Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been making up the rules as they go, with no regard for the scientific data they claim to respect.
We have known for months that the COVID-19 vaccines not only prevent infection but also significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and its variants. This means that fully vaccinated adults should not need to follow long-standing restrictions aimed at reducing the virus’s spread. Fauci admitted this week that he, just like every other health expert in the country, knew that this was true but continued to push coronavirus restrictions for vaccinated adults anyway.
“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals,” Fauci said when asked why he has still been wearing masks in public settings despite being fully inoculated against COVID-19. “But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”
Fauci’s desire to wait for the CDC’s new guidance and roll it out at the right time might have been understandable if he hadn’t spent the past year lecturing people who don’t “follow the science.” But clearly, the science hasn’t been driving Fauci’s messaging. Otherwise, he would have started encouraging vaccinated adults to live their lives again restriction-free as soon as their two-week inoculation period was up. Instead, he did the opposite, spreading doubt about the vaccines’ effectiveness along the way.
Now that vaccine hesitancy is evidently threatening to derail the federal government’s vaccination efforts, Fauci has changed his tune, and the CDC has changed its guidance. Their argument is that the science “evolved” in the past few weeks, prompting a guidance reversal. But that is a lie. The science has always been the same: Studies published back in March and April proved COVID-19 vaccines protected recipients from variants and prevented transmission. The only thing that has evolved is the public and its unwillingness to put up with these restrictions any longer.
Hence Fauci’s about-face. He, like any good bureaucrat, has always cared more about how the public responds to coronavirus guidance than about the quality or relevance of the actual guidance itself. It didn’t matter whether the guidance was actually in line with “the science” so long as people accepted it and obeyed.
Sen. Rand Paul put it best when he said that this has all been “theater.” There was no scientific need for Fauci to wear a mask after being fully vaccinated; it was just for show. That makes Fauci one of the most anti-science people in the room.
