Former COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci gave closed-door testimony before Congress last week, so it’s time yet again for the Fauci Follies!
The pint-size patron saint of the failed restrictionist policies that lefties and COVID crazies love simply can’t admit he’s lost a massive argument with reality.
The Not-So-Good Doctor got off to a weak start in DC, surprising House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) with “how much he doesn’t recall” from the start of the pandemic.
How convenient!
Fauci, after all, led the effort in the early days of the pandemic to quash the idea (now regarded as probable by the feds) that COVID sprang from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — throwing his considerable weight behind efforts to smear and suppress anyone who dared to dissent.
That’s after he admitted in private he took it seriously.
And before COVID even hit, he was passing funds to the WIV via the EcoHealth Alliance as the NIH helped pay for gain-of-function research there.
All great stuff to forget.
Then there’s the anti-COVID policies he championed: social distancing and vaccine mandates for schools and businesses.
On some of it, Fauci seems finally to have come clean. Per Wenstrup, he “claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come.”
No shock there: He and his cronies encouraged draconian rules around vaccines that don’t meaningfully stop transmission or infection, even as the medical establishment did everything it could to make talking about their (real but thankfully rare) side effects taboo.
On social distancing, it seems he’s admitted the whole thing was completely fake from the start.
The idea was everyone staying six feet away from each other would slow the virus spread.
From that flowed the “need” to close businesses, shut schools, and generally immiserate average Americans.
Yet, per Fauci (in Wenstrup’s words), the 6′ guidelines “sort of just appeared” without meaningful scientific input and “likely not based on scientific data.”
No kidding: The idea initially came from a high-schoolers 2006 science project (it placed third, by the way).
So, because of something Fauci now admits was totally made up, unimaginable harm was done — and yet he’s utterly unrepentant.
Perhaps the most terrible effect of this unscientific diktat was the massive academic and psychological damage it did to kids kept out of school for weeks and months on end.
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Reading and math scores plummeted.
As of 2022, 8th graders had lost two decades — two decades! — of progress, the deepest drop ever.
For Fauci? No big deal!
According to Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), he’s “still not convinced that there was learning loss” at all, that it’s “still really open for discussion.”
No, Tony, it’s not: The policies you backed did damage to a generation of kids — damage concentrated among poorer, black, and Latino students.
No wonder you lie; how else could you live with yourself?
It’s beyond clear by now that Fauci didn’t just get everything wrong about COVID it was possible to get wrong while treating anyone who disagreed like a Satan-worshipper.
He’s a cold-blooded sociopath, pure and simple.
The closed-door testimony is only the start; he’s slated to speak at a public hearing as well.
There’s no way to make Fauci pay for all the vast damage he’s done, which as our Douglas Murray notes extends to shattering the public’s “faith in institutions. And faith in science.”
But if he can’t be prosecuted, he at least should be shamed as a villain greater than the hero he once played.