Depraved-Heart Murder

PARIS — Tommy Tuberville, a 71-year-old Alabama cracker elected to the U.S. Senate after too many hits to the head on football fields, recently told Fox "News" that Dr. Anthony Fauci "killed or was involved in the killings of nine million people."

An AI check helpfully called that "a claim the network said was unproven and lacked supporting evidence." Ya think? When people like that serve in Congress, a dis-United States is the polar opposite of a representative democracy.

For three hours, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a man America should revere to invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times lest some slip of the tongue — or any remark inquisitors could twist — enable faithless Republicans to burn him at the stake.

Every Republican on his committee echoed his bogus charges. Afterward, Paul skirted normal procedure to demand Fauci be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, possibly imprisoned. "One million died, and I think they deserve the truth," he said. 

The man is a pathetic little pissant. I've spent decades watching dipshits savage truth for self-glorification. Consider established fact and the wider implications of faithless lawmakers, then judge for yourself. 

Of all the sins Donald Trump's rogue elephants are inflicting on America and the world, the most egregious are those that U.S. jurisprudence calls "depraved-heart murder." Wikipedia defines it like this:

"...where an individual acts with a 'depraved indifference' to human life and where such acts result in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill (when) defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person."

The climate collapse Trump denies is our greatest long-term threat. His futile assault on civilian infrastructure has strengthened Iran while impacting the entire planet. Mullahs who foreswore nuclear weapons in 2015 are now hellbent on making dirty bombs.

Elon Musk's gleeful strutting with a chainsaw to slash foreign aid is killing millions of the world's poorest people. Desperate young men must decide whether to besiege distant borders, join terrorist groups or watch their families starve.

But focus on Covid-19 and its variants, which have upended life on Earth perhaps permanently. Many Americans now dismiss them as old news, ignoring their lessons while new killer pathogens lurk undetected. That makes the threat exponentially worse.

Painful, lonely death is only part of it. Inflation, lost school days, border crises and most of what Republicans blame on Biden trace to supply disruptions, price gouging, income disparity — and an immeasurable but unmistakable hardening of human hearts.

Trump crippled a common approach to global crises with "America First." And Covid added a corollary. Me First.

I've covered global health threats since the first outbreak of HIV in the Congo back in the 1980s. At international conferences, I watched top world experts fawn over Fauci. His tireless work has helped to save tens of millions.

Tuberville's remark reflects profound ignorance or a cynical belief that enough voters are stupid enough to believe him. Whichever, people like that are unfit for any public office, let alone as their constituents' voice in Congress.

Epidemiologists know that all anyone can do about a mysterious new pathogen is avoid catching it. Strict surveillance across borders with testing and tracing of all recent contacts are vital as scientists work together to develop vaccines.

Isolation is an essential hardship. With a nationwide plan of attack, eventual vaccines and antibodies in patients who recover add up to herd immunity. Trump's initial denial and his later politicizing of the pandemic made that impossible.

He left policy to competing states with different approaches. Federal funding favored red ones loyal to him. Abroad, he muscled aside competitors for scarce equipment and supplies. 

Throughout 2020, Trump hogged the White House podium, sharing it only with those he wanted to hear. He suppressed studies he did not like. When he suggested injecting disinfectant to fight Covid, renowned expert Deborah Birx covered her horrified face.

America is now less prepared for a sudden health crisis than it was in 2020.

Dr. Scott Miscovich on CNN reflected what I hear from trusted scientific sources. He said he was sickened to see Fauci pilloried after doing so much to thwart Covid. His large medical network in Hawaii was overwhelmed. Now he fears the future. 

From Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on down, Trump's inept, unqualified health authorities enable a resurgence of common maladies. An MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella for one, is effective but only if parents allow kids to have a shot.

Miscovich worries most about novel coronaviruses. Fauci's plight weighs heavily on epidemiologists. Trump, he concluded, is muzzling the medical community that citizens depend upon for truth and guidance.

My own research began in 1985 when I met Jonathan Mann at Mama Yemo hospital in Kinshasa, where he traced HIV to green monkeys in the Congo. He later set up the U.N. Global Program on AIDS in Geneva and hired my old French pal, Michel Lavollay.

Michel got bored with prescribing pills to Parisian hypochondriacs and joined Bernard Kouchner's volunteer doctors, Médecins du Monde. At GPA, he crisscrossed Africa and Asia to demystify the virus and help families care for victims.

