What if leading healthcare “experts” are psychologically motivated to generate widespread suffering?

If you’ve ever heard of the psychological disorder Munchausen Syndrome, you have probably also heard of a related disorder called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, defined as

a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care…

–“Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital Health Library

Most of the time when you hear news stories about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, it’s because a caregiver is caught deliberately injuring a child or other vulnerable person, such as an elder or someone who is disabled.

But what if the syndrome also affects public health officials — including the person leading the U.S. response to COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci?

Does that sound preposterous to you?

Things too horrible to contemplate…and yet we must.

“Normal” people are horrified by stories of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

It seems unfathomable. Why would a caregiver deliberately injure a child?

But for people prone to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy behaviors, there are compelling psychological payoffs:

The attention that caregivers get from having a sick child may encourage their [the caregivers’] behavior. Caregivers may get attention not only from doctors and nurses but also from others in their community. For example, neighbors may try to help the family in many ways—such as by doing chores, bringing meals, or giving money.

–“Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital Health Library

In addition, caregivers with the syndrome don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Per the CS Mott Children’s Hospital article, people with this condition don’t see their behavior as harmful. They are literally delusional.

Where things get tricky is catching such a person “red-handed.” Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy people are notoriously good at deceiving others, including healthcare providers, family members, and friends.

People with Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome are very good at coming across as wonderful, empathetic, involved caregivers.

An article by Brenda Bursch published by Psychiatric Times describes how difficult it is for clinicians to catch caregivers affected by this syndrome. Perpetrators tend to be skilled at falsifying disorders (many have medical backgrounds). Clinicians are often fooled. Even “formal psychiatric interview” and “psychological testing” are pretty useless in detecting the syndrome.

Many individuals confirmed to have engaged in illness falsification … have the ability to appear normal as parents/caregivers …. a key feature of an individual with a factitious disorder is the impressive ability to successfully mislead clinicians, including mental health clinicians. 

–“Munchausen by Proxy and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another,” Psychiatric Times

Look at me! I’m saving the world!

The literature on Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome states that the condition is most often discovered in people responsible for family members (or sometimes pets).

But what if it were to affect individuals responsible for large numbers of people? What if it were to affect “experts” responsible for policies to protect the public from disasters, pandemics, and the like?

I started asking this question because of something I’ve noticed when I watch “experts” on television talk about disasters.

Maybe you’ve noticed it, too. The “experts” sometimes give off an odd vibe. They sometimes seem inappropriately “up” and excited.

Disasters are awful. They’re tragic. But many times, when the talking heads get in front of the cameras, they seem almost happy that some disaster has befallen.

I don’t think I’m alone in noticing this.

The next obvious question is: why would they be happy?

Well, guess what. The answer is very similar to the answer we get to our Menchausen Syndrome by Proxy question (“why would a caregiver intentionally harm an innocent child?”)

There’s a huge psychological payoff.

The “expert” on the television who becomes excited about an actual or impending disaster — the hurricane or polar vortex or pandemic or swarm of murder hornets — is getting attention.

They’re being admired for their expertise.

Admiration is a status-enhancer.

They also get to feel powerful and in control. I have the answers. I can explain this to people who are frightened or confused. People are looking up to me and following my instructions. I am the most important person in the world right now.

My hunch is that most of us are aware of this dynamic. It’s why we roll our eyes when the talking heads exaggerate dangers.

I watched a clip recently of a weather person talking about a tropical storm heading toward Texas. It’s not a hurricane, the person admitted, but then she quickly added that we should still be terrified. It could turn into a hurricane before landfall! There could be flooding! There could be tornadoes!

And yes, I rolled my eyes.

Not that I object to being warned when there’s a notable weather system headed in my direction. But there’s something about being in the disaster-warning business that incentivizes people toward behaviors that feel vaguely unbalanced.

And here’s the thing: I’ve picked up on that same vibe when I’ve watched people talk about the COVID pandemic.

And then I came across a link to an old article titled “AIDS and the AZT Scandal,” published by Spin in 1989.

This play is starting to sound familiar.

1989 was a long time ago. Unless you’re in 50s or older, you probably don’t know what it was like when AIDS first came on the scene.

Let me fill you in. It was, for a while, terrifying. Nobody understood anything about the virus (HIV) that appears to cause AIDS (or at least be associated with it). It wasn’t clear how it could spread. Could we catch it from air-borne droplets? From surfaces? Should we isolate people with the disease?

(Hey. What’s this remind you of?)

