Tipsheet

Get Fauci Off the Stage

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 29, 2022 10:15 AM

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced this summer that he'd be stepping down from various government positions in December, in order to pursue the "next chapter" of his life and career.  With his protracted farewell tour underway, I'd argue that his departure can't come soon enough.  In an interview with CBS News over the weekend, Fauci tried to blame the Trump administration for the Chinese Communist Party's flagrant cover-up on COVID's origins.  As others have noted, his timeline here is wrong -- and his view of how matters should have been investigated and settled is embarrassingly naive:


The 'horse out of the barn,' to borrow his phrase, was COVID itself, and it was out of the proverbial barn for months prior to Fauci's designated antagonist -- Donald Trump -- began criticizing Beijing over its scandalous handling of the pandemic's emergence.  Also, the notion that the issue of COVID's origins could have been settled among scientists, with 'politics' left out of it, is preposterous.  The CCP reflexively punished medical professionals and scientists, among others, who spoke out in those early days.  They run a closed, authoritarian government; the idea that they'd have permitted their scientists to operate with a free hand to pursue the truth is laughable.  They interfered at every single step, determined to obscure and bury what happened.  They're still doing things like roughing up and arresting western journalists.  Let's also recall that Fauci himself also had a hand in diminishing the viable-to-probable 'lab leak' theory early on, receiving personal thanks for doing so from a man who (like the CCP) was heavily invested in the suppression of that important line of inquiry.  And it was actively suppressed for quite some time.

I won't assert that Fauci is willfully spreading Chinese propaganda, but I can't imagine Chairman Xi and his henchmen are too disappointed to see the American media's favorite doctor pointing the finger at the "accusatory" Trump administration for supposedly causing the Chinese government's "flinch back" posture on COVID origins.  Meanwhile, here is how things have been going in China, where the regime's truly insane 'zero COVID' approach (bizarrely cheered on by a neurotic quasi-journalist at the Washington Post) is facing remarkable and deserved backlash from a population not accustomed to resisting any of its government's decrees.  People are understandably distraught and furious over scenes like this:


Like the incredible and ongoing protests in Iran, courage is breaking out across China:


Some additional dystopian vignettes, as the regime has loosened its draconian policies a bit:


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Back to the interview referenced above, in which Fauci also hedged on a question about closing down schools.  To be clear, this is not an old exchange.  It just happened a few days.  They're discussing potential school closures after this current holiday season:


This comes in the context of what some in the media are hyping as a "tripledemic" of COVID, RSV, and the flu.  But study after study have confirmed how damaging school closures have been for children.  Fauci has tried to pretend that he didn't have a hand in that public policy disaster, and he'll try to wriggle out of criticism for this answer by emphasizing the need for local officials to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, based on regional conditions.  He even chuckles about the toxicity of closing schools, as if it's a silly commentary on our politicized era.  But shutting down schools should be toxic, based on the resulting harm.  I'll leave you with Karol Markowicz, who moved her whole family from New York to Florida during the pandemic, largely due to the schools issue, offering the correct answer to the question posed:


And yet, nonsense like this continues in various parts of the country.  It's long past time for Fauci to exit stage left.  I'll leave you with this weak sauce.  They regularly have much harsher words for their domestic political opponents: