Leftist media is atwitter over Meghan McCain’s criticism on “The View” Monday of Anthony Fauci’s long history of garbling scientific information to control people rather than find and communicate facts.
On Sunday, Fauci appeared on CNN and refused to say whether grandparents who had been vaccinated against COVID-19 could safely resume seeing their grandchildren in person. Instead, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ridiculously communicated doubt about the vaccines — as America faces a high level of vaccine skepticism — rather than clearly communicate the basic and crucial public health message that getting the vaccine is protective for those most endangered by COVID.
Another key public health message his duplicity undermined is the highly motivating assurance that the vaccine is our ticket back to normal. This is not because the vaccines don’t work, it’s because Fauci’s career has hit its zenith and he has strong incentives to keep himself on TV constantly at the federal government’s highest salary no matter how long children have to miss school or how many isolated people kill themselves while he’s there.
“The View” played a segment of the interview Monday. McCain commented afterward: “The fact that Dr. Fauci is going on CNN and he can’t tell me that if I get the vaccine if I’ll be able to have dinner with my family…if I can go to dinner at friends’ houses who are older — it’s terribly inconsistent messaging and it continues to be inconsistent messaging.”
She then pointed out that Israel is communicating to its populace that if they get the vaccine they can get back to normal life: “Is the science in Israel different than the science here in the United States of America?” She continued:
I for one would like something to look forward to and to hope for, because if getting the vaccine means that just nothing changes and we have to wait another few years until everyone gets it — there’s already a lot of people not getting it. We’re already having a messaging problem getting people to take this vaccine. So I’m over Dr. Fauci. I think we need to have more people giving more opinions and I honestly quite frankly I think the Biden administration should remove him and put someone else in place that maybe does understand science or can talk to other countries about how we can be more like these places that are doing this successfully.
This is all 100 percent spot on. Twitter went nuts, not over all these completely reasonable points that COVID-19 does not act differently on Israelis and that vaccines are a basic scientifically validated tool for addressing infectious diseases, but at McCain’s comment that “the Biden administration should remove [Fauci] and put someone else in place that maybe does understand science.”
What is science? It is a search for demonstratable material facts. It is the process by which we validate observable natural processes. Or, as the Science Council defines it: “Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.” Science can absolutely find out what percentage of people who get X vaccine will have Y immune response. That’s its job.
If Fauci acted as a scientist, he would clearly communicate what scientists have observed about COVID-19, which in many cases is the opposite of the panicked media narrative he helps produce. What Fauci does is not science. It is public manipulation in the name of science. His entire professional history has not been one of testing observable phenomena and accurately reporting the results. It has been in wearing a lab coat while playing politics.
Let’s just look at a sampling of his long anti-science history to demonstrate this.
1. Singing in Church Not OK, Protesting In Streets — I Can’t Say
During a House hearing on the pandemic, in response to a question whether protests at which people chanted and screamed slogans contributed to virus spread, Fauci responded, “I’m not in a position to determine what the government can do in a forceful way.” Yet he gave precisely a “position to determine what the government can do in a forceful way” in a public statement about singing in church: “My recommendation still holds that the choirs should refrain from singing. When you sing and you protect your voice, the aerosols of the virus come out.”
Coronavirus doesn’t know what people are screaming, chanting, or singing. It either does or does not function the same way regardless of the content of the message it allegedly accompanies out of people’s mouths. Science could offer useful information about this question. Fauci doesn’t appear to know. Instead, he just shoots from the hip — and hits people Democrats love to target politically. Oops?
2. ‘I Have Confidence In the U.K.’s Rushed Vaccine’
In December, Fauci again presented his forked tongue. After sparking uproar with his comments saying the United Kingdom’s first-to-market vaccine process was “rushed” and the data not well-scrutinized, Fauci reversed himself the same day and claimed to “have a great deal of confidence in what the U.K. does.” That’s not what he had said a few hours earlier, but whatever, it’s just billions of dollars and lives in the balance, right?
3. Endless Double-Dealing on School Shutdowns
As I noted previously, “On Nov. 30, reporter Jordan Schactel chronicled Fauci’s constant lies, hedging, purposeful vagueness, and self-contradictions about the single issue of school shutdowns.” No joke: Schactel documents that Fauci called for school shutdowns, then said school shutdowns should depend on local spread, then said schools should mostly be online, then said open if local spread is low, then said close local industry while opening schools, then said schools should be physically closed, then said he has always supported open schools!
Gee, his public communication of “the science” makes so much sense, especially when numerous foreign first-world nations have had their schools largely open and in-person since last May due to its well-documented safety. I guess American kids are somehow all weaker than Danish and Australian kids? Or maybe the real disease is the infectious disease “experts” corporate media is saturating their parents’ and politicians’ brains with.
4. Cloth Masks Don’t Work — Except to Control People
Every corporate outlet has at this point retconned an explanation for Fauci’s well-publicized early position, consistent with peer-reviewed and randomized-controlled trial research, that mass cloth mask-wearing is not necessary or significantly helpful at reducing coronavirus transmission. The narrative seems to be that he was lying to keep Americans from buying all the masks away from health-care workers, and implicitly that lying to Americans is okay, even good.
Regardless, it is clear that Fauci, at one end of his two opposite positions on this, was not telling “the science.” In March, he said on “60 Minutes,” “There’s no reason people should be walking around with a mask. Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not proven to be the perfect protection that people think that it is.” Although there is good-quality scientific evidence to back up this statement, he soon reversed himself and became a major mask apologist — but only when the TV cameras are on.
5. Americans Simply Can’t Handle the Truth
In December, after the presidential election, Fauci openly told The New York Times that he tells Americans things he knows are false about COVID-19 in an attempt to manipulate us.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85,” he said. “…We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
What else has he lied about us to? And why did admitting this not result in his immediate firing? Does Joe Biden support lying to Americans to stampede them into his policy preferences?
Fauci should have been fired long ago for his long history of failing to conduct and oversee effective scientific research while politicizing it, and for his open cheerleading of the utter destruction of American lives, hopes, plans, dreams, and freedoms so he can dance on America’s funeral pyre while having CNN film it. Lockdowns of the healthy have long been known to be utterly ineffective at changing the course of infectious diseases while imposing horrific costs. Fauci is therefore scientifically and morally bankrupt.
McCain is right: Fauci should be fired.
