[imnotreallynew]

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I always found it it little odd that the guy who became the de facto pandemic era “leader” in the U.S. was also the same guy that personally approved funding for the lab in Wuhan.

[ethanbond]

You think it’s weird that one of the top virologists in the world was responsible for finding virus research and for planning virus outbreak response?

[carlivar]

How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most powerful" is a better term than "top".

[ethanbond]

Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has been for decades, well before COVID happened.

> In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine.

2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.

[puffoflogic]

The state religion reveres experts, who are by definition the people with conflicts of interest. It's normal.