The Devil and Dr. Fauci is an unsparing critique of what author James
Driscoll calls the "Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex," or
DTLM. Quietly dominating America's healthcare industry, the DTLM poses
threats comparable in magnitude, if not in character, to those of the
Military-Industrial Complex. With a satiric scalpel reminiscent of
Jonathan Swift's, Driscoll eviscerates the DTLM's avatar Dr. Anthony
Fauci, our age's version of the archetypal Dr. Faustus. He exposes
Fauci's pivotal position in the DTLM, at whose core is the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration. The FDA, Driscoll asserts, has long played
Mephistopheles to Fauci's Faustus, with grave consequences for American
healthcare. Dr. Driscoll's book is the first to upbraid the DTLM, FDA,
and Fauci for exacerbating the Covid-19 crisis. Seeking to maximize
profits from patentable vaccines, they rigorously suppressed off patent
prophylaxis and treatment alternatives. This was but one of many DTLM
follies that raised Covid's death toll and increased its socio-economic
devastation. Other prominent follies were the mask posturing, arbitrary
lockdowns, and closing of churches and schools that the DTLM and its
political allies used to distract from their sacrifice of public health
to their own agendas. We may never know if the Chinese deliberately
released the Covid-19 virus, or if they created it. Yet the world now
knows the destructive potential of gain of function technology. Similar
epidemics or worse will strike us. To survive next time, we will need
radical reforms in the FDA and transparency for the DTLM. But the opaque
FDA bureaucracy, Driscoll concludes, is only one instance in our greater
problem of deficient oversight within all of our increasingly powerful
and ever less accountable federal bureaucracies.
