By Michael
Brendan Dougherty
Monday, November
29, 2021
A few people show up in Botswana with
a new variant of COVID, and Dr. Anthony Fauci was scrambled from
NIAID to appear on the Sunday shows, where he had no useful information at all
to share on this development of the virus. But he did manage to criticize
President Trump, aggrandize himself as a martyr, say that Florida “does not
want to get vaccinated” (it’s in the top 20 most
vaccinated US states), and attempt to revive the wet-market theory of COVID’s origin.
And then he turned around and accused
everyone else of politicizing the pandemic and public health:
I am
somebody who only cares about science and health, and it is — you’re
right, it’s painful and disturbing to see when you’re trying to focus all of
your attention on doing what you can do the way we did to create the vaccines,
to develop the drugs, to save millions of lives. And then you have this
completely outlandish politicization of it. Politicization of everything.
Politicization of the public health, politicization of the origins,
politicization of all of it is really — I think when we look back at this,
we’re going to see what were we thinking, what was going on back then?
This is a bad joke. Public health was
already deeply politicized. Public-health bodies kowtowed to China early in the
pandemic and dragged their feet on declaring a public-health emergency because
they wished to spare from embarrassment the oversensitive Communists who run
China. Public-health officials were against border controls early on, not
because the science backed up their view, but because their politics
required it. Fauci amplified Peter Daszak’s
campaign to label the lab-leak theory a “conspiracy theory” because of
politics; they believed that it would hinder funding of research they believed
in.
While it is absolutely true that some
Republican senators calling for the legal prosecution of Fauci are cynical
showmen, Fauci is responding in kind. “I have to laugh at that. I should be
prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, Senator,” he said, referring to Senator
Ted Cruz.
But all this was prelude to the truly
grand peroration. Saith Fauci:
So it’s
easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent
science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the
arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but
science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing
something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that’s what I worry
about.
Reading it on the page, one is reminded
one of an overwrought crime drama where the most crooked and vindictive
policeman is left at the end of the line, exposed for what he is, impotently
shouting, “I am the law” before his satisfying comeuppance.
But it’s actually easier to understand
than that. “I represent science” is roughly Fauci’s job, if you think of
“science” as a special-interest lobby, rather than as an iterative process for
investigating truths about nature. He is, along with the director of the NIH,
effectively the head of an enormous industry that relies almost exclusively on
federal funding.
The question is whether the Biden
administration can stand to have Fauci much longer. Fauci has gone on
television to preemptively cancel Christmas, only to reel it back the next day.
He went on the talk shows this weekend to say nothing useful about the new
variant of the disease, but to lecture the world to prepare for the imposition
of the same policies that failed to contain the previous, less-infective
variants.
Hours after Fauci’s remarks on Sunday, the
head of the South African Medical Association pronounced, “The new Omicron
variant of the Coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent
symptoms.”
Somehow, I don’t think Fauci will be
touting this news, or the arrival of endemic COVID, and the onset of his
irrelevance to the Sunday talk shows.
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