Accountability For Ethics Villain Dr. Fauci? It’s Complicated.

I’m proud to say that Ethics Alarms began identifying Dr. Anthony Fauci as the despicable liar and irresponsible hack that he was and is in December of 2020, during the societal lockdown that wrecked my business, helped kill my wife, hobbled children’s education, destroyed whole industries…well, but it let American elect a senile Democrat as President, so it wasn’t all bad, I guess.

In my December 2020 post titled “Ethics Dunce, Rogue And Fool To Be Held Up As An Example Forever More: Dr. Anthony Fauci”, I wrote in part,

“[L]ying is not an option for someone who has been held up for almost a year as the epitome of an expert representing “science,” who must be believed and slavishly obeyed by policymakers because, after all, scientists only convey cold hard facts. If that’s the basis for your authority, if that’s the reason the news media and the President-elect lecturing us about the virtues of obeying experts and following what the “science” says, no matter how difficult, painful and counter-intuitive it might be, then a high profile expert cannot, must not, and dare not announce later that he withheld facts for our own good. That’s not the role that we have been told anexpert fills. Not telling the public the truth for the greater good is a pubic servant’s tool, and one that is perilous to use at best. We do not expect politicians to always tell us the truth, and we even accept the troubling reality that sometimes they may be right not to tell us the truth. As Pelt, the character played by the late Richard Jordan in “The Hunt for the Red October” says,

Listen, I’m a politician, which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies, I’m stealing their lollipops, but it also means that I keep my options open.

“But scientists, we have been told, over and over again, regarding climate change and the pandemic just to name two of the most egregious examples, aren’t politicians. They deal in facts only. They have no agendas, they aren’t shading or outright hiding the truth to manipulate us. We are told this by people arrogantly treating us like children and fools. Oh, you poor ignorant dolts who a skeptical of what these learned, good men and women know!

“Right. Anthony Fauci, the current symbol of the integrity and reliability of science, lied to the public (and probably to policymakers: who can be sure?) by his own admission.

“He cannot be trusted. He can never be trusted. And, having been held up as the unimpeachable representative of experts and science generally, they can’t be trusted either.”

Well before that post, Ethics Alarms (and many commenters here) had taken the position that the lockdown of the schools and the economy was a near suicidal act made politically unavoidable by the teachers unions, the news media and the “experts” who were, like Fauci, asserting dire consequences as “science” when they were in fact only guesses or worse, deliberate lies to advance a partisan agenda. The mask nearly fell off when the same “experts” that insisted that white people avoid groups larger than five declared that there was an exception for George Floyd mobs because, see, racism is a public health threat.

It was, or should have been, so obvious what was going on, but Fauci played saintly doctor beautifully, bolstered by Axis propaganda like this

….to crush anyone who pointed out that shutting down the economy and the schools for a virus that was only more dangerous than the flu to people over 65 is insane.

Now, six years after that headline (I have never trusted The Atlantic since, and never will)—too late for all the millions of victims of the pandemic lies and experts malpractice—the walls may finally be closing in on Fauci.

May.

Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted this week and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded “gain of function” experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started. The five-year statute of limitations runs out on May 11.

“99% of this country has no idea who Morens is,” said Oversight Project President Mike Howell after the indictment was announced. “It’s Fauci that they will blame for one of the worst government catastrophes in history in America. And so the test is Fauci. The Morens indictment is great, and we applaud it. But there are a lot of people out there that want to see Fauci held to account for the damage he wrought. [Fauci] lied about one of the most damaging events in American history routinely and was behind a massive coverup of the key factors,” Howell said.

Verdict: true. The Ethics Villain may avoid accountability anyway, because on his final full day in office, President Joe Biden or whoever was operating his auto-pen issued a blanket pardon to Fauci for “any offenses” dating to 2014. After all, it was Fauci’s lockdown (and the questionable election security that it spawned) that made Biden President. A Fauci indictment would neatly set up a judicial determination if the pardon (and others “Biden” issued) is valid.

Now THAT’S An Unethical Surgeon…

“He eventually removed Mr. Bryan’s liver, thinking it was his spleen. The Health Department noted in its report that, in addition to being on different sides of the abdomen, “spleens and livers are anatomically distinct, have different consistencies, and are different colors.”

This might ssem funny, except that the patient, 70-year-old William Bryan, died. You can’t live without a liver.

The surgeon, Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, has been indicted for second-degree murder. Good! This medical version of a scene in a Marx Brothers movie took place at Ascension Sacred Heart of the Emerald Coast Hospital in Miramar Beach, Florida in August 2024. I must say, I don’t understand the story at all.

