How Fauci Lost America’s Trust: Dr. Hemmati Explains | The Brief with Shabbos Kestenbaum

Did policymakers actually shut down their states and cities because of Fauci? Absolutely. I was upset and I was questioning that decision from the very beginning. All signs really do point to Dr. Fauci. Will we ever know the truth of where and how COVID originated? I'm certain we will. There are people who have that knowledge. I've actually done gain-of-function research. It's not hard to do this. In this case, it was a little bit weird. Could it have happened in the wet market? Absolutely. Is it likely? No. Let me ask you the question that perhaps got the most amount of people censored. And welcome back to The Brief. We have a great show for you today. But just before we begin, make sure you like, comment, subscribe to ensure you do not miss any new episode. And with that, we are joined today by Dr. Humand David Hemmati. He is an ophthalmologist, biotech entrepreneur, and frequent Fox News guest. Doctor, appreciate you making the time. Thanks so much, Travis, for having me. So let's just get straight into it. Anthony Fauci. So Senator Rand Paul has recently released more than 1,000 pages of journal entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci. Of course, he's the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He's chief medical advisor to the president, or at least he was. And now, of course, he's under this subpoena from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. He's actually been referred to for being in contempt. Now, look, he was known as America's doctor. People had, you know, the bobblehead of Anthony Fauci. I really like the guy. So if you wouldn't mind just walking me through this, how did America's doctor go from celebrated hero to now whereby there's so much anger and mistrust directed against Dr. Fauci? I'm glad you asked me this question up front rather than waiting to the very end, because that already defines the problem right there. The fact that there was this concept of America's doctor, the concept that there is one person who is omniscient, who knows everything and who automatically knows what's best for all of us, and who could not be questioned, who, if you questioned, you were somehow evil or wrong or deserved to be censored, something that is otherwise not allowed in our society, in our American culture. That right there defines the entire problem, that when we had a national emergency or what was perceived or billed as a national emergency, regardless of how you see it, right, there were people getting very sick. That is true. We put, or a lot of people, especially the government and the large media organizations, convinced everyone to put all their faith and trust blindly into a single individual, as well as all the people in his sphere, and said that if you dare question this person, you will be censored, you'll be silenced, you'll be ridiculed, you'll be excluded from public. And in California they passed a law, AB 2098, that if you dare go against government orthodoxy and you have a medical license, your medical license can and likely will be taken away. That was unconstitutional. That law is now gone, obviously. That right there is the problem. But I think what led to that problem is that when we have a situation that's perceived to be an emergency, where people are scared, legitimately scared, sometimes feeding into media hype scared, or both, we want to find some source of comfort, some source of direction when it's something unfamiliar, right? We want to latch onto something. And when we're given someone with such a huge title, right, head of National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, someone who has been around in government service for numerous decades, who's advised numerous governments, who's controlled tens of billions in dollars in grant funding for research in infectious diseases, who has put himself at the forefront of so many different issues, especially decades ago when the AIDS crisis was emerging, you all of a sudden have an automatic recipe to trust that person. The problem is that when those people who were simply asking questions, as we're supposed to do in medicine, and as we're supposed to do as Americans, were silenced, all of a sudden the general population starts to think, well, no one's questioning him, so he must be right. Little did they realize that those people who were questioning him simply weren't getting airtime, or if they were on social media, their accounts were being blocked. And as a result, all you heard was Fauci and his basically curated echo chamber of voices that parroted everything he had to say. And those were all things that whatever the administration or whatever the people in power wanted to say at that time were pushing. And that is the problem, is that we allowed this to happen as society, and it teaches us several very important lessons of what we should never, ever allow to happen again. So let me ask you the question that perhaps got the most amount of people censored, which is the origins of the pandemic itself. There are essentially two leading scientific theories. One is the traditional Fauci line, which is this was animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan. But the other theory of which people really were cancelled when they brought it up in March of 2020, was that it's quite possible it leaked from this Wuhan Institute of Virology. We know that Fauci wrote in January of 2020 that the quote, we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. We know that former FBI Director Chris Wray, he said in 2023 that the bureau had for quite some time assessed that COVID most likely originated from a lab incident in the Wuhan Institute. So I guess my question to you is twofold. Number one, will we ever know the truth of where and how COVID originated? And number two, your personal expertise, your personal opinion. What do you think happened? Yeah, these are great questions, Chavez. So first, in terms of will we ever know the truth? I'm certain we will, because there are people there who have possessed that information, who have that knowledge, and who