As he looks ahead to a comfortable retirement, Anthony Fauci is acknowledging one or two things that could have been handled better during his time as the face of America’s COVID response.
Without taking any personal responsibility, of course, the polarizing scientist admitted in an interview that “aspects” were “botched” by the so-called experts.
Fauci admits some mistakes
Fauci’s comments to the Texas Tribune were a predictable mixture of selective amnesia, defensive whining, and outright revisionist history.
He cited ambiguous public health messaging as one mistake, but he justified the constantly shifting guidance, including his notorious flip-flop on masks, as simply the product of “science.”
“Knowledge, evidence and data evolved, and as it evolves you have to be flexible enough to change, and that’s what science is all about, it’s a self-correcting process.”
No remorse
He also said the government mishandled COVID testing. But concerning the authoritarian COVID lockdowns that destroyed the economy and damaged a generation of schoolchildren, Fauci made clear he is totally without remorse, insisting that closing schools was the “right decision at the time.”
During the pandemic, Fauci and his media allies relentlessly attacked skeptics of his measures as anti-science “conspiracy theorists,” but Fauci now says that “no one can deny” that school closures hurt kids.
“It was a right decision at the time and it did have collateral consequences. No one can deny that keeping children out of school has a negative impact on the children,” he said.
Whines about criticism, defends Biden
He also complained about “divisiveness” surrounding the pandemic and said he has become a “boogeyman” for the “far right” which, in Fauci’s eyes, is irrationally obsessed with holding him accountable.
Fauci only recently made the startling admission that he knew his “draconian” — his words — restrictions would have downsides. He emphasized to the Texas Tribune that he is “not a political person” even as he blamed people who refused to take the vaccine for a rise in COVID deaths on Joe Biden’s watch.
“If the country doesn’t want to get vaccinated, the country doesn’t want to wear a mask in an indoor setting, there’s not much the president can do about that,” Fauci said.
Biden recently bragged that the pandemic is “over” thanks to him after Democrats spent months easing restrictions ahead of the midterm elections, but America is only starting to reckon with the damage done by the totalitarianism that Fauci and his friends in the Democratic party forced on the nation.