Ben Franklin’s Plea to Dr. Fauci

Andy Snyder|December 1, 2021

We’ve started work at our new inn. Over the past week, we’ve filled a 30-yard dumpster with all matter of waste… everything from a big stack of old newspaper to a hefty wood stove that nearly cost us our back… and a finger (a typing finger!).

Most of the stuff is pure junk. But while we were lifting a floorboard from the 186-year-old house, we found something incredible.

It’s another one of those notes we’ve been making up and printing in this oddball column of ours.

It has nothing to do with finance or making money – a relief to many, we’re sure. But it’s an incredible time capsule. These words from a beloved Founding Father flow off the page and reek of controversy, slavery, pandemics and – oh no, says our editor – vaccinations.

It’s a letter – get this! – from Benjamin Franklin to Dr. Tony Fauci.

It’s crazy…

Dear Doc,

I’m sitting up here watching TV with the Big Guy and saw a few of your interviews today. Golly, with all of your appearances in front of the camera, how do you find time to keep up with the latest science? From one spotlight lover to another, I do hope all the publicity pays off someday. You’d look good in Aspen.

But your financial fortunes are not the reason I’ve dunked my quill in the ink this morning.

No. I’d like to confess a sin. And, well, where I am now isn’t really a great place to be all that overt with such news… if you know what I mean.

So I’ll send you this note from beyond with hopes you’ll relay it to the masses (not the cancerous kind, mind you).

You see, my family once hated a man. My brother James especially went after him.

Cotton Mather called himself a minister. He was a Puritan. But he owned slaves and did things with medicine many didn’t approve of at the time.

He owned a fine fella named Onesimus. You ever heard of him in your studies? He was from West Africa originally. When smallpox was killing nearly 1 in 10 folks in Boston, he told his keeper about something somebody did to him back home.

They cut his arm and put some pus from a smallpox “victim” in there.

Onesimus said it would “forever preserve” him from the nasty disease.

Mather, a man of God and science, studied it and promoted this form of inoculation vehemently.

This was all happening while I was still apprenticing with my brother. I remember reading what he wrote as the editor of The New-England Courant – the paper he started largely to publish his anti-inoculation arguments.

If someone is inoculated with smallpox and then spreads the disease, we published, “at whose hands shall their Blood be required?”

That whole piece, which we published in August of 1721, was aimed at disproving Mather’s work. It wasn’t based on too many facts (there weren’t many at the time)… but instead on a great disdain for the man promoting inoculation.

Even the line about smallpox coming “as Judgements from an angry and displeased God” was aimed at Mather’s chosen line of work and his not-so-godly choices.

As an apprentice to my brother, I did my part as we published these ideas.

I regret it.

In fact, I regretted it the most the day we dug the grave of my 4-year-old son, Francis.

My intent was to inoculate him against smallpox. It really was. But he got a case of, um, what do you call it these days… the squirts? It was pretty bad, so, at my confused wife’s behest, we waited… and waited.

But, dear friend, we waited too long. He got what so many folks got and died.

I missed him dearly. Oh, how I missed him.

As I wrote in 1771, I “regretted bitterly and still regret” not following Mather’s advice and inoculating my son sooner. Don’t put it on TV, but I never forgave my wife.

The political controversy over all this was so strong that I had to convince the nation that it wasn’t the inoculation that killed my boy… it was the lack thereof.

It was crazy.

My trust in the inoculation, as I wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette, is why the rumors started. I said I wanted to protect him… and so many folks wrongly claimed that it was the protection that killed him.

It wasn’t. They were just trying to use whatever they could – even my dead boy – to score their political points.

All this in a nation that was still fighting the scourge of politics and the freedom-destroying disease that attends it all. History and the people who make it sure are ironic.

As I wrote on Francis’ gravestone, he was “the DELIGHT of all that knew him.”

I fear other delights may have been snuffed out merely because I meandered into the debate on inoculation.

So here’s why I’m writing you today.

You must quit your job, Fauci. You must stand down.

You’re too political. You’ve said things you shouldn’t have. And, contrary to your intent, you’re killing folks.

Just as my brother published so many words to prove he was right, those media imbeciles today publish so much filth that they no longer report facts. They report opinion.

Nobody is telling the truth. Neither side.

They’re either telling lies to prove that you’re right… or telling lies to prove that you’re wrong.

Lord knows I didn’t follow the best of advice and picked up an infection or two in my day (ah… Paris). But what I’m seeing from up here is no longer about the truth.

It’s about who is “right” and who is “wrong.”

I look over at dear Francis and am reminded of that pain from so long ago. The politics of it all were rife then, but they’ve long since faded away. The trivial seemed so big… so important… but it’s all gone now.

The horrendous solitude of digging a grave will do that.

So quit.

I beg you.

Stop talking so much. And write a damned letter of resignation.

Don’t stick around just to prove you’re right. Or else the blood of the wary will be on your hands.

I did a lot in my day.

But it’s the one thing I didn’t do that I hope folks understand today.

Truly,

Ben F.

Oh boy… we might as well just plunk a link to our mailbag right here. The hate mail is going to flow.

Good. None of us can type without thinking for ourselves.

That’s the intent of this piece. It’s not for or against vaccination. We – or Ben Franklin, for that matter – are no more an expert on such things than most of the folks on TV.

We merely ask that you think for yourself.

We got the shot… a trio of doses, in fact. Were our views on free markets, small government and wholesome morals suddenly diluted by the serum in our arm?

You tell us.

We got the shot because we long ago turned off the TV. We don’t get our facts from a surface-level propaganda machine. We didn’t get the jab because a man from the state told us to… because of some job requirement… or because we can use it to signal some half-cocked idea on social media.

That’s all dumb.

We got it because we thought it was best for us. We did our research, studied the raw facts and made our choice.

We take our politics to the voting booth… not the doctor’s office.

Like all things, we urge you to do what you think is best – not what your power-seeking party thinks is best.

As Franklin so eloquently wrote… the delights in our lives are worth so much more.