In his inaugural address, President Biden promised “to defend the truth and defeat the lies”.
So, let’s start by being brutally honest about Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the source of some of the most damaging incorrect information about COVID-19.
At the very least, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist and Biden’s chief medical advisor does not know the facts and is likely to change his mind.
This is the man who dictated the coronavirus policy under the Trump administration. If mistakes were made, as the Biden government says, they are from Fauci.
Still, surprisingly, Fauci told CNN on Friday that the Trump administration’s “lack of candor” cost American lives.
But if people’s lives were really at stake last year, why did he wait until now to tell us?
It may be another convenient tale of a habitual liar, who deceived us in everything from masks to collective immunity.
Even if you decide that they are not lies, but Fauci’s judgments, they have potentially lethal consequences.
Take, for example, Fauci’s serenity on January 21 of last year, when he assured us that the virus that was convulsing China at the time “is not something that the citizens of the United States should be concerned about.”
To be fair, the pandemic caught many people without knowing it, but the problem with Fauci is that he is always very sure of himself.
The following week, he was back, vehemently opposing Donald Trump’s flight ban proposal from China, which Biden at the time denounced as “xenophobia”.
It was January 28, and Trump invited his trade advisor, Peter Navarro, to the Situation Room to convince Fauci and other officials that banning travel to China would save lives.
“The guy I fought the most that day was Fauci,” Navarro told me on Sunday. “He vehemently opposed the travel ban. All he said was that travel restrictions don’t work. ”
Navarro countered: “‘If you prevent 20,000 Chinese people from entering every day and some are infected, are you telling me that this is not going to spread the virus?’ It was like talking to a brick wall. ”
The following day, Navarro wrote a memo highlighting three options: if you do nothing and there is no danger, that’s fine; if you ban travel and there is no danger, you lose a few million dollars; but if you do nothing and there is danger, the risk is one million American lives and more than $ 2 trillion in damage.
“I pushed everyone on the task force with the e-memo. . . it made everyone support the president, ”said Navarro.
Trump imposed the travel ban on January 31 and Fauci later credited the action for saving lives.
But, says Navarro, “if Biden were president and Fauci was the top adviser, we would probably have another million Americans dead.”
Then there was Fauci’s advice on masks.
In March, when the coronavirus was decimating New York, he told us that the masks were useless.
“Right now, in the United States, people shouldn’t be walking around in masks,” he told “60 Minutes”.
Three months later, he took a somersault: “The masks work. . . to prevent you from infecting another person. . . but it can also protect you to some extent. ”
Posing by the pool with sunglasses and new socks last June, Fauci told InStyle magazine that he did not regret lying:
“We have been warned… We have a serious problem with the lack of PPE and masks for healthcare professionals [and decided] we really need to save the masks for the people who need them most. ”
It was a noble lie, so he didn’t feel the need to apologize or even be a little embarrassed.
But nothing has been more corrosive to the public’s confidence in medical experts at the height of the pandemic.
If Fauci lied about masks, what else would he lie about?
It turns out that he lied about the herd’s immunity too.
In December, Fauci admitted to The New York Times that he had “slowly but deliberately moved the targets” in the percentage of the population that needed to be vaccinated before “herd immunity” against COVID-19 was achieved.
“When surveys indicated that only half of all Americans would get the vaccine, I was saying that collective immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. So, when the most recent polls said that 60 percent or more would accept, I thought, ‘I can increase this a little bit’, so I went to 80, 85, ”he said.
Fauci is not accurate with numbers, which is strange for a scientist who claims to care about the facts.
For example, on Biden’s first day last week, Fauci said that we would have “100 million people vaccinated in the first 100 days” and specified that he referred to “primary and intensive” vaccines, a total of 200 million vaccines.
On Sunday, he was forced to “clear this up, because there was a little misunderstanding. We are talking about 100 million shots at individuals ”.
The 100 million target is false anyway, as we are already there. In the week before the inauguration, 912,000 shots were administered per day, according to the Bloomberg News tracker. On the Opening Day, there were 1.6 million photos.
Fauci spoke last week about how “liberating” it was to work for Biden now. “One of the new features of this government is: if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Just say that you don’t know the answer. ”
This would be appropriate for Fauci because, for an expert, he never seems to know the answer to anything.
Cuo’s ‘arrogant’ deck
Governor Andrew Cuomo was engaged in his favorite pastime on Friday, boasting.
“Never be arrogant with COVID,” he said, proud of the catchy alliteration.
“True words were never spoken. I will take credit for that quote.”
Maybe he should have taken his own advice before accepting an Emmy and writing a book congratulating himself on the country’s worst COVID reaction.
This is what you call arrogant, in every sense of the word.