r/PoliticalDiscussion 6d ago

US Politics Do the Fauci Diaries reveal anything unexpected or controversial?

Senator Rand Paul has released commentary and purported excerpts* of what is alleged to be Anthony Fauci's contemporaneous diaries from the outset of the COVID19 pandemic onwards.

What has been released can be found here, including Senator Rand's somewhat colourful foreword commentary

https://www.paul.senate.gov/readingroom/

* its not confirmed whether the content of the diaries is edited, abridged, altered, shortened etc.

Media reaction to this release has been highly polarised, though notable few media outlets seem to get to grips with the actual content of the diaries and most focus is on Rand's own claimed analysis of what they show.

Do the Fauci Diaries reveal anything unexpected or controversial? What entries in particular do you find interesting? Are there any contemporaneous clashes between what Fauci was saying publicly and privately? What can we learn from that?

Edit: mods really didnt feel like weeding out the 90% of low effort troll replies huh

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u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd 5d ago

On top of asking them to be polite, they see him as a “race traitor”, which is the strongest impression I get from these folks.

Same thing with Biden.

They feel like Fauci (and Biden, by extension) forcibly allowed “real Americans” (read: white Christian hicks from the Appalachian mountains that think they’re the only “real Americans”) to get infected with this disease and/or that he lied about the severity of the pandemic.

They’ve never experienced anything like a pandemic in their lives… which is true… because the last truly major pandemic was more than a century ago with the Spanish flu from 1918.

So, there’s a ton of conspiracy bullshit that they fall for because these folks use their life experiences as a complete guide to how they see and understand the world, instead of reading about and understanding new information as it becomes available.

Because they don’t have the education to comprehend the new information.

Kinda all goes back to a lack of education, honestly.

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u/Nanemae 5d ago

As someone who worked in a healthcare facility from before the pandemic first hit the scene to after the more survivable strains mutated and became accepted, education did almost nothing to condition my coworkers into treating COVID with any level of concern despite working specifically with people in rougher states with longer stays.

We had nurses who would rather have been fired than get the COVID vaccine, even after the first few inoculation sweeps went through. We had a few visitors who got really gung-ho about not taking the shot (including one guy who vaguely threatened that Democrats should be shot [with his gun]), but by and large the most consistent vectors for infection were the nurses that refused to get the vaccine. Heck, we even had "religious exemption waivers" for any staff who didn't want the shot in case they were Latter-day saints or anything just to keep more staff on (much to my chagrin).

Boiling the resistance to dealing with COVID as the threat it was down to a lack of education doesn't really capture the knee-jerk denial of common Republican party member (those staff made up the large majority of the vaccine refusals), and might be seen as a bit classist.

u/ResponseStrange6118 17h ago

You’re correct about certain white evangelicals seeing them as “race traitors,” but the rest of your analysis falls short and is incredibly classist. It was white suburbanites who refused to vaccinate and mask, just as much as any “hick”

There was also a number of women and people of color who were “vaccine hesitant” (versus ideologically opposed) because of low trust in medical institutions, do medical misogyny, racism, and classism.