“Remember the government disease doctor who once described the Covid lockdown policies he was promoting as merely “inconvenient”? Trillions of dollars and countless shattered lives later, now the country’s most forceful advocate for shuttering U.S. society is pretending he was inconsequential.
To make his new case Dr. Anthony Fauci has chosen the friendly forum of the New York Times, which also isn’t eager to accept responsibility for panicked responses to Covid. In this week’s Times interview with David Wallace-Wells, Dr. Fauci says:
Nothing was done perfectly. But what I can say is that, at least to my perception, the emphasis strictly on the science and public health — that is what public-health people should do. I’m not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.
Certainly there could have been a better understanding of why people were emphasizing the economy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.
To expose the falsity of Dr. Fauci’s attempt to avoid responsibility for the consequences of his actions and advice, one doesn’t even need to look beyond the pages of the New York Times. Not that the paper was holding him to account. He was often cast as a heroic figure as he pushed back against those who tried to warn of the great harms of closing society. Dr. Fauci wasn’t deferring to economic experts or even to medical experts who didn’t share his Covid prescription—he was using his powerful perch to forcefully rebut them. And he largely succeeded, to the great detriment of America’s children.
As for Dr. Fauci’s claim that he looked at things from “a purely public-health standpoint,” this too deserves great skepticism. One of the reasons his advice was so destructive is that it was based on a purely Covid standpoint—and with a particular approach that didn’t even yield exceptional Covid outcomes—rather than assessing other threats to health, such as mental illness and cancer, the treatment of which suffered during the shutdowns.
Along with fellow government disease doctor Deborah Birx, Dr. Fauci issued forecasts of Covid deaths and then pushed the dubious notion that lockdown was the appropriate response. Michael Shear, Michael Crowley and James Glanz reported for the New York Times in April of 2020 that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said the number of Covid deaths “could be much higher if Americans did not follow the strict guidelines vital to keeping the virus from spreading.” The Times reporters added:
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx showed charts indicating that coronavirus cases in New York and New Jersey had risen far higher than in other parts of the country, a fact that they said gave them hope that the overall number of deaths might be lower if people in the rest of the states followed the guidelines for at least the next month…
The president, who on Sunday extended for 30 days the government’s recommendations for slowing the spread of the virus, made it clear that the data compiled by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx convinced him that the death toll would be even higher if the restrictions on work, school, travel and social life were not taken seriously by all Americans.
Dr. Fauci had won the argument over many economists and dissenting doctors. Most of the shutdown orders came from governors and local officials. But Dr. Fauci was the most influential figure encouraging the closure of schools and factories.
The following month, he not only continued to reject the advice of economists, but also wrongly suggested that his advice was actually the best prescription for the economy. A New York Times report covered his May 12 appearance before a Senate panel:
If economic interests were allowed to override public health concerns, Dr. Fauci warned, “there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control.” That could result not only in “some suffering and death that could be avoided,” he said, “but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery.”
… Scientists hope to know by late fall or early winter whether they have at least one possible effective vaccine, Dr. Fauci told the senators. But he cautioned, “Even at the top speed we’re going, we don’t see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get back to school this term.”
Dr. Fauci, who spent a career as an unelected head of a government agency, now claims he never criticized those who had to make decisions. But at the time he felt comfortable challenging even those who were both elected officialsand medical doctors. The New York Times reported:
“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home will not get to learn for a full year,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky.
Dr. Fauci pushed back, saying that the virus’s effect on children is still not well understood, and that recent cases of children who have tested positive and developed a serious inflammatory syndrome was worrisome. “We really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children,” he said.
Now Americans can only wish they had been more careful in keeping Dr. Fauci away from any policies related to children. But it wouldn’t have been easy.
No one sits atop a federal bureaucracy for nearly 40 years without having first-class skills in politicking and public relations. After that Senate hearing in 2020, another account in the Times suggested that Dr. Fauci had become even more powerful than the president and was in fact the critical public official preventing the opening of schools.
The leaders of the nation’s largest teachers’ union and parent volunteer organization pushed back on Mr. Trump’s efforts to reopen schools, saying only one official could reassure them that it was safe to welcome millions of students back. “I’m waiting for Dr. Fauci,” Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, said Thursday on a call with reporters. “I’m waiting not for a politician; I’m waiting for a medical, infectious-disease professional to say, ‘Now we can do it, under these circumstances.’”
Ms. Eskelsen García joined educators and members of the National P.T.A. a day after Mr. Trump had rebuked Dr. Fauci for expressing caution about reopening schools. Dr. Fauci told a Senate panel on Tuesday that a vaccine for the virus would almost certainly not be ready in time for the new school year. “We better be careful, if we are not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects,” he said.
Dr. Fauci’s testimony irritated Mr. Trump, who believes that reopening schools is critical to restarting the economy and to his re-election campaign. “I totally disagree with him on schools,” Mr. Trump said Thursday in an interview on Fox Business.
Shame on President Trump for not firing the destructive doctor in 2020, and shame on Dr. Fauci for trying to rewrite this history in 2023.