simply have been holding it back for reasons that are pretty obvious. When it's Fauci, when it's people inside the government who were likely the ones actually funding this research inexplicably in another country, that ultimately will have someone who's going to come forward at great risk to themselves potentially, but potentially also to avoid being on the wrong side of history, to avoid prosecution, combination thereof, right? So we're going to get that. There's going to be documentation somewhere. You can't burn everything that Fauci realized with his electronic diaries that he stored on a government server or multiple servers. I think the information is going to come out. In terms of my opinion and assessment on this, when Jamie Metzl, who's one of the biggest voices in the lab leak theory, was initially hypothesizing this in the early days of COVID, he was calling me on a regular basis. We're good friends, and he knows I have a scientific background. And what I haven't talked a lot about is that I've actually done gain-of-function research. I have taken not on this type of virus, but it is regularly done. It is not difficult to do. I did it as a teenager at UCLA, by the way. It's not that difficult to take a virus DNA sequence. So it's called a vector. It's a round circular piece of DNA. To cut it in a certain spot, to open it up, and then take another piece of DNA, insert it in there, cause it to close back up again, insert that little vector, that round piece of DNA into cells, then we'll use that DNA to create viruses and start spewing them out. It's not hard to do this. We did that in order to find new cancer genes. If you think a gene may cause cancer, put it in a virus, infect normal cells. If it turns into a tumor, you have your cancer gene. And if it doesn't, you don't, right? And so it's a natural part of research for certain things. In this case, it was a little bit weird. I understand why they were doing it and allegedly to figure out, you know, what makes a virus more infectious to humans. But in doing so, even if the intent was not to create a bioweapon, if you don't have the proper precautions, right? All it takes is for one nano-sized virus particle that obviously you can't see with the eye, you can't even see with a regular microscope, to make it to a person working in that lab, and that person's infected and it gets out. When you have that type of research happening in that exact type of virus, in the exact city where this broke out, that is the obvious natural source, right? Could it have happened in the wet market? Absolutely. Is it likely? No, but I think the wet market, if it's involved in terms of propagating it, maybe that's the case. But, you know, look, if you have a lab doing that research, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it really makes intuitive sense. And in medicine, science, we have this thing called Occam's razor, right? If you have one explanation that easily describes what you're seeing, that is probably the correct explanation. So I want to move away from the medical and get political just for a second. In a January 24 interview with members of the House Oversight Committee, Fauci said he was not involved in any local or state level decision to close schools during the pandemic. But we also know, thanks to these investigations, that in March of 2020, he wrote that then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to close city schools based on a conversation that he had with Fauci. Fauci wrote in his own journal, quote, I went on to tell him, referring to de Blasio, he should close the bars and restaurants in New York City. He said, again referring to de Blasio, that he would base this on my recommendation. So my question to you is twofold. Number one, did policymakers actually shut down their states and cities because of Fauci? And then number two, it's easy for us in retrospect to get angry. But given the science we knew at the time in March of 2020, was that the scientifically sound decision to make? I've been heavily involved in the issue of school closures. In fact, the reason that I'm here today, the reason I have a national voice now, is because of my involvement as a parent who was upset about what was happening with school closures, not just even from a medical perspective, just from a social perspective, its impact on kids and on families. I was upset and I was questioning that decision from the very beginning. So it was very clear, as you said, from Dr. Fauci's own words in his own personal diary, where he believed no one else is going to see. His version of the truth is that he did recommend it. It's obvious that he did. Did they get that recommendation or that requirement, that demand from somewhere else? Absolutely. We know teachers unions were forcing it as well. But they had the support of the biggest voice in the federal government, America's doctor, as you were calling him earlier. So without that voice, they would not necessarily have had the backup they needed to be pushing it. So I think all signs really do point to Dr. Fauci. When it came to the abundance of caution argument back in March 2020, did it make sense to close schools for a period of time? You know, look, there's a movie, there's a film out. I'm in it. Jay Bhattacharya, who's now running NIH and ran CDC until recently, is in it. Many of the figures now who were involved in that debate in the early days in 2020 are in that film. It was called 15 days because that's what Fauci and others said, 15 days to flatten the curve. 15 days. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools. Student engagement was much lower. Kids that I competed with. Disappear. They were gone. I want to shut down. This is the story of the families who fought to uncover the truth. And that would have been totally understandable and justifiable. That level of delay, interruption education wouldn't cause any lasting harm. The problem is all of them knew at that time that it was not going to be 14 days and it was pitched to people as temporary. But I think it was very clear from the get-go that no one intended it to be temporary in that manner. The other part was that they never made plans for there to be alternative in-person options. They simply forced much of the nation into over a year and a half or so of prolonged school closures that have, as we know now and as we predicted back then, devastating consequences. So I think when they were pitching this to the public, they were not being serious about it. They weren't being truthful whatsoever about it. And they didn't have a plan whatsoever. The other thing I want to add real quick is they said 14 days to flatten the curve. The problem when you flatten the curve of a virus is that you're also prolonging the curve. They didn't say 14 days to stop the virus. Don't forget that, right? They just said 14 days to reduce the peak of infections so that we don't have as many hospitalizations happening all at once. What they did by trying to artificially flatten something that normally burns itself out naturally pretty quickly is they ended up artificially really prolonging things and extending the pain that was inflicted on society. Had they not done that, yes, we may have seen a peak, but we also would have gotten, as we know now, a lot of natural immunity as we do with other respiratory infections. And this would have burned itself out most likely much, much sooner. There's a lot I want to ask you based on what you just said. I'm just going to focus on one. When you mentioned those devastating consequences on kids as a result of virtual or distant learning, can you just describe for our audience, both as a doctor and as a parent, what are those devastating consequences? What do you see even today as those long-term effects on kids who are not able to be in person learning? There have been several major, major issues. First, the effect was disproportionately severe on kids who were from single-parent households where they didn't have a parent who could stay at home with them, where both parents had to work, low-income people who didn't have a dedicated separate room to study, people who didn't have a good or any internet connection or a proper device, and kids who needed that kind of supervision, kids who were at risk of dropping out, not participating in that distance learning, who would go out and join gangs or go out with their friends and be unsupervised, get into trouble, et cetera. And what did we see? We saw that in school districts like LA Unified, right here where I am, you had a large, large percentage, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of students who dropped out of the educational system and never returned. The numbers of kids in the public education system has gotten to be nowhere remotely close to what it was pre-COVID. These are not kids who suddenly joined a private school, by the way. These are low-income, largely inner-city kids, mostly black and brown, people who really, more than anyone, needed to be part of that system. We also see dramatically reduced test scores across the board among kids who were impacted by those school closures. The longer the closures, the worse their test scores. And these are things that don't rebound. On top of that, we have medical consequences. Obesity rates in these kids skyrocketed. They weren't around that kind of supervision where people were watching what they ate or they were getting controlled amounts of food at school. And all of a sudden, it was a free-for-all for them raiding the pantry alone at home, quite often, all the time. And Kaiser published a great study on this. Obesity rates, diabetes rates among school-age kids during COVID went up very high. And I don't think that's really reversed. And so we've seen dramatic educational consequences, psychological consequences as well. Anxiety, depression rates have all gone up among kids who were impacted. And don't forget, kids who were playing school athletics, all that ended. A lot of them fell off the wagon and never regained that momentum in athletics as well. And their friendships got degraded. Their social interactions got degraded. A lot of kids who were young never really learned those social-emotional cues and early language processing, never really learned to communicate properly because they were in absolute isolation. And if they did see someone else, that person was wearing a mask and their face was covered. And so with all of this, the harm is irreparable. It is long-lasting and it's regrettable. So on that note, here's what I never really understood. Because even at the time, we knew that if a kid, if a young person got the COVID-19 virus, he would not have as severe impacts as, let's say, older generations. So why was there such a push to mandate vaccines for young people? That's number one. And then number two, would you encourage your patients to vaccinate their kids today against COVID? Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question. Any medical treatment, whether it's a vaccine, whether it's a treatment for a problem that you have or may have, you need to balance risk and benefit and alternatives and also consider the need, right? If you don't have cancer, you don't need chemotherapy, even if it's safe. If you don't have pain, why take a pain medicine, right? Even if it's safe, because you're only being exposed to the risks without getting exposed to the potential benefits. And what we know from the COVID vaccine is we saw in early data, right, well before the vaccines even came out, that kids were extremely low risk. So how was this being billed? It was being billed as, well, there are rare complications in kids from infection. So maybe you'll prevent those very rare complications. And it was also being billed as something where the kids can still remain vectors of transmission. And even if they're not impacted, being vaccinated will stop it in its tracks and prevent grandma, prevent mom and dad from getting infected. And that's going to save lives in high-risk adults. And what we know now was, A, that was never really truly tested. That was an assumption. Turned out not to be true. And second, we know that what was being billed as those potential benefits in kids didn't necessarily pan out. The greater problem was the fact that there were