Fortunately, it turned out that HIV is transmitted only through close personal contact with an infected person’s blood or semen. So: sex, blood transfusions, or dirty needles.

But make no mistake. There was a period of a few years when people were really, really scared. How widespread was it? Were we all going to catch it? Were we all going to die prematurely?

But wait. There’s more.

As you may know, some of the same health authorities who were in charge during the AIDS crisis are still in charge today. Anthony Fauci — yes, that Anthony Fauci — would later come under criticism, in fact, for over-hyping the dangers of “casual” AIDS transmission.

That’s not an overstatement. Anthony Fauci was “the guy” who started an AIDS panic media feeding frenzy by suggesting in a Journal of American Medicine article that HIV could be transmitted by casual contact. (Per the link, Fauci would later call that very claim — the unsubstantiated claim that he, himself, propagated — “preposterous.” Remind you of anything yet?)

What I didn’t realize until I read the Spin piece is that Fauci also did something else in the aftermath of the AIDS outbreak: he heavily promoted the use of a particular drug, AZT, to treat it.

When the treatment is worse than the disease.

I’m not going to reproduce the entire Spin article in this post. But let me make a few key points, and you can click through to read the whole thing (worth your time; it’s a terrific piece of journalism).

AZT is a chemotherapy drug. It destroys bone marrow. The side effects are horrific.

The studies that the FDA used to justify fast-tracking the use of AZT as an AIDS therapy were weak, or worse (meaning: utterly compromised).

The company that sells AZT (Burroughs Wellcome) made craploads of money thanks to Fauci’s policy.

And many clinicians who were treating HIV-positive patients became convinced that AZT was actually harmful — even deadly.

Clinicians began refusing to administer AZT. They saw with their own eyeballs that it was harming their patients.

They were right to be skeptical. There is credible evidence that AZT, far from being a “cure” for AIDS, actually kills people.

There’s something else that caught my eye in that Spin piece. On August 17, 1989, our government — meaning Fauci, then as now head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health — declared that people who were HIV antibody-positive (not showing any symptoms of disease, mind you, just testing positive for antibodies to the virus) should also take AZT.

That was 1.4 million people.

This guidance was, at best, utterly irresponsible. Fauci cited a study as the basis for expanding use of AZT. But there were problems with citing that study — big problems. It wasn’t even published yet. Fauci said the study had followed patients taking AZT for two years. That was false; the study period was only one year.

The study was also too small to be meaningful.

And — here’s the kicker — there was no significant difference in outcomes of patients taking AZT, compared to those who were not.

Actually, take that back. Here’s the real kicker. There was another contemporaneous study that Fauci did not mention.

Unlike the study Fauci cited, this one had been published — it appeared in December the previous year in the Lancet.

It had found that AZT was completely ineffective. The Lancet study

was more expansive than the original AZT study and followed patients longer. It was not conducted in the United States, but in France, at the Claude Bernard Hospital in Paris, and concluded the same things about AZT that Burroughs Wellcome’s study did, except Burroughs Wellcome called their results “overwhelmingly positive,” and the French doctors called theirs “disappointing.” The French study found, once again, that AZT was too toxic for most to tolerate, had no lasting effect on HIV blood levels, and left the patients with fewer T-4 cells than they started with. Although they noticed a clinical improvement at first, they concluded that “by six months, these values had returned to their pretreatment levels, and several opportunistic infections, malignancies, and deaths occurred.”

–“AIDS and the AZT Scandal,” Spin

So, legit question.

Why would Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID, push the widespread use of a drug that made infected people sicker — probably even hastened their deaths?

It’s possible, I suppose, that he was simply ignorant.

Maybe he was too busy doing other head-of-NIAID-y things to bother actually reading the study he referenced when he recommended millions of people take a drug that destroys bone marrow.

Maybe he’d been bamboozled. Maybe he was big buddies with Burroughs Wellcome, and they were lying to him because AZT was their golden goose and they knew they needed to keep Fauci on message about it being “the” drug that would save the world from AIDS.

But there’s another possibility.

Maybe, for Fauci, there’s something extremely satisfying — even addictive — in presiding over an international response to deadly pandemics.

And maybe the payoff is higher when he works everyone into a panic.

And maybe the payoff is also higher if the best available treatment causes infected people to suffer.

Maybe if infected people have to undergo horrendous side effects during treatment, it “proves” how horrible a disease is — which makes Fauci-the-caregiver come across as that much more important.