If there’s anyone…other than every member of the Biden and Clinton criminal cartels and Lois Lerner…who deserves to be behind bars, their wealth seized and pensions forfeited, it’s Dr. Faux Chi.
At the risk of seeming repetitive, we must note the lockdown strategy was originally set forth in a 14-year-old girl’s high school science project, after which two government doctors, neither schooled in either virology or epidemiology, refined it over pizza and beer. It was then dismissed by experts in both fields, without ever being reviewed by a single economist. And yet, this was the course of action Faux Chi favored.
Here’s the juice in meme form:
It was never about controlling a virus, but rather all about controlling…
“Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic delivered a sharp rebuke to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), for her organization’s role in delaying school reopenings during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The effect on children has been vast and to have no remorse on closing schools and keeping them closed for the length of time is unconscionable,” explained Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R., Iowa), a medical doctor and a former director of the Iowa Department of Public Health.
Referenced throughout the hearing were consultations the American Federation of Teachers had with the Biden administration and the CDC about school reopenings. On January 29, 2021, Weingarten and senior AFT staff participated in a conference call with members of the CDC in which they suggested ideas. Two of the suggestions were accepted in guidance the Biden administration sent out in February in 2021. The first was to encourage schools to provide options for teachers and staff who had documented high-risk conditions and the second was that the government’s guidance may need to be changed depending upon new variants of the coronavirus. Several members took issue with this, including the committee’s chair, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio).
Miller-Meeks did as well, but she zeroed into the claim that AFT had scientific expertise that allowed it to take science-based positions. The Iowa representative pointed to publications by the American Journal of Pediatrics that children had very little to no transmission of Covid-19.
“Did your scientific experts present to you, as of June of 2020, among 1.8 million children in this age group, do you know how many died from Covid?,” asked Miller-Meeks, later answering: “Zero.” “Did they present you data from other countries that showed continuing in-person schooling was in fact safe for children and safe for teachers?,” asked Miller-Meeks, adding that she understands the educational system has a great deal of experience with influenza and its contagiousness among children but “influenza is not Covid.” The representative then pointed to CDC data from March 1, 2020 to July 25, 2020 showing the exceedingly low risk to children of hospitalization or death from Covid-19.
“What our experts showed us…in two reports, the one from Massachusetts and the one from Wisconsin, and we also saw the reports from the other countries…that show that when you had this layered mitigation, there was much less transmission in schools,” explained Weingarten.
“The layered mitigation was in relationship with influenza,” Miller-Meeks countered. “What I’m doing is as a physician, as 7 physicians on this panel, challenging what your experts said.” “These facts are non-negotiable, ma’am. The fact is schools were relatively safe places for both students and educators. These are scientific questions that a scientific organizationshould be able to study and answer. The AFT is not a scientific organization,” Miller-Meeks asserted.
“The AFT was out of its league in this regard,” she added…”
Out of its league andout of its mind…unless of course the AFT hadn’t the faintest concern for “the children”; We certainly know Faux Chi and Randi Weingarten couldn’t have cared less.
“The New York Times editorial board was never going to come out and say, “Joe Biden shouldn’t run for another term because he’s too old to do the job anymore.” That would represent cutting off an incumbent Democratic president at the knees, a betrayal of a president who delivered a lot of policy wins, and perhaps even spur some serious Democrat — sorry, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to launch a primary bid. If the Times had declared Biden shouldn’t run again, in the coming year, we would have seen a million sentences saying, “Even the New York Times thinks Biden is too old to serve another term.”
But the Times’ house editorial on Monday came right up to the line of declaring that Biden taking the oath of office at age 82 in January 2025, and the notion of him serving in office until he is 86, is absurd. The Times warned, “Candidates shouldn’t pretend, as Mr. Biden often does, that advanced age isn’t an issue,” and that “If Mr. Biden runs again, as he recently said he intends to, questions will persist about his age until he does more to assure voters that he is up to the job.”
Inherent in that statement is a warning that Biden has not done enough to assure voters he is up to the job. That verb tense of “is” instead of “will be” is also intriguing. The editorial continued:
Concerns about age — both in terms of fitness for office and being out of touch with the moment — are legitimate, as Mr. Biden acknowledged in an interview in February with ABC News. His standard line, repeated in that interview, is: “The only thing I can say is, ‘Watch me.’”
But Mr. Biden has given voters very few chances to do just that — to watch him — and his refusal to engage with the public regularly raises questions about his age and health.
The usual White House method of demonstrating a president’s mastery is to take tough questions in front of cameras, but Mr. Biden has not taken advantage of that opportunity, as The Times reported on Friday. He has held fewer news conferences and media interviews than most of his modern predecessors. Since 1923, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan took fewer questions per month from reporters, and neither represents a model of presidential openness that Mr. Biden should want to emulate. His reticence has created an opening for critics and skeptics. . . .
His most recent health summary, released on Feb. 16, said much the same thing, describing him as a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” But his cognitive abilities went unmentioned. That’s something he should discuss publicly and also demonstrate to the voters, who expect the president to reflect the nation’s strength.
