In the News: Yesterday’s contained an item that Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, U.S. senators from Massachusetts and New Jersey, had both tested positive for the coronavirus despite each having had two shots plus a booster shot. This shows how ineffective the experimental shots can be — no surprise to people making their way through Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci.

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Also in the News: This is the time of any year for lists of recommendations. NPR’s “Morning Edition” noted yesterday that Richard Heinberg’s Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival made Bloomberg’s “Best Books of 2021” (HERE, scroll down). The recommender is Jeremy Grantham, a long-term investment strategist. I have excerpted some passages of Power in previous entries, which I’ll try to link to.

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Up to Page 126: I just finished reading Chapter 2 of Kennedy’s book. The chapter is titled “Pharma Profits Over Public Health.” At just six pages plus two pages of small-type endnotes, it compares in length with 95 pages plus 22 pages of endnotes for Chapter 1 (“Mismanaging a Pandemic”).

I continue to find the book highly readable and packed with fact after fact after fact. Chapter 2 was as slow going as the Introduction and the first chapter were for me, because I tend to underline sentences and write in the margins.

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How to Review It Properly: Any publication that wants to do justice to a nonfiction book needs to try and make sure which of its author’s assertions stand up to close scrutiny and which don’t. Here’s a thought: A magazine or newspaper wanting to cease pretending that The Real Anthony Fauci doesn’t exist or that its author is a “conspiracy theorist” might pair a prospective reviewer with a tried and true fact checker and they can go to town. Checkers can give a plus (+), minus (-), “doesn’t matter” or “don’t know” (0) to each assertion.

By his own reckoning, Kennedy has spent 40 years tracking Dr. Fauci and studying his field and the federal agencies supposed to be regulating medical care and pharmaceuticals. He seems to have the goods here. If mainstream media outlets are to deserve the credibility they should crave, they need to stop assiduously ignoring the book and its author, stop calling names, and get to work.

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Michael Specter: A few entries ago I suggested the New Yorker writer Michael Specter as someone eminently up to the task of reviewing Kennedy’s book. He has, after all, known and covered Dr. Fauci for decades, and has not been overly critical of him. So he could not be dismissed as a nut for noting here and there in his review that, yes, Kennedy makes a good point. He is presumably knowledgeable enough about allergies and infectious diseases and medicines to be able to say where he thinks Kennedy has it wrong or is unfair.

At the bottom of page 123, Kennedy describes him as “the adoring Michael Specter” when it comes Dr. Fauci.

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Improved Websites: Both Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry are paying more attention than before to their websites, which are more newsy and readable. Click on the two links to visit them.

— Mark Channing Miller