How much do you know about Dr. Anthony Fauci? Until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was the little-known Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). Today he may be the most well-known doctor in the world.

When President Trump created his Corona Virus Task Force, he named Dr. Fauci as one of his medical experts on infectious disease. Soon, the face of Dr. Fauci became a regular on our television screens in the daily briefings that marked the beginning of the pandemic. The country listened to his every word, desperate to learn more about this virus that threatened our lives. Many likened him to Moses coming down from the mountain with words of God.

But in time we began to notice inconsistencies in sage-one’s advice. At first, he told us masks were useless to prevent infection – and then they were critical. Even now, he claims we need masks even after vaccination – a statement that any physician knows is ludicrous.

When the Biden administration kept him as part of their corona virus advisory group, but rejected all the other Trump appointees, you had to wonder why. Could it be he loved the limelight enough to compromise his scientific principles just to get along with the new administration?

Now, we have more reason to doubt the integrity of Dr. Fauci. James Freeman, writing in The Wall Street Journal, reports on a revealing article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Nicholas Wade. Wade is described by the Bulletin as a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and The New York Times.

Wade’s article implicates Fauci and the NIAID in the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. . . It seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.”

Wade describes a key Chinese researcher whose work received support from Dr. Fauci’s institute via a U.S. group called EcoHealth Alliance. “Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady”, mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses. . . It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.”

The article by Wade is 35 pages long, and filled with the complexities of virology. In it, Wade details at length why he believes a lab-created virus in this case is much more likely than a natural one. His argument is clear: The scourge was particularly suited to attack humans and yet there’s little if any evidence showing a natural evolution from a virus that attacks bats to a virus that attacks people.

What is Dr. Fauci’s role in this?

Freeman says there seems to be some debate about whether the Wuhan coronavirus work really did involve “gain of function” research – genetically engineering viruses to attack people under the premise that such research assists in learning how to counter future threats. In February the website Politifact reported, “All parties involved in the grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology have denied that it involved gain-of-function research.” Politifact attributed a quotation to the National Institutes of Health, the parent agency of Dr. Fauci’s organization: “The NIH told us: “The research supported under the grant to EcoHealth Alliance Inc. characterized the function of newly discovered bat spike proteins and naturally occurring pathogens and did not involve the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied.”

There has been a strong push-back from the world of virologists to the theory that the SARS2 virus escaped from the Wuhan virology lab. But admitting such a theory would threaten virology research around the world. Wade strongly suggests, and his analysis of the known facts strongly corroborates, that this is the most likely explanation for the origin of this pandemic. The good Dr. Fauci seems to be right in the middle of this effort to deny any culpability for this disaster.

Several Republican Congressmen, including the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R- Wash.) recently wrote to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to “request that the U.S. Department of State release unclassified documents and declassify other documents for public release, as appropriate, related to the assertion in the department’s January 15, 2021 Fact Sheet that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China collaborated with the Chinese military in conducting classified research including laboratory animal experiments.”

Will we ever really know the origin of the Covid-19 virus? It’ s difficult to say, but what is clear now is that there are many people not just in China who don’t want the truth to be known.

This past Sunday was “Freedom from Masks Sunday” in our church. After fifteen months of being coerced into wearing masks by our local government, we finally were given the choice of wearing or not wearing masks.

When asked why we still have to wear masks on April 30^th, President Biden said, “It’s a patriotic responsibility, for God’s sake.” He said this even though he had been vaccinated and so had about half the country. To make matter worse, he later followed up this advice by saying, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do.”

Was this actually the “rule?” Was it breaking the law if you failed to comply? David B. Rivkin, Jr. and James Taranto write in The Wall Street Journal that in fact, there is no such rule. The Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) merely issued “guidance” that if you’re fully vaccinated, “you can resume activities without wearing a mask. . . except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules and regulations.”

States were quick to relax their mask mandates and even Washington followed soon with saying its decrees applied only to unvaccinated people on most federal property. But California, naturally, had their own set of rules. They insisted their mask mandates would remain in force until June 15. The White House and CDC still require universal masking on public transportation and at transit hubs, including airports.

Why, you might ask? Are vaccinations protective against the virus in most, but not all, situations? Is the virus more virulent on a subway than in your grocery store? Are airplanes nesting grounds for this dangerous virus? In fact, airplanes have been shown to be among the safest places to be since they have exceptionally high rates of turnover of the surrounding air, similar to operating rooms.

This raises some important questions about the limits of our freedom. Mask wearing has become a new form of virtue signaling. Biden reinforced that claim with his appeals to patriotism, which began during last year’s campaign as a rebuttal to the mask-resistant President Trump. Rivkin and Taranto say that if wearing a mask conveys a political message, mandating it is constitutionally suspect.

“No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religions, or other matter of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). This Supreme Court opinion held that forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated their freedom of speech.

Think about it. These authors say, “To wear a mask in public is to affirm a viewpoint no less powerful than the Pledge of Allegiance; that Covid poses a crisis so dire as to demand unprecedented government control of our lives and a transformation of the norms of interpersonal behavior. Ubiquitous mask mandates make assent impossible to avoid except by breaking the law or staying home.”

Public health officials would say, and they did, that they are regulating conduct, not free speech, and they are doing so to protect the public health. That argument might have been persuasive six months ago, but what about today? With the availability of several effective vaccines and the falling daily counts of Covid infection cases, could the government continue to make this argument? The Biden administration has made it clear it will do so as long as the media and public opinion will let them. Clearly, they are in full control of the CDC messaging, with the aid of the teachers unions, so the only hurdle to overcome now is public opinion. They must keep their eye on the mid-term elections that are coming soon.

