Beyond stating the obvious, these words were used by Dr. Ashish Jha to emphasize the takeaways from a January 2017 keynote presentation by Dr. Anthony Fauci -- the very same presentation wherein Fauci stated he was "extraordinarily confident" that the incoming Trump administration would suffer from a major pandemic "in the next few years." These were strangely prescient words, given that the COVID-19 pandemic began exactly three years later.
The full 45 minute presentation lays out exactly how Fauci, et al, worked to make viruses more transmissible, so that they could jump from animals to humans, using funding from military defense spending (BARDA) and the Bush era PEPFAR program. It was no surprise that Fauci had the highest praises for these lucrative arrangements, which allowed them to preemptively develop experimental vaccines and proactively establish the infrastructure needed for global surveillance of infectious disease.
He gave the aspiring students gathered for the Georgetown Global Health Initiative a crash course in epidemiology, outlining how the Obama administration had dealt with "more than their fair share" of pandemics. After discussing how nature was the "greatest bio terrorist," he zipped through lessons he and his cohorts had learned from H1N1, MERS, Chikungunya, Ebola, Zika, Bird Flu (H5N1), and the "silent pandemic" of AMR, or anti-microbial resistance. Dr. Fauci said that this series of pandemics were an "epidemiologist's delight" and, notably, how they "put the same pattern in play" for each of these global pandemics.
How many Americans were aware that all of this was happening? Not many, though there was some fuss in Congress when the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) discovered that the NIH had conducted research and laboratory experiments "that resulted in viruses with enhanced transmissibility in mammals," ... including humans.
