In Covid as in Climate Change: Truth Will Out: ‘Climate policy has followed a comparable arc of exaggeration & institutional capture’
https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/in-covid-as-in-climate-change-truth
By TILAK DOSHI
Excerpt:
The Senate oversight hearing of Dr Anthony Fauci last week offered a rare and bracing spectacle: a man once hailed as the embodiment of scientific authority (“I am the science”) reduced to invoking the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. The immediate catalyst was the release, days earlier by Republican Senator Rand Paul, of over a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Those entries, near-daily jottings of a public official at the height of his influence, contradict much of what he told the American people and Congress about masks, school closures, infection fatality rates and the origins of the virus itself. What had been presented as settled science now appears as a series of improvisations, self-promotions and strategic omissions.
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Parallel reckonings in climate science
The Fauci affair finds a striking parallel in the legal unravelling of climate scientist Michael Mann’s suit against Mark Steyn last year which was covered in these pages (see here and here). Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ chart, which flattened a millennium of natural temperature variation into a dramatic 20th-century uptick, became the iconic image of catastrophic anthropogenic warming and a staple of IPCC summaries, school textbooks and political rhetoric. When journalist Mark Steyn and writer Rand Simberg criticised it as fraudulent in construction and deployment, Mann sued for defamation in the District of Columbia courts. A jury in 2024 awarded him $1 million in punitive damages against Steyn and a smaller sum against Simberg.
The cases of Michael Mann and Anthony Fauci are not mere personal comeuppances of hubristic figures. They illuminate a deeper pathology: the twin mass hysterias of COVID-19 and climate change, each cultivated by a constellation of bureaucratic, academic, philanthropic, media and corporate interests that derived moral authority and material benefit. In both domains, the vast majority of ordinary people — workers facing lost livelihoods and shuttered businesses, parents confronting closed schools and developmental setbacks for their children, developing-world populations denied reliable and affordable energy — bore the costs while a relatively small elite harvested prestige, research grants, consulting contracts, green subsidies and regulatory rents. The pattern is familiar from earlier episodes of ideologically driven planning, from Soviet Lysenkoism to the influential Club of Rome’s resource-exhaustion forecasts that never materialised.
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Twin hysterias and the machinery of silencing
Public health orthodoxy before 2020 emphasised focused protection of the vulnerable and the preservation of societal functioning. The Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020, drafted by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, simply restated that wisdom: shield the elderly and infirm with targeted measures, allow the young and healthy to live, work and build population immunity, and thereby minimise collateral damage. It was met with an orchestrated campaign of character assassination. NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating published take down”; Fauci circulated critical pieces and helped frame the authors as “fringe epidemiologists”. Social media platforms censored discussion; professional associations issued denunciations.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic ( https://dailysceptic.org/2026/08/05/in-covid-as-in-climate-change-truth-will-out/ )
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