(LifeSiteNews) – Dr. Robert Califf, the commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), blamed “misinformation” for continuing COVID-19 deaths, asserting his agency as an antidote despite the federal public health bureaucracy’s history of perpetuating rather than correcting medical falsehoods.
“Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today,” Califf told the Associated Press in comments published Tuesday. “People who are denying themselves that opportunity are dying because they’re misinformed.”
“The FDA’s word is still one of the most highly regarded pieces of information people want to see,” Califf claimed, detailing the agency’s efforts to dispute claims that conflict with the FDA’s own via YouTube videos, Twitter threads, website articles, and even Instagram memes consisting of captioned screenshots from cartoons such as Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Yet many argue that the federal government generally, and the FDA specifically, are far from trustworthy when it comes to COVID-19.
Last year, former FDA adviser David Gortler accused the agency of “purposely hiding facts” about “both safety and efficacy problems with vaccines and boosters” for the virus, particularly regarding links to heart issues such as myocarditis.
Last summer, an FDA “expert panel” voted to approve COVID vaccine doses for children as young as six months, despite Dr. Eric Rubin, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, stating that “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it.”
The agency has also refused to release autopsy reports that critics say could shed light on the shots’ true health ramifications, and has long been politicized beyond the issue of COVID in Democrat administrations; in January, it changed the label on the Plan B emergency contraception pill to falsely deny that it can function as an abortifacient.
Beyond the FDA, critics argue that federal officials’ prevailing “misinformation” narrative does not merely make the public aware of genuine falsehoods but is primarily intended to suppress and discredit legitimate information and open debate about the proper response to COVID-19, particularly on aspects of the pandemic and the ensuing policies that the government has been wrong about, including COVID vaccines, lockdowns, masks, and the origins of the virus.
As time has gone on, contentions that were once labeled “disinformation” have been increasingly acknowledged as correct, such as the abundant evidence that natural immunity from prior COVID infection is as good as or superior to immunity from vaccination. Last week, mainstream media outlet NBC News reported on a Lancet meta-analysis acknowledging that natural immunity’s protection was “at least as high, if not higher” than that conferred from two doses of one of the mRNA-based shots.
But arguably the biggest government perpetrator of COVID misinformation has been Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director and top White House adviser, who has not been shy about presenting himself as an arbiter of truth.
In February 2020, he said there was “absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask” in the United States; by July, he was suggesting that Americans wear not only masks, but goggles and face shields, despite evidence indicating masks’ ineffectiveness. Critics also faulted Fauci for suggesting that handshaking should be abolished yet sexual activity with strangers was alright if “you’re willing to take a risk,” and being unwilling or unable to give a “firm answer” on why the vaccines are necessary for those with natural immunity.
But the most serious apparent falsehood comes from his past role presiding over NIAID’s approval of a federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance for gain-of-function research, which is controversial because it entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects, at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which COVID may have originally leaked.
In May 2021, Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky confronted Fauci on the government’s support for gain-of-function research. Fauci, who in 2012 had championed such research, told Paul that NIAID had “never” done so. Paul cited the EcoHealth grant in response, at which point Fauci claimed that EcoHealth had assured them at the time that gain-of-function work would not be done with the money. Paul later submitted a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice against Fauci for lying to Congress, which the Democrat-controlled DOJ declined to act on.