What must the government prove to continue such coercive mandates?

The authors say there are three elements that must be met. The government must demonstrate:

• The restriction furthers a “compelling interest”
• The restriction is “narrowly tailored” to fulfill its objective
• The restriction is the “least restrictive means” of doing so

Clearly, preventing disease is a compelling interest, but there are limits. Wearing masks in perpetuity would probably reduce the spread of the flu, as the 2020 flu statistics demonstrated, but this would hardly be considered necessary forever. The common cold, likewise, would certainly be reduced if everyone wore masks, but the public would never accept such restrictions for a non-life-threatening disease.

Vaccinations have become a much less restrictive means of stopping the spread of the virus than mask mandates. For this reason, federal and state governments have been encouraging Americans to get vaccinated. But this has not required coercive measures, at least not yet.

The wearing of a mask at this point in the pandemic should be entirely voluntary, based on personal risk from the virus and the personal choice to refuse vaccination. Thankfully, most Americans will get vaccinated, thereby reducing the risk for those who don’t as we eventually achieve herd immunity. It’s time to stop this “political correctness” of wearing masks just to signal your virtue or your patriotism.

Whatever happened to Medicare for All? In the presidential election campaign of 2020, we heard a lot about Medicare for All. Then Joe Biden was elected and since then we haven’t heard much more about it. Is that a forgotten idea?

Biden never actually endorsed Medicare for All, although his running mate, Kamala Harris did. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders came up with the idea of Medicare for All, but Biden stuck to ObamaCare since he served as Vice-President under President Obama. Biden did promote the idea of adding a Public Option to ObamaCare, an idea unacceptable even to Congressional Democrats when ObamaCare was first debated.

Yet both healthcare plans will lead to socialized medicine over time, since both seek to give the government more control over your healthcare. It’s really only a matter of how quickly that government takeover will happen.

The latest Democratic proposal is called the Medicare at 50 Act, a legislation proposed by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D – MI) and other Senate Democrats. It would make people ages 50 to 64 eligible for Medicare.

Why would people age 50 to 64 want Medicare? That’s the question asked by healthcare economist John C. Goodman. He can think of many reasons they wouldn’t. To understand why this is a bad idea, it’s necessary to know more than most about Medicare.

Goodman tells us Medicare currently spends $11,582/year/beneficiary. Since that’s more than most spend in the private sector, no one would purchase that insurance instead. Although actual costs would likely be lower for younger, healthier adults age 50 to -64, the fair premium for “young seniors” on Medicare is likely to be a lot higher than for comparable private insurance.

It is more than likely that Senate Democrats intend the government to subsidize these new Medicare beneficiaries just as they currently do older seniors. Current Medicare enrollees pay only about 25% of the real cost of Part B services. The other 75% is a gift from the government. This raises the question one might ask, “Why can’t I have that money to deposit in my bank account instead of in the form of insurance subsidies?” This is the right question to ask, given the following facts about Medicare:

Medicare is lousy insurance

Goodman says most people don’t realize there is no cap on catastrophic Medicare A (hospital) costs, unlike private insurance which requires this cap. Medicare Part B (doctor’s fees) also has no cap. Also, to get drug coverage you have to purchase an additional policy (Medicare Part D). The alternative is to purchase Medicare Advantage coverage, which includes drug coverage, but at the cost of losing the freedom to choose your doctor.

Access to telemedicine is now commonplace, since the Trump administration made this available during the Covid pandemic. But this could change easily under the new administration. It was never available in the pre-pandemic era.

No more employer subsidy

Most Americans get their healthcare insurance through their employer. Typically, the employer pays about 75% of the cost. This insurance is usually better coverage than Medicare. The cost of this benefit is naturally passed on to employees in the form of lower wages than they might otherwise enjoy if not for this health insurance benefit. However, it is illegal to ask your employer to give you cash instead of the insurance.

No more tax subsidies

This benefit is not taxed by the IRS. If you have to pay for your insurance apart from your employer, you must pay with after-tax dollars. All Medicare enrollees must do this. If employees age 50 to 64 were now eligible for Medicare, they would be stricken from the rolls of their employer-provided plans and they would have to pay for their new Medicare plan out of their own pockets with after-tax dollars.

No more ObamaCare premium compression

In the free marketplace, premiums for people in their 50s and 60s would exceed premiums for those in their 20s by a factor of 6 to 1. ObamaCare regulations limit this to 3 to 1. Therefore, older adults who purchase ObamaCare policies aren’t paying the full market price. Younger adults are paying more to subsidize older adults. This difference would be lost if “young seniors” leave the market and choose Medicare.

No health savings accounts

Health savings accounts (HSAs) have been shown to lower healthcare costs about 30 percent. But seniors are the only people in our country who are not permitted to have an HSA. It is likely this same restriction would apply to young seniors on Medicare.

With all these disadvantages to enrolling early in Medicare, the prudent choice would be to take the government money spent on Medicare and use it to subsidize private insurance. Goodman estimates that amount could be $8,000 to $9,000 per year. The cost would be about the same for the government, but they would also have less control over your healthcare. Perhaps that’s why that idea is unlikely to gain much traction with Senate Democrats.