In October, Rasmussen reported that 49% of Americans, a significant plurality, believed Dr. Anthony Fauci lied about funding gain-of-function research. The pollster also found a similar plurality, 45%, had an unfavorable view of the NIAID Director. In May of 2021, 65% of likely voters said they believed political considerations influenced Fauci’s decisions and public statements about the pandemic. Clearly, since the inauguration, public trust in Fauci has been declining. He’s been the consistent face of the pandemic through both administrations and is almost single-handedly responsible for the economic, social, and health devastation his policy directives caused.
Still, elected Democrats can’t get enough of the arrogant octogenarian. One other group also can’t get enough of him: the Democrats’ public relations staff in the corporate media. Even though America is long overdue for a second opinion, Margaret Brennan gave Fauci an hour-long interview on Face the Nation that aired Sunday. It appears CBS taped the interview before the media freakout about the omicron variant.
During his time with Brennan, much of his rhetoric was predictable. There was no recognition of recovered immunity. Everyone needs a vaccine and a booster. And he advocates vaccinating toddlers as early as the first quarter of 2022. He constantly calls for following the data, but he never really offers any, even in defense of his policy recommendations. When the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee was evaluating vaccines for children aged 5-11, panel member Dr. Eric Rubin said, “We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” But Fauci wants you to think he follows the science when he recommends you vaccinate your child.
A few notable things happened in his CBS interview. First, Fauci clearly and specifically said COVID-19 would not get eradicated. In describing how America could live with the virus, he asserted that we need to get down to a consistent level of fewer than 10,000 cases per day. The CDC currently describes low transmission as below a seven-day average of ten positive tests per 100,000 residents. If the entire nation met this standard, there could be as many as 29,610 positive tests per day. Who are Americans and local leaders supposed to listen to?
Brennan teed up questions several times about the lack of data available to make decisions during the pandemic. She also noted that the U.S. often relies on better data from other countries. After that framing by Brennan, Dr. Fauci surprisingly took multiple opportunities to criticize the CDC, their lag in making recommendations, and the lack of data collection. Later in the interview, he gave the public health response a grade of C while putting himself under the scientific response, which he graded an A+. Fauci expects viewers to accept his assertion that he is only an incidental public health official. His real contribution was developing vaccines and therapeutics.
Brennan repeatedly asked Fauci why the health agencies did not recommend mitigation efforts like masks earlier. This line of questioning provided Fauci with the opportunity to talk about asymptomatic COVID spread and use a statistic from a model rather than real-world data. The model he cites predicts that 35% of new cases come from people who infect others before they show symptoms, and 24% come from people who never develop symptoms at all. Fun fact: the flu can be spread during the incubation period before a person has symptoms too. And no contact-tracing study demonstrates that people who never become symptomatic spread COVID-19 with any significant frequency. One meta-analysis of household transmission put the transmission rate at 0.7% for asymptomatic people who never became ill.
However, if you take the transmission rates from a model at face value, it is easy to recommend broad-based frequent asymptomatic testing of everyone. Of course, Fauci pushed broad-based asymptomatic testing after setting a bar of 10,000 cases per day nationwide. Can you how this will become the neverending pandemic? Outspoken AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer once said that to get an appointment with Fauci, you didn’t call his secretary but his press officers, “who book [his] talks and interviews… like movie stars.” A neverending pandemic is an ideal situation for a megalomaniac narcissist who loves to be on television.
Fauci also criticized states that took different approaches than the one he prescribed. “To me, that is one of the antitheses of public health,” Fauci said. “We know exactly what needs to be done. We know we’ve got to get vaccinated. How can you possibly have a situation where one state says, ‘I am sorry, we shouldn’t be wearing a mask’? In fact, you have executive orders saying you shouldn’t be wearing a mask.” Obviously, Fauci is talking about Florida, while completely mischaracterizing Governor Ron DeSantis’s order. Since Fauci loves data, he may want to check out the numbers behind this map:
Hilariously, Fauci called out the politicization of public health and divisiveness as a barrier to effective control of the virus: “The divisiveness is the biggest mistake that supersedes everything we are talking about. Supersedes the mask situation. Supersedes everything.”
“When I give my history, that’s going to be the number one mistake,” he said. Fauci blames nearly every misstep, wrong decision, and questionable recommendation on “evolving information.” He praised the attention and focus on COVID-19 from the Biden administration while ignoring the daily updates and communication that went on for months from the Trump administration. He also takes personal credit for the development of the mRNA vaccines without ever acknowledging Operation Warp Speed.
Related: Is The Omicron Variant The ‘Midterm Election Variant’?
When Brennan asked Fauci to address the origins of the virus, he said Americans “hear about things they don’t understand like gain-of-function.” Fauci asserted that much of science is done by “modifying things” to dismiss the specific practice of increasing the ability of a virus to infect humans. Fauci characterized Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) questions about the research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “outlandish” and a “political football.”
When Brennan asked Fauci if he was personally upset by the questioning, Fauci retreated to his role of benevolent scientist out to save the world, eschewing all political motives on his part. He called for investigations and congressional oversight, citing “noise” from Paul. When Brennan noted that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the attorney general that Fauci should be prosecuted, he laughed and said, “I should be prosecuted? What happened on January 6th, Senator?” Fauci agreed with Brennan that this was a smear campaign to deflect from President Trump. In a single interview, Fauci attacked Republican governors, Republican members of Congress, and a Republican president. But he’s the apolitical one.
Fauci asserted that the attacks on him have an anti-science feel. “If they get up and criticize science, nobody is going to know what they are talking about,” Fauci said, implying that he thinks most Americans are relatively stupid. “But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, people can recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice.”
“They are really criticizing science,” he explained, “because I represent science.” Fauci’s assertion actually represents scientism. Science is a process engaged in by millions of clinicians and researchers worldwide. It is rarely settled and not embodied in a single bureaucrat. And Dr. Rand Paul has every right to question Dr. Anthony Fauci’s interpretation of the available data and research.
Throughout the interview, Fauci takes absolutely no personal responsibility for any of the adverse economic, mental health, physical health, or educational outcomes from his recommendations. The entire hour is obviously a preemptive answer to Dr. Scott Atlas’s new book, A Plague in Our House, which is reportedly highly critical of the Coronavirus Task Force leaders from the health agencies under President Trump. And Brennan’s softball interview insulting half the country is not a very good rebuttal.
WATCH the entire interview below if you can stomach it:
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