Should Covid rear its head in the US again, the White House would do itself a favor by keeping Fauci sidelined. He hasn’t done much to help the country react rationally to the possibility of a rising case rate — and he has remained defensively stubborn on the possible origins concerning the virus in China (he still claims the likely origin is zoonotic, despite a lack of evidence to support that thesis).
Most likely, the next time we will hear from Fauci will be when Congress convenes a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic, which was suggested earlier this week. He will get his talking points in about speaking for “the Science,” combative senators like Rand Paul will get their soundbites, the media will have a field day with the food fight. None of it will get us any closer to answers about how the pandemic happened, or why the CDC and Fauci changed their message in the name of science, sometimes almost overnight.
Anthony Fauci has quietly returned to the shady world of gain-of-function and dual-use-of-concern viral research, at least until the next pandemic. Don’t complain about him being gone.
More changes from President Klain’s White House: Pandemic over, cont’d: Biden COVID czar out. “Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who steered President Biden’s coronavirus response through successive pandemic waves and the largest vaccination campaign in American history, plans to leave the White House in April to return to private life, President Biden said in a statement…Zients was an odd choice from the start. By appointing Zients to that position and Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services, Biden picked two men without any medical background to run his administration’s policies for the worst pandemic in a century. Under their management, COVID-19 policies became even more politicized than before, especially when it came to schools and interventions. That politicization infected even the supposedly hard-science bastion of the CDC, which calculated its guidelines on political lobbying from teachers unions until this day. Appointing Ashish Jha is at least a signal that the White House has belatedly figured out that their credibility has evaporated on the pandemic as a result.”