Six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the controversy over the decisions made in the most critical months is heating up again. The reason for this was the refusals of the American infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci to answer hundreds of questions during a hearing in the USA, citing the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The topic has sparked a new wave of debates about the origin of the virus, lockdowns, vaccination and the consequences of pandemic policies. Infectious disease specialist Assoc. Prof. Dr. Atanas Mangarov spoke to FACTI about the topic.
– Dr. Mangarov, the topic of COVID has become very relevant again after Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to answer more than 100 questions in the US Senate, citing the Fifth Amendment. What do you think of this?
– This is simply a refusal to acknowledge everything we talked about during the pandemic. Fauci does not want to admit the mistakes that were made. Moreover, on the last day of Joe Biden's presidency, he received amnesty.
What I have seen from these interrogations before the Senate committee shows that the questions themselves are interesting, because there are practically no answers. He constantly refers to the so-called Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, according to which no one can be forced to give testimony that could incriminate or harm him. In fact, it is the questions that are asked that are interesting, because to a large extent they speak for themselves.
– How is the scientific and medical community accepting the fact that Fauci refuses to answer?
– People who defended the measures, the lockdowns, the masks and the vaccines during COVID cannot accept this in any other way, because that would mean admitting all the mistakes and stupidities they made then. I don't know if they acted consciously or under pressure. At least it becomes clear where the nonsense that our parrots so selflessly repeated came from, including the irresponsible claim that vaccinating children and pregnant women for COVID is advisable and safe, as well as that collective immunity is achieved only through vaccination and so on...
The rest of us maintain our opinion that a large part of these measures were pointless, ridiculous and even dangerous and that the way they acted was incorrect.
In fact, what countries like Sweden and Belarus did, which were then condemned for playing with the lives of their citizens, looks in a completely different light today. Unfortunately, in Sweden they subsequently vaccinated themselves well, which is why they currently have worse indicators than ours.
– Which of your warnings during the pandemic are now being confirmed?
– By the end of February 2020, there was already enough information from Wuhan, a city of over 20 million inhabitants, about how the disease was progressing and which population groups were most at risk.
It became clear that children and young people were not exposed to the same danger as adults and people with concomitant diseases.
What should have been done was to isolate the elderly and vulnerable people, while the children had to continue to go to school, to contact each other and the infection passed through them. In this way, of course, protection would have been built for the rest. Unfortunately, the exact opposite was done, with small exceptions such as Sweden and Belarus. The results are known.
I have the feeling that those who released the virus did not know exactly what kind of monster they had created and for this reason reacted so panicked.
Subsequently, opportunities for very serious business opened up, which were well implemented by those in power.
– How do you assess the role of vaccines against COVID six years later?
– The accumulated data is still not sufficiently reported, and much of it remains inaccessible. The most indicative is the data on the so-called excess mortality. This is the difference between the number of deaths before the pandemic - 2015-2020, and after it. It can be seen that since the spring of 2022, countries with the highest vaccination coverage have significantly higher excess mortality than countries like Bulgaria and Romania, where vaccination coverage was much lower. In our country, the coverage is about 30%, with at least 1/3 of the immunizations recorded as having been done not actually being done.
In Germany, Finland, Portugal, Denmark, Malta, etc., where vaccination exceeded 90%, after the pandemic the excess mortality reached over 50 percent in some months, which is extremely high. This can be seen most easily when comparing countries with high vaccination coverage and countries like Bulgaria, Romania and others, which have low vaccination coverage. I repeat, currently even Sweden has a higher excess mortality than us.
– Do you think that health institutions have already learned the necessary lessons, or do we risk repeating the same mistakes in the next pandemic?
– A few days ago I listened to a speech by the former director of the National Center for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases. From his words, I got the impression that his views have not changed at all. He continues to claim that everything that was done then was correct. The most interesting thing is that these people clearly consider others stupid and short-lived. Especially when it comes to masks. Until 2020, the health authorities themselves claimed that wearing masks during epidemics of airborne infections was pointless and unnecessary. Then they began to claim the exact opposite, that it was the masks that protected us, etc. The evidence for both types of claims by the same people is still on the web. Those in leadership positions in health, media, and politics are largely the same. But the traces remain.
– Has the scientific consensus on the origin of the virus changed?
– No one has yet come out and said openly: “We were wrong here.“ What Tulsi Gabbard, who in the final days of her tenure as the US director of national intelligence declassified a package of documents related to the origin of COVID-19, American funding of virology research, and the role of Dr. Anthony Fauci during the pandemic, said is that there are strong grounds for concluding that the virus was released from a laboratory in Wuhan, where research was being conducted to modify coronaviruses to make them more pathogenic. This is extremely risky research.
This laboratory was located in Wuhan, precisely because such research can only be done in places where human life is cheap.
It became clear that there were such laboratories in Ukraine. If what happened in Wuhan had happened in a city like New York or Los Angeles, the consequences would have been completely different. In scientific circles, this topic is hardly discussed because there are not enough publications. And there are no publications because scientific journals refuse to publish serious research on these issues. The same applies to the topic of additional mortality. The data is public and generally available, but there is a lack of serious scientific analysis. Under any other circumstances, such data would be the subject of in-depth research and analysis. This is not being done yet. The time has simply not come yet. Especially in our part of the world, where things happen slowly, often with years of delay.