then there was Scott Atlas, who was writing the same thing, but in greater scientific depth in some cases, and talking about it from a public policy point of view. 

And they were both talking about natural immunity. And they never said, “Don’t take the vaccinations.” They said, “You make that choice, not a mandated government choice, based on the information that you must have, that we have, in a cost-benefit analysis.” 

And then there was John Ioannidis, and he was the one that broke wide open the Theranos scam that you could get a drop of blood and suddenly test for, like, 17, 20, 50 maladies. That whole $8 billion fiasco, which a lot of my colleagues were on the board of, unfortunately. 

And he did that. And he wrote from the very beginning that this is more like the flu than Ebola, basically. 

And then there was Michael Levitt, I think that’s his first name, and he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. And he looked at the data, and he said very early on, “This has to be lab-orientated.” 

And then there was the former Stanford professor. Now, I think he’ll probably, I think, I don’t know if it’s announced, but Redfield said it the other day, so I don’t feel reluctant to say it, that he’s gonna be Fauci’s replacement. We’ve had him on the show. 

And he said from the very beginning, based on the scientific examination of the genomes and everything, that this could not be naturally created in the wilderness, so to speak. It had to be concocted. 

Those four people, especially the first three— 

Fowler: Steven Quay, by the way. You didn’t mention his name. So, Steven Quay. 

Hanson: Yeah, Steven Quay, a former Stanford professor, and he had created gadolinium, the dye in the MRI, while he was a professor and researcher. 

But the thing I’m getting at is, you had right on the campus Bhattacharya, Atlas, Ioannidis, right there, three of them. And they were at the forefront of the opposition to Fauci. 

And they were very different. Sometimes Scott was a lot more outspoken. Jay was more soft-spoken. They were very complementary. They got along wonderfully. 

But what was the reaction of the university to all of them? 

They went after Scott because he was courageous and actually joined the Trump administration as their COVID czar and fought relentlessly with [Deborah] Birx and Fauci. And they censored him. 

And then, when they found the evidence, they were so embarrassed that when there was a motion to rescind the censure, they wouldn’t do it, the faculty. They hated him so much. 

And Jay, they ostracized, ostracized. 

I was at a meeting once when he was discussed, and I won’t discuss what happened, but it was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. 

And Ioannidis, he had been Stanford’s prize catch, came from Greece. He was one of the best immunologists, public policy people, and epidemiologists there was, and all of a sudden they were saying that he was second-rate. 

And they’ve never apologized to them. 

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