Dr Fauci must be held responsible for errors: Devine

In his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to “stand up for the truth and beat the lies.”

So let’s start by being brutally honest about Dr Anthony Fauci, who has been behind some of the most damaging misinformation about COVID-19.

At the very least, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to Biden is oblivious to the facts and is inclined to change his mind.

He is the man who dictated coronavirus policy in the Trump administration. If any mistakes have been made, as the Biden administration claims, it is the Fauci’s.

Yet, surprisingly, Fauci told CNN on Friday that a “lack of frankness” from the Trump administration had cost Americans their lives.

But if people’s lives were really on the line last year, why has he waited until now to tell us?

Fall for another convenient lie of the usual streak, which has deceived us on everything from masks to collective immunity.

Even if you decide that these are not lies but errors in judgment on the part of the Fauci, they have had life-threatening consequences.

Take, for example, Fauci’s serenity on January 21 of last year, when he assured us that the virus that was convulsing China at the time “is not something that citizens of the United States should know about. ‘worry”.

To be fair, the pandemic has caught a lot of people in the dark, but the problem with Fauci is that he’s still so sure of himself.

The following week he did it again, vehemently opposing Donald Trump’s proposed flight ban from China, which Biden at the time called “xenophobia.”

It was January 28, and Trump had asked his trade advisor, Peter Navarro, to enter the situation room to convince Fauci and other officials that the China travel ban would save lives.

“The guy I fought the most that day was Fauci,” Navarro told me on Sunday. “He was categorically opposed to the travel ban. All he said was that the travel restrictions are not working.

Navarro pushed back: “If you prevent 20,000 Chinese nationals from entering every day and some are infected, are you telling me that is not going to spread the virus? It was like talking to a brick wall.

The next day Navarro wrote a note outlining three options: If you don’t do anything and it’s okay, it’s OK; if you do the travel ban and there is no danger, you lose a few million dollars; but if you do nothing and there is danger, the risk is a million American lives and over $ 2 trillion in damage.

“I have everyone in the working group paper with the memo and. . . it made everyone support the president, ”Navarro said.

Trump imposed the travel ban on Jan.31, and Fauci went on to blame the action for saving lives.

But, says Navarro, “If Biden had been president and Fauci had been the main adviser, we would probably have a million more Americans dead.”

Then there was Fauci’s advice on masks.

In March, when the coronavirus was decimating New York City, he told us masks were unnecessary.

“Right now in the United States, people shouldn’t be walking around with masks,” he said at “60 minutes.”

Three months later, he did a backflip: “The masks are working. . . to keep you from infecting someone else. . . but also, it can protect you to some extent.

Posing by his pool in sunglasses and fancy socks last June, Fauci told InStyle magazine that he doesn’t regret lying:

“We were told … we have a serious problem with the lack of PPE and masks for healthcare providers [and decided] we really need to keep the masks for the people who need them the most. ”

It was a noble lie, so he didn’t feel the need to apologize or even feel a little ashamed.

But nothing was more corrosive to public confidence in medical experts at the height of the pandemic.

If Fauci was lying about the masks, what else would he be lying about?

It turns out that he also lied about collective immunity.

In December, Fauci admitted to the New York Times that he had “slowly but deliberately shifted the targets” on the percentage of the population that needed to be vaccinated before “herd immunity” to COVID-19 was achieved.

“When the polls indicated that only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then when more recent polls said 60 percent or more would take it, I was like, “I can push that a little bit,” so I went to 80, 85, “he said.

Fauci isn’t precise with the numbers, which is odd for a scientist who claims to care about the facts.

For example, on Biden’s first day last week, Fauci said we would have “100 million people vaccinated in the first 100 days” and clarified that he meant both “primary hits and boosters,” a total of 200 million shots in the arms.

On Sunday, he was forced to “clarify this, because there was a little misunderstanding. What we are talking about are 100 million shots at individuals.

The 100 million target is wrong anyway, since we are already there. In the week leading up to the unveiling, 912,000 shots were administered per day, according to the Bloomberg News tracker. On the day of the inauguration, it was 1.6 million shots.

Last week, Fauci said how “liberating” it was to work for Biden now. “One of the new things about this administration is this: if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Just say you don’t know the answer.

This would suit Fauci because, to an expert, he never seems to know the answer to anything.

Cuo’s ‘arrogant’ pot

Governor Andrew Cuomo was indulging in his favorite pastime on Friday, boasting.

“Never be pushy with COVID,” he says, proud of the catchy alliteration.

“Truer words have never been spoken. I will take credit for this quote. ”

Maybe he should have taken his own advice before accepting an Emmy and writing a book praising the nation’s worst COVID response.

This is what you call arrogant, in every sense of the word.