[My letter sent to Dr. Fauci follows. I already received an automated email telling me he and his staff were too busy stamping out disease and saving lives to be bothered answering emails - no surprise there.]
While I can set aside my assessment of your tenure and performance regarding the administrative response to Covid, I cannot resist responding to your most recent puerile and inane public statement that it is “disturbing” that a court can overrule the CDC. This is, unfortunately, emblematic of the lethality to reason of metastatic bureaucratic ‘thought’ (conducted, really, in the archipallium, not the cerebrum), when it comes to society, governance, or for that matter, achievement of the actual public good. You have clearly lost all perspective as to how a Constitutional republic or a decent society works, and on the confines of your job as a federal official. As such, the oath of office you took acknowledged the three branches of government, including the judicial. The ability of the judiciary to overrule the executive of which you are a small part, is hardly novel.
I choose the word ‘puerile’ out of my own experience. When I was a young medical student, I could not understand why it was possible that physicians could be sued. Why should the law have power over doctors? After all, physicians were only trying to do good, to help their patients. Why should they be subject to laws? I wondered in all innocence. Are you really, a septuagenarian, veteran of the internecine, endless wars of bureaucracy, really an innocent? Or a totalitarian in waiting like the rest of the federal bureaucracy?
Then, after med school, I grew up. Simply experiencing life as a practicing physician forced me to realize that the solutions to the vast majority of life’s problems are NOT medical. That the attempted medicalization of many areas of life via putative public health measures and individual medical practice are a sneaky technique of the American progressive rendition of creeping (and creepy) totalitarianism. Every bureaucrat in every agency, every one believes they could solve every problem in their purview if they only had enough power! You so obviously subscribe to this statist worldview. It is a sad commentary on the decline of Constitutional governance that one with such beliefs has risen to the position you hold. My interest in governance led me to enter law school after 5 years of medical practice and subsequent admission to the bar. Had not my simple life experience cured me of my naivté, law school surely did. Medicine and public health are NOT the authority from which all other power flows.
My life experience and incidental exposure to the blatant Marxist worldview instilled in students by schools of “public health” during my legal studies, have given me quite a a good understanding of the threat to any semblance of individual liberty posed by those who purport to know exactly what is “good for the health ” of the rest of us - down to the most minuscule corner of our wretched lives. We would inhabit utopia, you surely believe, but for the lack of plenary power in the hands of the nation’s MPH’s and the CDC.
I have a prescription for you, doctor. Look in the mirror, and as you do, read the following quotation from C.S. Lewis:>
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Though I am not religious, I find myself praying, “God protect us from government officials like Dr. Fauci”, please”.
With dismay appropriate to the stealthy danger you represent,
Civil Westman MD, JD