The hearing last week where Dr. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times continues to unearth “interesting” facts about the nation’s highest paid federal employee. There is little doubt that one bureaucrat reshaped science into dogma.
From the American Spectator:
Various online bios claim Fauci is “author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks,” or words to that effect, but definitely including the 1,300 figure. This would be extremely impressive in any case, but remember we’re talking about someone who spent his career as a full-time administrator. Would you believe that General Dwight D. Eisenhower killed 30 Germans on D-Day with an entrenching tool?
As one can see by entering Fauci’s name in PubMed, the government’s archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, there are simply too many papers listing Fauci on too many disparate subjects, and too often as lead researcher, including animal studies. (Fauci enters the lab every morning to check on the mice.)
Keep scrolling, and you find Fauci is apparently a published expert on virtually every medical topic.
Something is going on here. And unless Fauci has had himself cloned, the best guess might be labeled “plagiarism by consent.” There is always steep competition to get in the top-ranked journals or any journal of any reputation at all. It would appear that the true researchers were putting Fauci’s name on their papers to push them up the ladder, in exchange for which he got yet one more academic publication attributed to him, as noted, usually with him as lead researcher. It’s a shame he’s not part of Marvel’s Avengers.
In academics, publication is the “coin of the realm.” What most Departmental Heads do is insist on co-authorship – not necessarily first author – on every paper coming out of their department. That is how a guy like Fauci could be everywhere at once – TV, in the lab, in the clinic, on capitol hill – and still publish multiple papers at the same time.
Is this right? It certainly appears to be unethical. An co-author ought to be identified as to what role was played besides approving funding. Let’s be reminded that Fauci’s doctor title was a medical one not a PhD.