After Mann was killed in a plane crash, Michel worked with U.N. agencies in New York, frustrated by bureaucracy. He moved to Washington as the French Embassy health attaché and later was a sidekick of Jonas Salk, whose vaccine beat back polio.

Salk died in 1995, and Michel returned to Geneva as a consultant, specializing in public-private partnerships to supply African countries with affordable drugs and help health ministries contain dangerous outbreaks.

Early in 2020, he went to stay in my remote, empty Provence home. On the phone, his daughter in London sensed something wrong. She pinned his GPS location so medics could find him.

Michel collapsed just as they came in the door. He spent more than seven weeks in an induced coma, at one point helicoptered to Toulon where doctors warned his wife and daughter he would likely die. He didn't, but long Covid took a brutal toll.

On a visit to Geneva, I found him struggling to recover. His mind was sharp, and he could manage a laugh unless the topic was Trump. Still, he tired easily and suffered blurry lapses. Not long ago, complications caught up with him, and now he is gone.

Under Barack Obama, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and the National Institutes of Health near Washington were the global standards. Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH.

Pathogens ignore borders so global cooperation is crucial. Obama stationed health attachés around the world to keep watch. CDC specialists worked with local colleagues at Wuhan. Personal relations and daily contact would have cut through state secrecy.

But Trump recalled most of them. In China, Reuters reported, "the headcount of epidemiologists and health experts working out of the Beijing office was slashed from roughly 47 down to 14 just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic."

He had also cut back on ventilators and protective gear, breaking the cardinal rule of preparedness in case of a sudden outbreak. And after courageous Chinese doctors defied Xi Jinping's attempt to hide the new coronavirus, he did everything wrong.

American correspondents at the time covered China well. They alerted the world from Wuhan. Xi shared gene sequences, and the World Health Organization quickly produced Covid tests. But Trump wanted U.S.-made kits, which did not materialize.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a 25-year CDC veteran and its top respiratory specialist, did her job on Feb. 25, warning that Covid might be severe with a serious impact on America. Trump threw a tantrum. That contradicted his narrative, and stock markets plummeted.

He pushed her into the background and put Mike Pence in charge of dealing with Covid. The vice president, fearful of angering the boss, was terrible at the job. Few White House correspondents pushed hard for honest, detailed answers to questions.

Trump's campaign to bully and befuddle the American press corps — abroad as well as at home — gained as the pandemic set in. Despite so many crises now imperiling the world, it has yet to recover. That is a a tragedy of many parts, but zero in on Covid.

At first, Trump heaped praise on Xi for his early response. But when he needed a scapegoat for his own failings, he labeled Covid "the China virus." More than six years later, Republicans toadies still stand by that.

Xi reacted by expelling U.S. journalists from China, leaving coverage of the deadly disease to the few specialists who covered global health from their home bases. Few had a vantage point from which to fit America's response into a global context.

The timeline is damning.

Whether Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab or jumped from some live species to a human in a nearby city market is beside the point. It was a mysterious new coronavirus, and the only way to curb it was for urgent, drastic measures to contain it.

We learned only in retrospect that Trump told Bob Woodward on Feb. 7 that he knew the virus was airborne — and deadly. On March 19, weeks after he raged at Messonnier, he admitted to Woodward he was playing down the threat. 

Woodward's book, "Peril," only came out in September 2021. Though working for a daily, he was committed to Trump and his publisher to the release date. Should he have dropped a few clues to colleagues who might have prevented a hecatomb? Your call.

The New York Times' Donald G. McNeil, Jr., was an ideal reporter to sound the alarm. A 45-year veteran, he had waded into the worst outbreaks in far-flung places. Experts who shunned most reporters in fear they would get things wrong spent hours with him.

In late March, Trump demanded an end to Covid shutdowns by Easter, April 12. "You can't just come in and say let’s close up the United States of America,” he wrote, saying the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu.

That, Fauci responded, exposed the country to needless death and suffer. McNeil had already made that point in a guide for Times' readers:

"We need to shut down all travel, as experts have said. And then we really aggressively tackle the clusters. People have got to stop shaking hands; people have got to stop going to bars and restaurants. New clusters are appearing every day.

"It’s basically urgent that America imitates what China did. China had a massive outbreak in Wuhan, spreading all over the country, and they’ve almost stopped it. We can shut off the roads, flights, buses and trains."

He acknowledged that would cause massive disruptions. Americans don't like being told what to do. But as an example, he noted that all cases raging in Seattle stemmed from one man arriving at SeaTac airport, who could have been isolated after a test.

