"I am trying to get this jerk shut down by working from within the White House." That's Dr. Anthony Fauci, in an October 14, 2020 email, describing his campaign against Dr. Scott Atlas — a fellow member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force whose crime was disagreeing with Fauci on lockdown policy.
The exchange spans October 11 through October 16, 2020, and shows Fauci coordinating with Dr. Deborah Birx, then-NIH Director Francis Collins, and an epidemiologist named Gregg Gonsalves — a contributor to the far-left publication The Nation — to isolate and discredit Atlas within the administration. Atlas's offense: he supported the Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by thousands of medical professionals arguing that lockdowns were causing more harm than the virus itself to younger, healthier populations.
Fauci didn't just disagree. He escalated. On October 15, 2020, he described a conversation with Jared Kushner in which he tried to convince the presidential son-in-law that Atlas was dangerous. "I really laid it on him but he still does not completely understand how dangerous this guy is," Fauci wrote. "He is still in the realm of 'differences of opinion.'"
Imagine that. A senior adviser to the president wanted to hear all opinions on a topic. Fauci found that unacceptable.
In the same thread, Fauci urged Collins to call Kushner directly: "You have got to speak with Jared and confirm what I said that this guy is killing people. I likened him to the AIDS denialists of the 1980s." That comparison is worth pausing on — not because it's offensive, though it is, but because Fauci himself spread false information about AIDS transmission in the 1980s, suggesting household contact could spread the virus. The man who got AIDS wrong was using AIDS to discredit a colleague who got COVID right.
Birx chimed in with her own October 14 email: "I'm just glad it's in the open who has been undermining Tony and I at the White House and who was manipulating the data. We are pushing back very hard." No specifics on what data Atlas allegedly manipulated. No examples. Just the accusation, delivered as settled fact.
Meanwhile, Gonsalves — the epidemiologist Fauci looped in — went after the Great Barrington Declaration authors by name. "Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya can suck it," he wrote, adding, "I have never been so ashamed of my community." Kulldorff was a Harvard biostatistician. Gupta was an Oxford epidemiologist. Bhattacharya was a Stanford professor of medicine. But sure — they should "suck it."
Fauci also emailed Collins on October 16: "Over the past week I have come out very strongly publicly against the 'Great Barrington Declaration.' Scott Atlas may try to counter this. Please speak out for me." Not "please evaluate the science." Not "let's review the data." Speak out for me.
This wasn't a scientific debate. It was territory. Fauci treated the White House COVID response the way a mid-level manager treats a turf war — except his turf war shut down schools, cratered small businesses, and left a generation of kids measurably behind in reading and math. Atlas was offering an alternative, and instead of engaging it on the merits, Fauci organized a pressure campaign to get the guy fired.
None of this required a subpoena to discover. Fauci wrote it all down, in emails, with his name on them. The same man who later invoked the Fifth Amendment during Capitol Hill testimony apparently had no problem putting his internal lobbying campaign in writing six years ago.
When the person in charge of the "science" spends his evenings organizing political hits on the scientist who disagrees with him, the word "science" needs the scare quotes.
