In his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to “defend the truth and defeat lies.”
So let’s start by being brutally honest with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the source of some of the most damaging misinformation about COVID-19.
At the very least, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to Biden has no record of the facts and is prone to change his mind.
This is the man who dictated the coronavirus policy to the Trump administration. If mistakes were made, as the Biden administration claims, they are from Fauci.
Still, surprisingly, Fauci told CNN on Friday that the Trump administration’s “lack of frankness” had cost American lives.
But if people’s lives were really at stake last year, why did they wait so far to tell us?
Take advantage of it to another convenient fiber from a regular fiber, which has fooled us into everything from masks to herd immunity.
Even if you decide that they are not lies, but a slip of Fauci’s trial, they had potentially lethal consequences.
Take, for example, Fauci’s serenity on January 21 last year, when he assured us that the virus convulsing China at the time “is not something U.S. citizens should worry about.”
To be fair, the pandemic surprised many people, but what Fauci does is he is always so sure of himself.
The following week, he returned to participate, vehemently opposing the flight ban proposed by Donald Trump of China, which Biden at the time called “xenophobia.”
It was January 28 and Trump had asked his business adviser, Peter Navarro, to enter the situation room to convince Fauci and other officials that the ban on traveling to China would save lives.
“The guy I fought with the most that day was Fauci,” Navarro told me Sunday. “He strongly opposed the travel ban. All he kept saying was that travel restrictions don’t work. ”
Navarro took a step back: “‘If you stop 20,000 Chinese citizens from entering every day and some are infected, you tell me it won’t spread the virus?’ It was like talking to a brick wall. ”
The next day, Navarro wrote a note outlining 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 wallpapered everyone in the workgroup with the note and. . . he turned everyone around to support the president, ”Navarro said.
Trump imposed a travel ban on Jan. 31, and Fauci later credited the action for saving lives.
But, says Navarro, “if Biden had been president and Fauci had been the top adviser, we would probably have a million more Americans killed.”
Then there was Fauci’s advice on masks.
In March, when the coronavirus decimated New York, he told us that the masks were useless.
“Right now in the United States, people shouldn’t walk around with masks,” he said in “60 Minutes.”
Three months later, he did a backflip: “The masks work. . . to prevent you from infecting someone else. . . but it can also protect it to some degree. ”
Putting on the pool with novelty sunglasses and socks last June, Fauci told InStyle magazine he didn’t regret lying:
“It simply came to our notice then. . . we have a serious problem with the lack of PPE and masks for healthcare providers [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 was more corrosive than 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 he also lied about the herd’s immunity.
In December, Fauci admitted to the New York Times that he had “slowly but deliberately moved the target sites” over the percentage of the population that needed to be vaccinated before the “herd immunity” against COVID- was reached. 19.
“When polls said only half of all Americans would get a vaccine, it said the herd’s immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when more recent polls said, 60 percent or more they would take it, I thought, “I can push it a little bit,” so I went to 80, 85, “he said.
Fauci is not accurate with numbers, which is strange for a scientist who professes to worry about the facts.
For example, on the first day of Biden last week, Fauci said we would have “100 million people vaccinated in the first 100 days” and specified that he was referring to both “primary and impulse” shots, a total of 200 million of gunfire.
On Sunday, he was forced to “clarify it, because there were some misunderstandings. What we are talking about is 100 million shots in people.”
The 100 million goal is false anyway, since we are already there. The week before the inauguration, 912,000 shots were fired a day, according to the Bloomberg News tracker. On the opening day, there were 1.6 million shots fired.
Fauci last week Fauci rushed over the “liberator” who was now working for Biden. “One of the novelties in this administration is: if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Say you don’t know the answer. ”
This would suit Fauci because, to an expert, he never seems to know the answer to anything.
Cuo’s “hunting” cookie
Gov. Andrew Cuomo took part in his favorite pastime Friday, boasting.
“Never get arrogant with COVID,” he said, proud of the attractive alliteration.
“It simply came to our notice then. I will call this budget. ”
Maybe he should have taken his own advice before accepting an Emmy and writing a book congratulating himself on the nation’s worst COVID response.
This is what you call arrogant, in every sense of the word.