mandates and the fact that there was this shaming and coercement to have kids vaccinated without allowing parents and kids to make informed decisions. And that lack of informed consent is worse than anything else. Had they been truthful about it and said, look, we really hope this vaccine in kids will prevent transmission, but we're not 100% sure. Let's find out. You should make a choice based on that knowledge. Or we don't really know long-term side effect profiles in kids because this is brand new and it's relatively experimental technology still in terms of a vaccine for this particular infection. Why don't we allow you the choice to wait and see how things go? They didn't do that. And that was the big part of the problem. Any type of treatment requires informed consent. And I understand that they were saying this may have big public health advantages, but there's a big difference between public health, which is designed to ideally benefit all of society, and individual health. And in the US, we consider those two things separate, but individual health and individual informed consent is sacred. And when you take that choice away for something that we have very little data on, and this is different than childhood immunizations, for which there is a great deal of data on. We have millions of human years worth of data on those. And that's a separate argument. But when it comes to this one particular vaccine, it's a separate class. It's a totally different argument. They didn't allow people to make that choice and were not transparent about the data that was available. And in fact, silenced physicians, scientists, and parents who even dared bring up that question. So when it comes to the efficacy of the vaccine or lack thereof, another obvious question I have to ask as a follow-up is the masks. Do the masks work? Or was this just security theater to make us laymen feel better about ourselves that we were doing something? Because it seems like the actual scientific data is pretty underwhelming concerning the efficacy of wearing masks. It is. And when you think about the size of a virus particle versus the pores that are in a mask, there's a huge difference. The virus would be like a tennis ball going through a big net where the holes are gaping. It's easily going to pass through. And we knew that all along. The only place where the masks truly are going to benefit are when you have someone who is actively coughing, actively sneezing, and that's going to stop those particles that get spewed out when someone is actively sick. That makes sense, right? And someone who is not symptomatic, how is that necessarily going to help? Yes, if you were to strap on an N95 mask that has tiny, tiny pores and is almost impossible to breathe through on a regular basis onto every single man, woman, and child, are you going to slow infection down by a little bit? Probably. But that's also not a feasible intervention. And it comes with its own set of risks and discomfort. So the feasibility of that was never there. So when you think about these mask mandates, it was, again, a lot of theater and a lot of virtue signaling without very much scientific basis. And even Fauci in the early days was saying, oh, it doesn't really matter. And then he switched his tune toward cloth masks and then switched his tune toward medical masks and N95 masks. And then they were running short on the fancier masks. So he backed off and said, well, just use a regular medical mask. It was all over the place. And the reason why it was all over the place was that there was a lack of any data and a lack of scientific basis, including for the six-foot distancing. Those things were largely made up as they admitted later on. Look, we're out of time. But I would be remiss if I did not ask you this one last question. I'll do it very quickly, which is unfair because it probably requires a very long response. But just in general, we've been speaking a lot about the faults and failures of Fauci and the scientific community. Should the American people, though, at the end of the day, should they have trust in the integrity of our scientific institutions, NIH, CDC, FDA? Why or why not? I think the answer is very easy. You and I were both taught growing up to always question, right? And I think it's a matter of trust, but verify. It is always good to trust, but you should always question, always question even the most senior leaders. If I ever end up in a senior leadership role, I expect to be questioned. I want to be questioned because I may be wrong. I'm frequently wrong. I want to be challenged. And I think all of us need to bring back that American culture where we never accept anything as dogma, where we never worship a single individual or a single institution, but rather understand that our society, our democracy is based on that concept of always being skeptical and pushing people to the limits, pressure testing them, and making it clear that we will always demand better. And only if we do that are we going to get to that place where we used to be, where we did have a great deal of automatic trust in the system because we knew that those people want to be challenged and are participating in that open dialogue. It was this really regrettable, disgraceful era of censorship, silencing, shaming, and exclusion that brought us to where we are today. It's going to take many years to bring back that trust, but as a society, we need to. I don't think we have any other choice. And needless to say, we hope that you get that senior leadership position. It's not only well-deserved, but it's also important for the health of the American people. Unfortunately, we've got to end it there, but we very much appreciate you making the time. Dr. Humant, David Hamanti, he's an ophthalmologist, biotech entrepreneur, and frequent Fox News guest. Appreciate your time and your perspective. Thanks for having me, Chalice. Thanks for watching this week's episode. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and also tell us what topics you want to see covered, whether it's immigration, tariffs. We have great episodes coming up, and we'll see you next week on The Brief.