The sell-by date of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s usefulness has expired. He should exit the public stage that he so obviously enjoys. His long tenure as a healthcare bureaucrat should come to an end. He has proven more adept as a showman than as a doctor.
We have now reached the stage where the most dangerous place in Washington, D.C. is between Anthony Fauci and a camera. If he’s not tossing out the first pitch at a baseball game (was that what that was?), he is preening in shades sitting by a pool.
Dr. Fauci, for good or ill, has been the commandant of the federal, state, and local response to the COVID-19 virus for these last many months. He has been the architect, if not the builder, of policies that have been inconsistent, unpredictable, and destructive.
He has opined on virtually every aspect of American life and its intersection with the virus and potential cures. While he has often said that his job is to focus solely on stopping the spread of the disease, he has enjoyed proffering his opinion on everything from baseball to lockdowns. For a guy who thinks his job is very narrowly focused, he sure has a broad range of opinions. And, he has a naïve attitude when it comes to the implications of his casual dicta.
His policies have resulted in an economic disaster, a public mental health crisis, and a secondary public health crisis that will become more visible in the coming months. And ultimately, his counsel has transformed America’s vision of itself, from our belief in individual rights to the role of government, in ways that may never revert back to the baseline of pre-COVID life.
It was his advice to lockdown most states and local jurisdictions that resulted in the unemployment of tens of millions of Americans. Thousands of businesses have been permanently shuttered. People who had mortgaged their homes or leveraged their retirement savings to open businesses saw their economic dreams vanish. But, Fauci told Congress he didn’t consider these things when crafting his policies.
Suicide rates have soared. Under Fauci’s guidance, domestic violence, child abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, have also skyrocketed. The Census Bureau embedded questions typically used by counselors to determine clinical depression in a national survey. More than a third of all Americans responding (48,000) answered yes to each of the questions.
The impending public health crisis revolves around the millions of patients who stopped receiving necessary treatments for serious medical conditions, such as cancer, or who needed to be screened and didn’t receive the screening, diagnosis, or treatment necessary.
Typical of Fauci’s casual approach to this crisis is his recent statement in one of the many interviews that seem to occupy his time. He suggested that the spread of COVID might not even be by aerosol. That would leave spread by contact. And, it would mean, as we already suspect, that masking Americans does nothing, really, to stop the spread of COVID.
Admittedly, it looks like Fauci just tossed off the remark. It was probably just a throw away. But, that’s the point here. State and local officials have been hanging on his words as if they were the tablets from the Mount. All the while, his focus has been myopic and his public comments, that so many revere, have been casual, philosophical observations that are not necessarily based on science.
It is past time for Fauci, and his sidekick, Deborah Birx (who embraces no school until the spread rate is 5% or less, although that number is without scientific support and appears to have been pulled like a rabbit from the hat in an arbitrary fashion) to exit stage left.