Move over, Anthony Fauci. There’s a new pandemic hype man in the greenroom.
President Biden was virtue signaling to the media when he said he wanted Fauci to remain in his position as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Journalists adore him, even more so now because he’s openly complaining about former President Donald Trump. But there’s someone else whom the media are citing with increasing frequency as an expert on the coronavirus.
His name is Michael Osterholm, and if you say it in the mirror three times, the former Biden campaign adviser will appear with a face mask while properly social distancing.
He’s everywhere these days, and it’s because he has the most dire, grave things to say about the spread of the virus, which effectively functions as an aphrodisiac for cable news hosts.
On Friday on MSNBC, Osterholm, the director for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said one of the new variants of the coronavirus will likely lead to an exponential increase of infections.
“I think we’re going to see the number of cases build dramatically over the upcoming weeks, far surpassing what we’ve had already,” he said.
Far surpassing! (By the way, when do we get to start blaming the current president for failing to control the virus?)
This is standard Osterholm talk. On Thursday on CNN — he gets around — he said that the next 14 weeks will hold “something that we haven’t even come close to experiencing yet.”
That same day, he told the Hill that the downward trajectory in cases “is the calm before the real storm” and that, actually, “the darkest days of the pandemic are just ahead of us.”
Who knew?
Well, Osterholm did. Or at least he’s been saying these things for months. He’s the one who was cheerleading for another six-week lockdown nationwide immediately after the election. That alarmism hasn’t abated in the 12 weeks since.
He told liberal writer Ezra Klein at the New York Times just Thursday that “what we need to do right now is to plan for the worst-case scenario.” That scenario, he said, was “most likely case.”
Are you scared yet? The media and Osterholm say you should be. Democrats get more of what they want when you are.
