Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and (thankfully) former Chief Medical Advisor to the White House Dr. Anthony Fauci is once again shunning responsibility for the nation’s awful COVID response, instead acting like he was an innocent bystander to flawed decision-making and the victim of other people’s mistakes.
Of course, he was the captain of Good Ship COVID, and as any captain knows, what happens on your watch is yours to own. But not Fauci. In a Monday New York Times Magazine interview, the good doctor was combative, defensive, and unwilling to acknowledge the pivotal role he played in harming our nation:
Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.
Dr. Fauci today in the @nytimes : “Something clearly went wrong, and I don’t know exactly what it was.”
Who wants to tell him?? 👀https://t.co/JO4rGze8fv
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 25, 2023
Fauci continued, blaming the nation’s political divide for the problems:
The divisiveness was palpable, just in trying to get a coherent message across of following fundamental public-health principles. I understand that there will always be differences of opinion among people saying, “Well, what’s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?” But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not — that is extraordinary.
What is “extraordinary” is that he and the president assured us that if we got vaccinated we would be safe. That serious untruth unraveled very quickly, but I have yet to hear Fauci apologize. Meanwhile, he initially told us that the COVID threat was “minuscule,” and that masks were unnecessary. Then he changed his tune and became a mask fanatic; anybody who’s witnessed the perverse Cult of the Mask knows he’s partially responsible for it. And yet he thinks it’s wrong that thinking people had “fundamental arguments” over these subjects? How could we not?
Fauci—the egomaniac who claimed that attacks on him are “attacks on science”— railed on about those who were reluctant to get “vaccinated” or to subject themselves to multiple “boosters” of the novel and ineffective mRNA technology:
Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.
It’s almost as if he’s saying, “I don’t care that masks and vaccines turned out to be almost completely ineffective against the virus, I’m just p***ed off that people didn’t bow down to my recommendations anyway. Damn that American independent spirit—I want to crush it.”
As my colleague Nick Arama wrote, Americans rejected Fauci’s exhortations to get the vaccine—to his face.
Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admits that mask mandates were a broad spectrum failure: “From a broad public health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins – maybe 10%.”
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 25, 2023
Pressed on the damage that many of the draconian recommendations did to our economy and to our youth, Fauci got defensive, once again avoiding any culpability even though he was the “COVID Czar.”
Certainly there could have been a better understanding of why people were emphasizing the economy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.
This is one of the greatest dodges I’ve ever witnessed. Public health institutions all around the United States relied on guidance from Fauci and the CDC, and those recommendations caused catastrophic damage to our country—especially to our youth, some of whom were out of school and sitting on their couches for a year and a half. The damage done to them at this crucial developmental stage is incalculable, and I believe we’ll be seeing the ramifications for years.
Talk to any teacher, guidance counselor, or mentor, and most will tell you the same thing: the kids are not all right.
No, Fauci didn’t walk into a specific school or factory and call for its closure, but he knew full well that his policies and pronouncements would have that effect. His attempt to distance himself from the consequences of his reign is appalling.
He even laughably tries to say that he always kept an open mind about the origins of the virus, when he was at the forefront of censoring and mocking anyone who dared theorize that it might have come out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, of course, the FBI and other governmental agencies have belatedly signed on to that conclusion, but only after countless voices were silenced for merely suggesting the idea.
Fauci’s sorry not sorry:
So when people say to me, “Could we have done better?” Of course, of course. If you knew many of the things then that now you know, definitely you would want to do things differently.
Luckily, since Fauci is retired, he won’t get a chance at a do-over. But if he did, I would suggest he do virtually everything differently.
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