Poor Mr. Bryan underwent diagnostic imaging at the hospital on August 18, 2024 that indicated his spleen might be enlarged. There was blood in the membrane lining Mr. Bryan’s abdomen, but no signs of hemorrhaging. Dr. Shaknovsky told the patient that he needed to have his spleen removed, a minimally invasive procedure with a recovery time of up to six weeks. The doctor neglected to tell his patient that he couldn’t tell a spleen from a liver.

It Looks Like The Biden Administration May Have Killed My Wife…

I feel like Mrs. Kintner in “Jaws.”

A Senate investigation confirms that Biden administration officials at the FDA and CDC knew about a significant stroke risk tied to Pfizer’s bivalent Wuhan virus booster in people over 65. They decided not to let the public know about it….might make them hesitant to get the shot, after all. Can’t have that!

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a formal notification letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. along with about 2,000 pages of federal documents. “I am sharing my preliminary findings to provide HHS and the public with even more evidence of the Biden administration’s unsupported and unyielding devotion to a harmful vaccine at the expense of the public’s health,” Rep. Johnson begins.

The letter goes on to described how as early as Nov. 2022, the vaccine safety surveillance systems operated by Biden health officials began detecting statistically significant evidence of “ischemic stroke among individuals age 65 and older following injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster.” They did not issue a formal warning to the public. Instead, the Biden White House and HHS pushed to “increase uptake of the booster” for people 65 years and older. In Jan. 2023, a draft Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “communications plan” emphasized the Biden administration’s intention to “increase uptake of the booster.” White House edits buried the significance of the safety signal, for example, changing a sentence that stated that the “signal is moderately elevated” to the “signal is slightly elevated.”

Even as a safety surveillance system continued to detect a statistically significant safety signal for ischemic stroke, Biden health officials posted on the FDA website that “no change is recommended in COVID-19 vaccination practice.”  While Biden health officials continued to let the public believe the vaccine was safe, they initiated multiple studies and statistical analyses including a “Stroke Project” to investigate whether the vaccines really were safe for the population at risk, and the investigations continued through at least September 2025. 

On The Matter of a Murderer’s Insanity

Conservative pundits seem to be having a problem with the fact that Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., the homeless man who slaughtered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte subway as her fellow riders pretended they were under the sea or something, has been declared incapable of standing trial and prosecutors have delayed his competency hearing by six months.

A horrified conservative writes on PJ Media in part:

“….because soft-on-crime authorities in Charlotte ensured he was always released on cashless bail after his 14 prior arrests, he was free to thrust his knife into a stranger on the subway. Unfortunately, woke medical and legal professionals continue to treat Brown as if he were the victim, a pitiable, crazy man with no responsibility for his actions, rather than as a serial criminal and sadistic killer. The new assessment that Brown is incompetent to stand trial could prevent trying him for the death penalty….”

Ethics Alarms has barely touched on the question of whether not guilty by reason of insanity verdicts (NGBRI) are ethical or even sensible. That’s a big failing, because this is one of the major ethics questions in criminal law, and one that is still unsettled. It may be beyond settling.

“The Ethicist” Slaps Down Manipulative Parenting

I was stunned that this question made it into “The Ethicist” column, but who knows: maybe it was a week light on difficult ethical dilemmas.

A mother who wanted to use Prof Appiah the way ethicists are often used in the consulting world—to back the client’s opinion after that individual has already made up his or her mind—wanted to be able to appeal to the professor’s authority in a family dispute. Her adult son is morbidly obese and she and her husband fear for his health. They want him to go on a chemical weight-loss regimen with Ozempic or the similar drugs, but he keeps getting fatter and fatter. Years ago, they bought a house for the son, and he is paying them back in monthly installments. Their plan is to waive the rest of the payments and give him the house now, but Big Boy’s father wants to condition their generosity on the son agreeing to use the drugs to lose weight.

An under-discussed sub-value on the Six Pillars of Character is autonomy, listed under the RESPECT pillar. That means allowing those we have contact with in out lives autonomy, and not using resources, power or emotional bonds to control the conduct and choices of others. To me, the answer to The Ethicist’s inquirer is an easy call, and I was pleased that his answer tracked with mine exactly.

Professor Appiah wrote,

Oh Canada! The Government Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia Slippery Slope…

@the.free.press

One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program. What’s even more shocking is how fast the deaths are approved.