Sound far-fetched?

What if I told you this was not just an isolated incident?

Let’s talk about Ebola.

Are you old enough to remember Ebola?

That’s another pandemic that threatened to kill us all, although in terms of severity, it makes COVID-19 look like child’s play. Ebola, a viral hemorrhagic fever, kills 50-90% of the people it infects within six to sixteen days of infection. Most people die horribly because they start hemorrhaging blood internally and externally.

Ebola’s biggest outbreak, to date, was in 2013-2016, in West Africa. Its origins are wild animals — possibly bats but most likely wild primates.

Guess who was out there at the time, issuing dire warnings about a global Ebola pandemic? The outbreak, Fauci told a “packed stadium” at the 2014 Weill Cornell’s Global Health Grand Rounds, was “an extraordinary but frightening textbook of epidemiology.” Exported cases could have a “domino effect.” If we wanted to prevent a global outbreak, we would need to deploy “an army” of professionals.

Notably, Fauci also used this event to call attention to the personal toll the epidemic was taking on his own state of mind.

The epidemic has produced sleepless nights for Dr. Fauci. The last time he’d pulled so many consecutive all-nighters, he said, “I was on the old H5 ward during Christmas” during his training in what was then New York Hospital.

–“Fauci: Quelling Ebola’s Perfect Storm in West Africa Requires Global Mobiliation,” Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom

And from a Huffington Post piece the following year:

Fauci was thrust into the spotlight. In addition to a medical expert, he became a chief public soother, a TV personality and a critical conduit between the worlds of science and politics. All the while, he worked with an Ebola patient transferred to the NIH facility.

–“One Year Ago Today, America Collectively Lost Its Mind About Ebola,” Huffington Post

So … sleep-deprived Fauci, when he wasn’t on television soothing our horribly jangled nerves, was busy … personally caring for an Ebola patient?

“I do believe that one gets unique insights into disease when you actually physically interact with patients … It is very exciting and gratifying to participate in saving someone’s life.”

—Fauci in 2015

Are you starting to feel a bit queasy, yet?

It gets worse. Fauci later admitted that this same Ebola patient (a nurse) probably got infected because the NIH, meaning Anthony Fauci himself, failed to require sufficient PPE for healthcare workers caring for Ebola patients.

Did you catch that?

We were cooing over the guy for caring for a patient that FAUCI HIMSELF had put at risk of contracting Ebola!

What’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, again?

So what about Ebola treatments?

Interestingly, the Ebola outbreak was also leveraged by the Centers for Disease Control and the pharmaceutical company Gilead to test an anti-viral drug that you might of heard about in the news recently: remdesivir.

Remdesivir was tested in Africa as a potential treatment for Ebola.

It failed.

During the recent Ebola virus epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, remdesivir was included in a randomized, controlled trial of selected therapeutics in EBOV patients (NCT02818582); since in the midstudy primary analysis, remdesivir treatment was found inferior to antibody-based therapy with respect to mortality, the remdesivir intervention arm was terminated.

–“Remdesivir: From Ebola to COVID-19,” Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications

Remdesivir didn’t go away, however. In April 2020, our Anthony Fauci announced that it was the magic bullet that would cure COVID. The drug he said, had been proven to “block” the COVID virus.

The US health chief went so far as to liken it to the discovery of the first medicine found to help treat HIV more than three decades ago.

–“US health chief Anthony Fauci promotes Ebola drug to treat coronavirus,” The NewDaily

“The first medicine to help treat HIV?”

You mean: AZT?

Not everybody thought Fauci’s announcement about remdesivir as “the” COVID cure was appropriate. He’d based his statement on a study that wasn’t yet published. He was dismissive of a study in China that failed to find the promised benefits of remdesivir to COVID patients.

Remember what Fauci did with AZT? Announced that it was an AIDS cure based on a study that wasn’t yet published — while ignoring studies that called the drug’s efficacy into question?

Remdesivir was subsequently granted Emergency Use Authorization for in-patient treatment of severe COVID. (By the way, there are NINE Gilead employees on the CDC advisory panel that green-lighted the drug.)

So what about remdesivir’s side effects?

Turns out, they are potentially pretty awful — right up to kidney failure.

So awful that at least one alternative health practitioner has proposed that remdesivir is the cause of death of some patients admitted to hospitals for COVID treatment. This practitioner became curious, he said, when he heard media reports that COVID patients were experiencing kidney failure within a few days of admission to New York hospitals. Kidney failure, he claims, isn’t a typical result of a viral infection. Could it be that something else was causing it?

Now, I can’t vouch for this guy. He’s not a medical doctor, although he is apparently a chiropractor and goes by “Dr.,” something that will likely earn derision. His concerns will likely be written off as a quack’s ravings.

What concerns me is that I see a pattern.

How to catch an abusive “caregiver.”

Let’s go back to that Psychiatric Times article on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy that I referenced at the beginning of this post — the one that told us how good abusive caregivers are at hiding what they’re doing.

The most effective way to identify abusive caregivers, writes this article’s author, is to look at a patient’s medical records. Look for clues or patterns that indicate a caregiver is misleading clinicians. Give preference to data submitted by clinicians who directly observe documented information, rather than relying on accounts provided by the suspected abuser. Think about whether records make clinical sense.

Chronologically summarizing each medical contact into a table reveals patterns of health care utilization and parent/caregiver behavior in a format that is easy to analyze.

—“Munchausen by Proxy and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another,” Psychiatric Times

That’s what we need to do.

We need to look for patterns.

We need to look at information provided by the actual scientists who study how to contain and treat infectious diseases, including COVID, and compare what they’re saying to Anthony Fauci’s public guidance.

Here are some of the patterns I see.

Fauci seeks media and public attention. He clearly relishes being viewed as a caring, even sacrificial person.

He often makes statements that seem careless — and that throw the public into a panic.

He has, on more than one occasion, touted unproven drugs as being magical cures. These drugs later turned out to be useless at best. At worst, they exacerbated peoples’ suffering.

So what we should be asking…

Are “patients” who accept Fauci’s “care” better off than patients who do not?

Were the HIV-positive people who took massive doses of the bone marrow-destroying drug AZT better off than the patients who pursued other courses of care?

Are COVID patients who are administered remdesivir more likely or less likely to beat the virus than patients who are not?

And while we’re at it, how about the vaccine?

The vax.

I am not going to use this post to wade into the “vax-don’t-vax” conversation.

But I am going to point out two things about the COVID vaccine.

First, no vaccine is guaranteed to be free of side effects. Per the CDC itself: “like any medication, vaccines can cause side effects.” 

Second, natural immunity is a thing. Credible scientists and credible news services agree.

More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. 

–“Natural immunity to covid is powerful. Policymakers seem afraid to say so,” Washington Post

So, regardless of whether you are pro-vax, anti-vax, vax-mandator or vax-hesitant, the facts are this: a person with natural immunity who does NOT get the vax is:

A. Well-protected from COVID and,

B. Safe from the risk of vaccine side effects.

By definition, this person is better-served by refusing to follow Anthony Fauci’s advice to get vaccinated (he’s on record as thinking we should get to 90% vaccination rates; this would, by definition, mean people with natural immunity would get the jab).

But instead of saying so — instead of saying that people with natural immunity might be better off avoiding the vax — when pressed on the question, Fauci wriggled. “I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” he said. “That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response.” 

Question.

What would a Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy caregiver say, if a clinician suggested the patient in the person’s care might be perfectly healthy and ready to resume a normal life?

Would that person be happy for the patient? Would that person quickly agree with such a positive outcome?

No. The caregiver would hesitate. The caregiver would stall rather than accept the prognosis. The person would look for ways to suggest the patient might need additional interventions.

Because the caregiver would know that the minute that patient is really, truly “better,” the caregiver loses the psychological payoff that comes from being a caregiver.

Put another way: if the COVID pandemic fades away, so does the 80-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci. His last moment in the spotlight is gone.

Another question.

What sort of person would fund dangerous research on viruses?

Fauci’s been on the hot seat a few times, recently, over allegations that his agency funded so-called “gain of function” research on coronaviruses. He’s denied doing this, but earlier this month The Intercept published 700 pages of leaked documents that cast serious doubts on Fauci’s credibility. These documents

contain new evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as “gain-of-function research of concern,” intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose.

–“NIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan,” The Intercept

What does this tell us about Fauci’s conduct?

A man whose responsibility, nominally, is to protect Americans from the threat of infectious disease was secretly backing experiments that could unleash particularly dangerous strains of infectious disease.

Why would he do this?

Is it possible that Fauci, a caregiver with Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, was working behind the scenes to make his patients sick?

Now: think about this.

We literally call Anthony Fauci a saint.

Saint Fauci, we call him.

I don’t think he’s a saint, at all.

I think he’s the opposite.