In the latest test the White House needs to wrap up Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s top medical adviser told the nation that normalcy won’t come until the fall or winter of 2022, and then corrected it until to a still absurd spring of 2022.
Fauci’s initial claim to NPR was that if there were enough Americans vaxxed, the country could “really have good control over” the virus by the end of next year. Then he backed away and told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I didn’t mean the fall, I got the word wrong. It’s my fault.”
My fault? His job is to give the public the best sense of science and what it means. This is far from his first big mistake on this front: as a trusted public communicator, it’s horrible.
It’s not that his correction was better, as it offered “good control in the spring of 2022,” as long as “the overwhelming majority of the 90 million people who haven’t been vaccinated” received a punch.
Driven to define “control,” he said he would “return to a certain degree of normalcy,” such as “restaurants, theaters, that sort of thing.”
Hello: Most of the country has gone to restaurants since they reopened last year (although the industry continues to suffer). And, without a doubt, Broadway will be back before next spring.
This is another of the doctor’s annoyances “for our own good”: an effort to blame or scare the brazen into doing as they should. Yes, we have to get closer to normal, but at the moment the homeless are only creating problems for them. Fauci and politicians follow his advice, pushing for restrictions that postpone normalcy.
He blamed the “very cunning virus,” explaining, “We thought we’d have that degree of freedom as we got into July 4th and summer. And then comes a punch with the Delta variant.”
Sorry: some future variant I could it means big problems, but Delta is no disaster. It is more contagious than previous COVID strains, so cases have increased, but hospitalization or death cases are a a lot a smaller fraction of the total than in the past, thanks to the extraordinary effectiveness of vaccines in reducing the risk of both.
In Britain, which Delta hit hard earlier than here, hospitalizations accounted for 9.7 per cent of confirmed cases in February; they are now only 3.2 percent. Daily deaths in the UK are 92.7% below the maximum.
And the rate of U.S. infections has slowed, with an average or flat count last week in many states, including the highly malignant Florida (COVID’s mortality rate per 100,000 people is still 1,944, compared to 2,799 of New York).
These numbers simply do not justify any major delay in returning to normalcy.
In fact, Cooper exposed how false Fauci’s fake talk really is: what part of the population, he asked, must be captured to achieve that goal of normalcy in the spring of 2022? The answer: “With all transparency and honesty, we don’t know.”
Fauci bases the supposedly scientific claims on pure conjecture. Get this guy off the TV and the White House.