Far-Right's Star Boy Elon Musk Once Again Calls for Fauci's Prosecution
Like Elon, it's getting old.
Elon Musk has, once again, used the social media platform he bought and ruined to call for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s prosecution. This time he’s doing so by quote tweeting “sadistic troll” Paul Thacker’s posting of the unreliable New York Post’s sensationalist and misleading coverage of recent activity out of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP).
The HSSCP, the GOP’s answer to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC), appears to be following a road map for their hearings laid out by the Heritage Foundation. Instead of continuing the HSSCC’s investigation into the Trump administration’s pushing of a dangerous herd immunity strategy, promotion of the false COVID-19 cure hydroxychloroquine, or interference with public health messaging, the HSSCP hosts right-wing “experts” like Great Barrington Declaration author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
And, in keeping with the road map in this key election year, the HSSCP has focused on the lab leak COVID-19 origin theory in an apparent attempt to divert attention away from the Trump administration’s disastrous mishandling of the pandemic outbreak in 2020.
I’ll have plenty about what is and isn’t going on with the HSSCP out soon, but the point of this post is to discuss Musk. In the meantime, I highly recommend Michael Hiltzik’s coverage of the recent HSSCP hearings for the Los Angeles Times (see here and here).
While the chronically online Musk is more than happy to post disparagingly about scientists and politicians for his increasingly extremist politics (he famously tweeted a meme accusing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of being worse than Hitler during the anti-vax Ottawa trucker rally), he is not exactly forthcoming about his own pandemic history from 2020 leading to his embrace of COVID-19 conspiracies and radical rhetoric.
If you have not yet read “How Musk Sold MAGA on HCQ — and Opened the COVID-19 Disinformation Floodgates,” published by Karam Bales in WhoWhatWhy in January, now would be an excellent time to do so. There are three key points about Musk in this deep dive worth addressing here.
First, there is Musk’s promotion of a deeply problematic Google doc on hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 which cited the now extremely disgraced French researcher Didier Raoult. This “white paper” went straight up the right-wing media chain — and to then-President Trump — in a matter of days.
While Trump excitedly began promoting hydroxychloroquine in March 2020, Fauci was tasked with informing the public that this hype was only built on “anecdotal evidence,” putting him at odds with the president.
Musk — who began the pandemic by railing against the “fascist” lockdowns, which he skirted in the US, for getting in the way of his own mission at Tesla (despite having followed lockdown orders for his Chinese factory) — played a key role in building the hype around HCQ for COVID-19. On March 16, 2020, he tweeted out a Google Doc “paper” touting the drug, written by Dr. James Todaro, a physician turned block chain investor, and Gregory Rigano, a lawyer later called out for misrepresenting his status as an adviser to Stanford University’s School of Medicine.
The “paper” — picked up by the influential Silicon Valley blog Stratechery — had been “published” on March 13, 2020 — the day Trump declared a national emergency. Musk followed up his tweet containing this Google Doc publication with a claim that it was consistent with “what I’m hearing from a lot of smart people.”
Musk's foundation was a donor to Steve Kirsch's Covid Early Treatment Fund which funded a major hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 study. It unfortunately did not produce the results Kirsch et al were hoping for, and the tech millionaire has not exactly handled failure well.
In addition to tweeting about the promise of HCQ, Musk invested in early treatment research, with his foundation donating to wealthy tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch’s Covid Early Treatment Fund (CETF). As noted, research into drug repurposing was not a bad idea at the time — given the early promise of HCQ and lack of effective tools against the deadly virus — but jumping to claim it as a cure was. Larger trials were warranted and in need of funding, and there was plenty of money floating around in the tech world.
However, Kirsch — a philanthropist and cryptocurrency enthusiast who made his fortune off of the optical mouse — had no medical experience or history with running clinical trials and would go on to struggle with the failure that is commonplace in medical research and experimentation. Initially, however, he had a strong team around him and they set off on an optimistic quest for a pandemic cure. One of the initial CETF-funded efforts was an HCQ randomized control trial performed by Dr. David Boulware of the University of Minnesota, which began enrolling patients the same week Todaro and Rigano posted their Google Doc.
A few months later, this study would conclude that the drug was ineffective against preventing COVID-19 infection after exposure to a sick person and did not lessen symptoms of a COVID-19 infection better than a placebo.
Boulware would be demonized for these results, attacked by Kirsch — who became convinced a “correct” interpretation of the data would show HCQ worked — and other far-right individuals.
Second, Musk's Tesla invested in a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, CureVac, which failed to produce a product comparable to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Elon has a bit of a track record of taking an "if I can't be the hero, no one can" approach (see the 2018 Thai cave rescue incident, Musk’s beef with Bill Gates, etc.) and his petulant posting the day Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weisman won the Nobel Prize for their work behind the successful mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is the sort of immature behavior the public has come to expect from the 52-year-old billionaire.
On October 3, the day Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman were announced Nobel Prize winners for the life-saving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, Musk posted a bizarre tweet of an image from The Twilight Zone with the text, “Imagine a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it” and the caption “Imagination Land!”
This sneer stands in contrast with a gung-ho summer-2020 Musk, who announced Tesla was getting in on the mRNA vaccine development space via CureVac — which unfortunately failed to produce a product comparable to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and make a hero out of the tech tycoon. Musk, joining a procession of similarly motivated left-turned-far-right-wingers, would turn his back on mRNA science out of hurt ego, political opportunism, or perhaps a mix of the two.
Lastly, Musk promised Tesla would provide struggling hospitals with ventilators for COVID-19 patients only to send far less costly BiPAP machines, prompting mocking from the medical community. A few years later, during a 2023 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk claimed ventilators killed COVID-19 patients (which is false). He would further demonstrate his lack of critical care knowledge during this podcast appearance by using the term “intubated ventilators.”
Recently, Musk appeared on Rogan’s podcast — streamed on Twitter/X — where they made the false claim that ventilators were responsible for the deaths of patients critically ill with COVID-19, the virus they have been downplaying for years now. Musk’s use of the term “intubated ventilators” received appropriate mocking from actual doctors online. This bit of nonsense from the man who promised Tesla would be donating ventilators to US hospitals early in the pandemic, when what hospitals actually received were far less costly BiPAP machines commonly used for sleep apnea — with Tesla stickers slapped on the boxes for PR.
Flash forward to the present, it is worth noting this week’s call to prosecute Fauci is at least the third time Musk has done so. As I discussed in a WhoWhatWhy article last year about COVID-19 contrarians crying censorship, Musk first tweeted for Fauci’s prosecution in December 2022 — the day after he met with future Twitter Files “victim” Bhattacharya.
Despite “prosecute” being a verb and “Fauci” being a proper noun, Musk recycled his “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” tweet in April, seemingly rather proud of its lame combination of digs at vaccines and the transgender and non-binary communities.
In an ideal world, the rantings of an unqualified person — no matter how wealthy — would not be worth commenting on. However, Musk has been using his mega platform to try to shape public opinion around political issues in a key election year. Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation behind the HSSCP’s strategy is also behind Project 2025, the extreme plan to overhaul the American government under another Trump presidency.
The targeting of medical experts and MAGA enemies like Fauci and crafting of a GOP-friendly re-write of pandemic history is part of the “Project 2024” to get Trump re-elected come November. In order to make an informed decision at the ballot box, voters deserve to be fully and accurately informed as to what happened four years ago under the Trump administration.
As Musk is involved here, he has a vested interest in the public not being informed.