When no further bioterror attacks occurred over the next ten years, Dr. Fauci skillfully maintained his annual $1.7 billion biosecurity funding by deftly recalibrating his rhetoric away from bioterrorism hype. Instead, he invoked the new panic of natural but emerging infectious diseases. Dr. Fauci’s pivot to conflate infectious disease with terrorism proved a milestone inflection point in the militarization of pandemic response and in overcoming the traditional revulsion among Western democracies—codified in the Nuremberg Charter—against coercive medical interventions.

