Anthony Fauci leaves behind a broken agency

Fauci Leaves a Broken Agency for His Successor | Newsweek - Marty Makary:

December 30, 2022 - "After 54 years at the NIH, tomorrow marks Dr. Anthony Fauci's last day in office as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). While many were angered by his changing and conflicting recommendations, I am not. They are mere symptoms of a much larger and deeper problem. Dr. Fauci's agency failed to promptly fund key research during the pandemic.... In a study of NIH funding published in The BMJ [British Journal of Medicine], my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I found that in the first year of the pandemic, it took the NIH an average of five months to give money to researchers after they were awarded a COVID grant. This should be unacceptable during a health emergency.

"Consider the question of how COVID spread — was it airborne or spread on surfaces?... It lingered as an open question without good research for months, as Fauci spent hundreds of hours on television opining on the matter. Finally, on August 17, 2021 — a year and a half after COVID lockdowns began — Dr. Fauci's agency released results of a study showing the disease was airborne.... The announcement on the NIAID website, titled "NIH Hamster Study Evaluates Airborne and Fomite Transmission of SARS-CoV-2" came 18 months too late..... On this question and many others throughout the pandemic, our problem was not that the science changed—it's that it wasn't done....

"A randomized controlled trial is the gold-standard method to establish a drug's effectiveness. Yet remarkably, for COVID, we still don't have randomized trials for so many drug recommendations, including the new bivalent vaccine, COVID vaccine boosters in young people, the optimal vaccine dosing interval, and even [using] the antiviral drug Paxlovid in vaccinated people. More disturbing, our country has been deeply divided for years about whether to mask children. The partisan arguing and harm to children could have been avoided if a proper study settled the science early....

"The critical discovery that steroids reduce COVID mortality by one-third came only after European researchers did a randomized trial that Fauci's agency should have commissioned quickly. Similarly, a conclusive study showing that Vitamin D reduces COVID mortality, published last month, arrived two years too late.

"The official government job description for Dr. Fauci's role states that the director must 'respond rapidly to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.' Dr. Fauci didn't do that during the coronavirus pandemic. In order for the U.S. to respond better to the next pandemic, we will need our nation's infectious diseases research agency, and its top doctor, to act with a sense of urgency.

"The NIH's disheveled COVID response is a window into a bureaucracy that has underperformed for decades. With obvious biases and blind spots, our nation's top research institution has long hindered research progress in important topics, from food as medicine to the role of general body inflammation in disease. The 'H' in 'NIH' stands for health, and health means much more than laboratory medicine. That means it should fund proper studies on environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just chemotherapies to treat it. The NIH's legacy system of having the oldest scientists in the room determine what research is worthy of investigation crowds out the study of fresh new ideas....

"On a personal level, many infectious disease doctors and academic physicians have told me privately they were afraid to disagree with Dr. Fauci because their entire career is dependent on NIH funding.... If Dr. Fauci wants to forever improve the agency he is now departing, he should speak out against medical censorship and publicly call for the immediate discontinuation of a White House internal policy that the thousands of doctors and scientists at the NIH, FDA, and CDC are not allowed to speak to the media. Medical discussion should not be a privilege hoarded by a select few agency leaders.

"Dr. Fauci made helpful contributions during the pandemic, urging people to take COVID seriously and encouraging high-risk Americans to get vaccinated. But at a desperate time when the country needed the NIAID to work, it didn't. Fauci's agency failed to pivot its mammoth research infrastructure to give doctors and policymakers the medical evidence they needed at a critical time. In the absence of evidence, dogma ruled the day. The result has been the most politicized pandemic in history and a loss of public trust. Rebuilding that trust and a broken agency will be the charge of Dr. Fauci's successor."

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-leaves-broken-agency-his-successor-opinion-1770215