Dr. Anthony Fauci is having the time of his life. As a largely know-nothing government bureaucrat, he gets to make the rounds on TV, appear on magazine covers, and do YouTube hits for a living. It doesn’t matter that he’s been consistently wrong on so many points surrounding the coronavirus. He’s famous, and he wants you to know it.

Even still, his latest claim pushes the limit of how much shamelessness one person can manage in a given time period. Instead of taking a humble approach to his failings, Fauci is now claiming credit for the vaccine, asserting that it was his original decision that “got the ball rolling.”

Fauci credits himself, not Trump, for the rapid rollout of Covid vaccines: “It may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made" pic.twitter.com/CYrni6KeKA

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 29, 2021

Dr. Fauci says it was him and NOT Trump who started the ball rolling to develop COVID vaccine https://t.co/yWTwzcYH9I

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) March 29, 2021

‘When I saw what happened in New York City, almost over-running of our healthcare systems, and that’s when it became very clear that the decision we made on January 10 to go all out and develop a vaccine, may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to intervention as the director of the institute,’ Fauci said.

Fauci’s remarks seemed to gloss over the key role played by pharmaceutical companies and Operation Warp Speed – the Trump administration’s program to manufacture, test and deliver vaccines to the public in record time.

Yes, I’m sure no one had thought of needing a vaccine for a deadly, global disease before Fauci’s brilliance came onto the scene. Truly, we should build statues of this man and order a new stock of emotive candles.

To be clear, Fauci had absolutely jack to do with making the decision to start developing or developing a vaccine. To the extent that Trump deserves credit, and he does, it’s because he took the lead to negotiate Operation Warp Speed, which incentivized private companies to research and develop the vaccines we now have on the market. Past that, those individual companies did all the work, which is a testament to our free market system and its benefits. Compare the United States’ speed to a vaccine and our distribution with that of Europe, for example.

What Fauci is trying to do here is take credit for something he had almost nothing to do with. Perhaps he suggested in a meeting at some point that a vaccine would be needed. Again, that probably occurred to a dozen other people in the room as well, but it certainly wasn’t “his” decision to begin development, and he had nothing to do with anything that happened after that as well.

This guy is shameless. He’s a true egomaniac, put in a position of power by a president who can’t even remember what day it is half the time. Fauci has been wrong on masks, wrong on herd immunity, wrong on vaccine effectiveness, wrong on schools, and wrong on a variety of other issues. For him to now pretend he was the hero here is laughable.