RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joe Biden likes Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lockdown advice so much, he has tapped him for chief medical advisor. Biden also plans to keep Fauci on his COVID advisory board despite Democrats spending 2020 insisting President Trump’s COVID guidance, although clearly influenced by Fauci, contradicted science and hurt the nation.

That same day, Fauci reversed himself on the safety of the COVID vaccines being developed, apologizing for making false statements about U.S. allies’ work in partnership with the Trump administration to save countless lives through cutting-edge medical research.

Axios reported: “‘I have a great deal of confidence in what the U.K. does both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint,’ Dr Fauci told the BBC on Thursday after saying earlier in the day that U.K. regulators ‘rushed’ their approval of the vaccine” for COVID from Pfizer-BioNTech. The day before, the United Kingdom had become the first nation to grant emergency approval to one of three reportedly highly effective vaccines that have been developed in conjunction with massive U.S. taxpayer spending and government effort.

“In the United States, there is such a considerable amount of tension of pushing back on the credibility, on the safety and on the efficacy that if we in the United States had done it as quickly as the U.K. did — and that’s no judgement on the way the U.K. did it — …there likely would have been pushback,” Fauci word-saladed in his apology over the “misunderstanding” he created by criticizing the United Kingdom’s efforts to end the pandemic faster.

“If you go quickly and you do it superficially, people are not going to want to get vaccinated,” Fauci told Fox News. “We have the gold standard of a regulatory approach with the FDA.”

Once again, the truth is closer to the opposite of what Fauci tells the media. Just this week news broke that the United States had an effective COVID-19 vaccine designed on January 13, two days after the virus’s genome sequence was published. It is just about to come out now — ten months, 130 million more people at risk of starvation, 80 million children dead of lockdown-induced poverty, and hundreds of trillions of dollars in economic pain across the globe later.

Notice that the vaccine criticism Fauci apologized for wasn’t about the efficacy of the science but the message a speedy process might send. Excuse me: public health and ability to sustain life should be the top priority, not “perception.” Indeed, Fauci has shown himself, with the help of our anti-American media, highly effective at manipulating public perception. That’s about all he’s capable at, it seems.

But also, what negative perception could be sent by a speedy vaccine process — wow, American scientists are awesome? As Alex Tabarrok writes, it is unacceptable to suggest delaying due to political, not scientific, concerns when that unequivocally means increased global death and suffering.

Fauci “really does seem to be blind to the harms of the lockdown,” Stanford University epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Megyn Kelly in her podcast published Monday. “We’ve talked about the depression, we’ve talked about starvation in developing countries as a consequence of the economic damage from the lockdown. We haven’t talked so much — but they’re also medical damage from people delaying cancer care, because people are more scared of COVID than cancer. I think all of these harms should enter into our policy calculus. And when Dr. Fauci talks, I never hear him thinking about those harms in a way that’s meaningful.”

Fauci’s history of major errors apparently recommended him the Democrat team about to command the White House. In his CNN interview announcing his intentions to retain Fauci and keep following his advice, Biden told Jake Tapper “he would be willing to take the vaccine publicly as soon as Fauci says it’s safe, in an effort to boost public confidence,” wrote Politico. Biden vice presidential pick Kamala Harris says she will wait to get vaccinated until “more vulnerable” Americans try it first.

Fauci has constantly contradicted himself and suppressed expert medical opinions on COVID over the course of the pandemic, with the effect of undermining President Trump while increasing Americans’ suffering under lockdowns. On Nov. 30, reporter Jordan Schactel chronicled Fauci’s constant lies, hedging, purposeful vagueness, and self-contradictions about the single issue of school shutdowns.

This may be the one COVID issue on which the research is overwhelmingly clear: Children are far safer in school than locked down at home halfheartedly doing Zoom school. Fauci has not only not communicated that message to an anxious public, he has obfuscated on this issue to the point of contradicting the truth and thereby helping needlessly harm millions of American kids.

Fauci now claims he has always supported keeping schools open throughout the pandemic. That is false. On March 12, Schactel chronicles, Fauci called for school shutdowns nationwide. On April 13, he slammed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for saying he wanted to reopen schools as soon as possible.

On May 14, Trump supported reopening schools, which media reported contradicted Fauci’s advice. Fauci never, ever shut corporate media down for using him as a battering ram against anyone, including tens of thousands of highly credentialed infectious disease experts, who pointed out that lockdowns have harms that may rival those caused by the virus.

On July 24, Fauci told reporters that whether schools should reopen “depends on where you are.” On Aug. 13, he affirmed that “many months” of online schooling were likely required “in some places” “before schools can safely open.” On Sept. 30, he told CNN schools should only reopen “once the virus is under control.”

Anthony Fauci has shown himself to be a feckless bureaucrat whose ego and cowardice has done more harm than good to the United States and world in a time we desperately needed precisely the opposite. It’s therefore perfectly fitting that he should join the Biden administration, whose motto is nothing if not “Nobody cares who we hurt as long as the media won’t cover it.”