There is much to learn about the way the world works today by watching the confirmation vote on Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. In so many ways, this is a remarkable development with a dramatic story arc, one that speaks presciently to events over the past five years and where they stand in public consciousness.
In November 2021, a major book blasted onto the scene that hardly anyone had expected. It was “The Real Anthony Fauci” by Kennedy. The author had already emerged as the world’s leading critic of the policy response to COVID-19, which included locking down societies across the globe to prepare the population for a vaccine that was already on record as failing to protect against both infection and transmission.
This book was not just a criticism of the way that the “nation’s leading infectious disease doctor” had been the dominant voice for shutdowns, closures, distancing, and masking. It dug through the deep history of the U.S. bioweapons program to highlight the role of dangerous research with a military angle. Fauci was not merely the guy telling you how to stay well; he had become a powerful figure in the bioweapons industry, which had a deep relationship with pharmaceutical companies.
The book was beyond mind-blowing, and its many hundreds of footnotes provide an incredible documentary source for readers to check. I dug through them to discover features of the pandemic response I never knew existed. The depth of research here was simply astounding. As the book became a bestseller, Amazon itself faced pressure to censor it. It acquiesced for a time simply because the powers that be were so awesome and aggressive. Still, the book made inroads in any case.
At that time, the political constellation in the country was shifting wildly, and no one knew where it would wind up. The Biden administration had doubled down on coercive pandemic policies and added vaccine and mask mandates while issuing wild warnings of mass death for noncompliance. Resistance on the right and left were growing, but no one knew for sure where all of this would end up.