♬ original sound – The Free Press – The Free Press

It is reassuring to know, at least for me, that the ethics issues EA has been most adamant about continue to inspire the same analysis from me. On the topic of legal human euthanasia (assisted suicide), the position here hasn’t changed since the policy, now legal in Illinois, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey,New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington first began to spread. Gee, I wonder what those states have in common? Oh…right. An ideology that devalues life: that’s today’s progressive movement and its Democratic Party.

This toxic and corrupting culture holds that individual life is not precious, but rather is subordinate to the needs of the many. Letting people kill themselves, or, if necessary, allowing their families and care-givers to let them be killed, costs a lot less than letting the old, sick, depressed and poor try to hold on to every last minute of existence. Masquerading as individual “choice,” the versatile word that encompasses letting mothers snuff out burgeoning young life in their wombs for their convenience and career advancement, the right to have the government kill you quickly metastasizes into a cultural norm where autonomy, courage, fortitude, individualism and reverence for life erodes in the interests of affording a nanny state.

Euthanasia is a straight violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; it also, in cases where the object of this kind of “palliative care” is forced on victims, as it frequently is in Canada, a Golden Rule breach. The only ethical system it can be squared with is Utilitarianism, but only of the most brutal kind that was used as the justification for the mass murders under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

I personally authorized the hospital pulling the plug on my 89-year-old mother when she lapsed into a coma after unsuccessful surgery. My father, who always told us that he would not be a financial or other kind of burden on his family, managed to die during a nap, also at 89, apparently by force of will. My ethical assessment of the Left’s fondness for assisted suicide has been aired frequently on Ethics Alarms, most thoroughly in a series of posts in September of 2019: The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”, and Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll.

In the first post, I wrote, “I believe that permitting an individual to kill another with the victim’s consent is so ripe for abuse—Dr. Kevorkian comes to mind—that it crosses an ethical line that should be thick, black, and forbidding.  The alleged consent of the doomed can too easily be coerced or manufactured for the convenience of others.” That position hasn’t changed one whit.

A Contrarian Ethics Take On “Body-Shaming” Performers

I guess I’ve read too many articles like “Country Star Issues Blunt Response After Being Criticized for Her Appearance: ‘I’m Seething’” Not that I’ve read a lot of articles about country singer Lauren Alaina, yet another star in that genre introduced to the world by “American Idol”: I’ve never heard her, or of her. But I have been reading and hearing performers, particularly women, going into high dudgeon about fans, movie-goers, concert ticket-buyers and others who criticize them regarding their physical appearance, particularly their weight. Apparently Lauren’s furious because a lot of people criticized her weight based on a recent video of her performing. The singer wrote on Instagram in part,

“I’m literally so mad right now. I’m seething…We’ve got to change the way we’re talking about women on social media. We need to retire the obsession with women’s bodies. If you care about the music…talk about the music. If you don’t…. well, that’s fine too.
But this culture of speculating about women’s bodies?
It’s tired. Do better.”

Alana went on to emote about the phenomenon later. “A few weeks ago, I saw a TikTok of me up on stage singing, and all of the comments were about my weight,” she sobbed. “People were saying that my tour needed to be sponsored by Ozempic and just horrible things. It really affected me,” she said. “I am in recovery from an eating disorder that I’ve battled for a very long time. This just really upset me…I have an 8-month-old daughter, and we can’t talk about women this way. This is bull crap. If you’re a woman out there and people are commenting on your body, and saying this, myself included, we’ve gotta ignore that, and we all need to be better. This is crazy.”

“Well allow me to retort!” I say, in my best Samuel L. Jackson impression. (No, I’m not going to shoot her.)

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week (If you don’t count all the others): Drunk Washington State Legislator Joe Fitzgibbon

This video brings back some bad memories as I head to the second anniversary of my wife’s sudden death. Grace battled alcoholism our whole marriage, and the careful, plodding, slightly slurred speech pattern you hear above from Rep. Fitzgibbon is exactly how she would speak when she was smashed and trying to hide it. Sober, she was quick-tongued and sparklingly articulate.

I feel sympathy for Fitzgibbon, but he has to resign, and so far doesn’t have the integrity to do it. Fortunately for him, he belongs to a side of the ideological spectrum that doesn’t believe in responsibility or accountability among their other ethical quirks.

Fitzgibbon, to his credit, at least issued an ethical apology for his disgraceful conduct, except for one teeny-tiny omission: there was no “therefore, today I tender my resignation as representative of the 34th District”:

Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True [Corrected]

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times: