In the latest proof that the White House needs to muzzle Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s top medical adviser told the nation that normalcy won’t come before fall or winter 2022 — then corrected it to a still-absurd spring 2022.
Fauci’s initial claim to NPR was that if enough Americans get vaxxed, the country could “really get some good control over” the virus by late next year. Then he backtracked, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “I didn’t mean the fall — I misspoke. My bad.”
My bad? His job involves giving the public his best sense of the science and what it means. This is far from his first huge error on that front: As a trustworthy public communicator, he’s awful.
Not that his correction was better, offering “some good control in the spring of 2022” provided “the overwhelming majority of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated” get jabbed.
Pushed to define “control,” he said it’s “getting back to a degree of normality,” such as “restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing.”
Hello: Most of the nation has been going to restaurants since they reopened last year (though the industry’s still suffering). And Broadway will certainly be back sooner than next spring.
This is another of the doctor’s fibs “for our own good”: an effort to guilt or scare the unvaxxed into doing as they should. Yes, we need to get closer to normalcy — but the unvaxxed are only creating problems for themselves at this point. It’s Fauci, and the politicians who follow his advice, pushing restrictions that postpone normalcy.
He blamed the “very wily virus,” explaining: “We thought we were going to have that degree of freedom as we got into the 4th of July and the summer. And then along comes a sucker punch with the Delta variant.”
Sorry: Some future variant might mean big trouble, but Delta’s no disaster. It’s more contagious than past COVID strains, so cases are up — but cases involving hospitalization or death are a much smaller fraction of the total than in the past, thanks to the extraordinary effectiveness of vaccines in lowering the risk of both.
In Britain, which Delta hit hard before it did here, hospitalizations were 9.7 percent of confirmed cases in February; now they’re just 3.2 percent. Daily UK deaths are 92.7 percent below peak.
And the pace of US infections has been slowing, with average counts down or flat last week in many states, including much-maligned Florida (whose COVID death rate per 100,000 people even now is at 1,944, vs. New York’s 2,799).
Such numbers simply don’t justify any major delay in getting back to normal.
Indeed, Cooper exposed just how phony Fauci’s talk really is: How much of the population, he asked, needs to be jabbed to meet that goal of normalcy by spring 2022? The reply: “In all transparency and honesty, we don’t know that.”
Fauci is basing supposedly scientific statements on pure conjecture. Get this guy off TV — and out of the White House.