If he runs again, Mr. Biden will need to provide explicit reassurance to voters; many of them have seen family members decline rapidly in their 80s. Americans are watching what Mr. Biden says and does, just as he has asked them to do.
That’s about as skeptical and critical an assessment as we can expect from the Times.
Biden did almost no in-person campaigning or public events in 2020 once the Covid pandemic hit in March; the term “basement campaign” was not an exaggeration. Covid was a nonfactor in American life by last autumn, but Biden didn’t get out on the trail much in 2022, either. And now, the New York Times reports, “Biden has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.”
Now, ask yourself: If Biden could get out on the trail, and do more than one public event per day, wouldn’t he be doing that? Because Biden isn’t doing these things, isn’t that a de facto admission that he can barely handle his current duties? What will Biden’s physical and mental state be a year from now? Two years from now? Five years and change from now, when the Democratic Party envisions him wrapping up his second term?
“Nearly two years ago, an errant spark inside a mill caused an explosion so big it destroyed all the building’s equipment and blew a corrugated fiberglass wall 100 feet. It also shut down the sole domestic source of an explosive the Department of Defense relies on to produce bullets, mortar shells, artillery rounds and Tomahawk missiles.
The ramshackle facility makes the original form of gunpowder, known today as black powder, a highly combustible material with hundreds of military applications. The product, for which there is no substitute, is used in small quantities in munitions to ignite more powerful explosives.
No one was hurt in the June 2021 blast. But the factory remains offline, unable to deliver its single vital component to either commercial or Pentagon customers.
Military suppliers consolidated at the Cold War’s end, under pressure to reduce defense costs and streamline the nation’s industrial base. Over the past three decades, the number of fixed wing aircraft suppliers in the U.S. has declined from eight to three. During the same period, major surface ship producers fell from eight to two, and today, only three American companies supply over 90% of the Pentagon’s missile stockpile.
Lower-tier defense firms are often the sole maker of vital parts—such as black powder—and a single crisis can bring production to a standstill…”
But hey, at least the DoD is up to speed on its DEI regulations and requirements, not to mention converting to all-electric vehicles by 2030, at least if Biden’s Energy Secretary has any say. This is an idea so devoid of any common sense or the faintest grasp of reality it quite literally beggars the imagination.
Moving on, we present another sextet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Just when you thought Progressives couldn’t promote deeper perversions, a transgender state lawmaker in Minnesota…
(4). As our insensate chief executive recently spoke alongside South Korea’s president, a photographer happened to snap a photo of a small cheat-sheet in the president’s hand signaling he had advanced knowledge of a question from L.A. Times journalist Courtney Subramanian. It included a breakdown of the correct pronunciation of the reporter’s last name.
(5). Nikki Haley has taken sides in Ron DeSantis’s battle with Disney, and as Julio Rosas reports, it’s the wrong side. As if Disney is going to spend billions of dollars to relocate from Orlando, with it’s airport, hotels and other attractions. In response, a senior aide to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shared a clip of him bashing corporatism:
A senior DeSantis aide texts this clip from his Heritage speech:
“It’s not conservative to simply defer to every corporation in America. That’s being a corporatist.”
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) April 26, 2023
Here’s a second shot of the juice: Anyone who believes corporations have the interests of anyone or anything other than their top executive bottomline is as demented as Joe Biden…or they’re selling something.
And just to be clear, Nikki Haley has taken sides with corporate child groomers against Conservative governance, as Nate Jackson notes at The Patriot Post:
“It’s no secret that Disney has in recent years devolved from being a family entertainment company to a primary vehicle for grooming kids into the gender-confusion cult.
From adding a same-sex kiss to the background of a movie to making major characters in its cartoons LGBTQ to having its parks host “Pride Nights” and even stop referring to “ladies and gentlemen,” Mickey Mouse’s Not-So-Magic Kingdom is a far cry from the generally wholesome family fare of yesteryear.”
Thus, as Freddy Mercury so famously sang…
So long, Nikki; We hardly knew ya.
(6). Stop the oppression B.S. is right!
High school senior gets $9 million in scholarships, 125 offers
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Major Jon…
…Ed Hickey…
…and the Great Geffoir:
Finally, we’ll close out the month with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this just in from the Centennial State:
What an incredibly senseless way to end someone’s life, let alone that of a lovely young lady. As Colorado doesn’t have a death penalty, we’re with Jack Reacher‘s Lieutenant Emerson in hoping these boys enjoy the rest of their lives behind bars…
Come to think of it, that’s a fate Dr. Faux Chi should share!
Magoo
Video of the Day
James Patrick challenges anyone to decipher what the heck this horrid harpy is trying to say. It’s hard to believe people are actually being paid to write such drivel.
Tales of The Darkside
What on earth qualifies this failure to teach “leadership”? The fact she’s virulently anti-free speech, needlessly and heedlessly imposed some of the harshest lockdown measures on the planet or was SOOOO unpopular she resigned instead of getting shellacked at the polls?!?
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