"It's very, very inconvenient," McNeil concluded. "It destroys your vacation plans. My niece’s wedding is off. People are heartbroken over this, but it beats being dead, or having somebody you love being dead. It beats the alternative."

McNeil's Covid reporting coincided with a new mood in America. The Times had added ranks of diverse, young hires to a newsroom that followed old rules. Credibility was paramount. The paper corrected mistakes, but it kept internal conflicts private.

When the business side began enlisting reporters to escort people on money-earning trips abroad, McNeil reluctantly took a group from a high-end private prep school to Peru in 2019. At a dinner, he spoke the N-word in an answer to a student's question.

That got back to outraged parents and others. Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who is black, examined McNeil's remarks. He concluded they were offensive and showed extremely poor judgment but did not appear to be hateful or malicious.

McNeil was reprimanded but not fired. Outrage continued. After a petition by mostly young staff members who said they had been disrespected, he was forced to resign. In a four-part, 10,000-word post on Medium, he apologized.

"I thought I was generally arguing in favor of open-mindedness and tolerance," he wrote, "but it clearly didn't come across that way. And my bristliness makes me an imperfect pedagogue for sensitive teenagers."

What matters now is the hypocrisy and moral turpitude in today's Republican Party displayed in that Senate star chamber.

Josh "Haul-ass" Hawley, a Missouri Republican, sprinted for dear life away from murderous insurrectionists Trump later pardoned as patriots. Back in the Capitol, he channeled 1950s Wisconsin red-baiter, Joe McCarthy, at his snide, sarcastic best.

Nothing in the personal diary Fauci left on a government server impugns his integrity. Scientists leave notes behind in a collegial effort to help those who follow them. Paul made it public, then cherrypicked fragments of it to defame a national hero.

But Hawley sneered at him for taking the Fifth, calling that proof positive he was guilty.  

Snopes.com dug deep into precedents. Trump once said only mobsters and miscreants with something to hide invoked the Fifth. In fact, he and his family did that at least 400 times in multiple cases of stonewalling Congress and prosecutors.

Hawley harped on Fauci's 2021 Dan David Award, a $1 million dollar prize given in Israel for contributions to humanity. Past winners include cellist and peace monger Yo-Yo Ma, author Margaret Atwood and, for climate advocacy, Al Gore and James Hansen.

No one applies for it. Others submit dossiers for people they admire. It is an honor but, after taxes, hardly a mogul-sized windfall compared to the multiple billions the Trump clan pockets in dubious dealings.

Fauci worked seven a days a week with little sleep. His advice changed as Covid research added new information. At first, he gave mask priority to vulnerable medical staff because stocks were so low. He gave interviews to keep the public informed.

In contrast, look at Rand Paul. When Covid struck, Congress approved more than $8 billion to soften its impact. Earlier, Trump had proposed a mere $2.5 billion. Only three legislators thought that was too much. Paul was one of them.

Or Elon Musk, who in early 2025 Trump gave free rein to make better use of the federal budget. His contemptuous approach toward a stricken nation was clear when he X-ed out Twitter. In his profile, he declared his preferred pronouns: prosecute/Fauci.

As Trump tells it now, he saved America. Incalculable death and pain, an economic collapse that rivaled the Great Depression, crippling societal shifts were all Biden's fault.

Operation Warp Speed, the $12 billion program Trump initiated, produced effective vaccines. But that was a global effort fraught with controversy. So many anti-vax Republicans refused shots that variants extended the pandemic for another year.

Trump blocked WHO funding early in 2020 and gave a required one-year notice to exit. Biden reversed that, praising the agency. Hours after his inauguration, Trump pulled out again. He said the WHO mishandled the pandemic — and America's $400 million annual dues were too high.

Ebola now spreads in Africa, with cases in France and Germany, among other new scourges. But Trump barred the CDC from communicating with the WHO. He recalled nearly 30 CDC experts detailed to work in WHO offices.

That sparked outrage. A report from the Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins forecast heavy new costs and higher death tolls without U.S. help. "If we think it’s expensive to be part of the WHO," it said, "just wait until we aren’t part of the WHO."  

Stepping back, America's Covid response shows the nation is more divided than united when faced with serious challenges. Trump's enablers condone reckless disregard for human lives. His casual threat to wipe out 92 million Iranians is evidence enough. 

A pandemic needs herd immunity. Ridding America of a deranged president who commits depraved-heart murder — and public servants who help him do it — needs turd immunity. Voters can begin that process in November. Otherwise, all bets are off.