The problem isn't that Fauci weighed costs and benefits. It's that he was willing to impose life-and-death costs on unwitting Americans in order to benefit himself.
Fauci’s Cost-Benefit Calculation: You Absorb The Cost, He Benefits
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Anthony Fauci penned these words in a 2012 paper, long before the COVID-19 outbreak, about gain of function research. “Scientists working in this field might say — as indeed I have said — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
The benefits outweigh the risks. For research involving scientists extracting viruses from the wild and engineering them to infect humans in order to study potential therapeutics, Fauci determined the high risk was worth the potential benefit. Whether Fauci was right or wrong — although hindsight and mass casualties have certainly teamed up to condemn him — all the doctor did was perform a cost-benefit analysis.-- More...
