Dr. Anthony Fauci has been the public face of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic for more than a year and a half. During that time, he has been “shocked,” he says, by criticism that he’s occasionally been wrong.
“I’ve been the object myself of a phenomenal amount of hostility merely because I’m promoting what are really fundamental, simple public health principles,” he told Chelsea Clinton on a podcast. He equated attacking him with attacking science.
Obviously, humility is not his strong suit.
That’s despite the number of times fact-checkers have caught him telling lies or just being wrong. Ordinarily, you’d expect politicians to make lying a part of their personality. But Fauci is a public health official, not a politician. He was charged first by Donald Trump and now Joe Biden to help Americans through a pandemic by relating the truth and the facts in an understandable way.
Instead of understanding, we got obfuscation. Instead of clarity, we got murkiness.
Not much is known about SARS-CoV-2 — at least compared to what we will know in five or ten years. So mistakes in the guidance should have been expected. That they weren’t says a lot about the piss-poor job Fauci did as government spokesman for the pandemic. Now, the government is so invested in pushing certain narratives — about masks, about the vaccine, about other preventative measures — that it’s impossible for public health bureaucrats to change them.
Related: Fauci Fatigue
Instead of calming the waters, Fauci constantly spread uncertainty and panic. It happened again on Monday, when Fauci claimed the United States could get the virus under control by the fall of 2022.
In fact, if enough Americans get the vaccine over the next two months, we should be able to get back to normal by early 2022 — six months before Fauci originally claimed.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top disease expert in the U.S., said in an interview Monday that he misspoke when he said the country may get the virus under control by fall 2022—another full year.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN the error occurred during an earlier interview with NPR.
Fauci apologized and said he listened to the interview. He tried to clarify and said if more Americans sign up to take the vaccines – as well as those who have already recovered from the virus–the country could get “some good control in the spring.”
Fauci’s previous pronouncements on when the U.S. would get back to normal have also been wrong. In October of last year, he said that if a significant number of Americans got vaccinated, the U.S. would get beyond the pandemic. Fauci added that we’d still have to wear face masks indoors and that places like restaurants would still be unable to serve patrons at capacity.
We are paying the price for Fauci being the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. He has been a unique failure in the annals of bureaucratic history.
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