ROGER KIMBALL: The Cost and Irritation of Abandoning Common Sense in Dealing With COVID.
Back in the 1980s, Fauci was a superspreader of the myth that an important vector for the transmission of HIV was heterosexual intercourse.
For the last couple of years, he has been terrifying the public with tales from the crypt about the virus he helped develop with American taxpayer money for “gain of function” research in a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan.
The fact that this Bela Lugosi of the medical establishment is also a publicity addict who can’t pass a television camera without primping and dispensing contradictory but depressing dicta makes him a public nuisance.
You see his baneful influence everywhere.
In our former newspaper of record, for example, The New York Times.
On Oct. 1, the Times ran one of its long emetic specials on COVID, the Delta Diaries.
Deploying their signature mixture of nauseating human interest pabulum and tendentious statistics, they paid homage to the CCP virus for giving them something to write about now that Donald Trump is, for the time being, off the menu.
According to the Times, the fact that the deaths of 700,000 people in the United States have been attributed to the virus means that it is now officially more deadly than the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918, which killed about 675,000 people in the United States.
Remember the old saw about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
The Times specializes in that wheeze.
The CCP Virus can be serious, no doubt about it. But it represents a significant threat to a tiny part of the population, mostly the elderly, especially those with certain co-morbidities like diabetes and obesity.
The Spanish ’flu, by contrast, cut a wide swathe through the young and healthy.
The so-called Delta variant seems to be more infectious but less virulent than the original.
It has affected some younger people, much to the delight of the Times and other members of Fauci fan club.
But the Times story is just the Gray-Lady version of a domestic-strife story like those in the sensationalistic rags you see in the supermarket checkout line. “Betts and Andy on the Rocks: What Really Happened On Their Honeymoon.”
As Noah Rothman of Commentary writes, there are “Diminishing Returns on the Cult of Fauci:”
Fauci has since clarified his comments to suggest that he didn’t say what he said. “I will be spending Christmas with my family,” the doctor confessed. “I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family.” This walk-back suggests that the administration Fauci serves understands his level of risk intolerance is sapping him and the White House of credibility.
Dr. Fauci’s tenuous grasp of elementary political realities has become impossible to ignore. Millions of Americans have acquainted themselves with a new status quo in which pre-vaccine mitigation measures like masking and social distancing are reserved primarily for the unvaccinated. Mass gatherings are no longer forbidden—they’re not even uncommon. Third booster shots are being administered to older Americans because an American administration must serve the American public before it concerns itself with the long-term interests of the globe. And no bureaucracy ever conceived has been able to stop Americans from getting sick.
A first-term administration has one prime political directive: Convince voters that they are better off today than they were during the previous presidency. Rising rates of inflation have robbed Joe Biden of confidence in his ability to steward the economy. The historic debacle his administration engineered in Afghanistan has led to deteriorating faith in Biden’s capabilities as a commander-in-chief. And now, Biden faces a “trust deficit” when it comes to combating the disease. If the public face of the administration’s public health program continues to view basic human nature and tangible political imperatives as abstractions that can be safely disregarded, the administration’s precarious position will only get worse.
And they’re stuck with him — and alas, so are we. On Wednesday, Hugh Hewitt asked Fauci, “Is there a point where you will say I do more harm than good because people don’t listen to me anymore and step aside?” To which Fauci replied, “No, absolutely, unequivocally no, Hugh.”
As the Washington Post noted last year in an article headlined, “Trump says he might fire Fauci. Technically, he can’t,” “Technically, the president of the United States cannot directly fire Fauci, let’s say by a tweet, mainly because he is not a political appointee. As a career federal employee and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, Fauci is protected by federal civil service regulations that shield him from being fired or demoted for political reasons. Fauci could be removed, but it would imply a complicated process layered with civil service protections that require the government agency to provide evidence that there is a just cause for dismissal, including failure to follow orders or misconduct.”