Dr. Anthony Fauci is butting heads with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem after she said he was “wrong a lot.” But Noem is correct, and the sooner we stop hearing from Fauci, the better.
Whatever benefits once resulted from Fauci’s public appearances have long since evaporated. It’s not just that he undermined his own value by lying about the effectiveness of masks in stopping the virus in March 2020. Today, with cases plummeting across the country as vaccination efforts ramp up, there’s little reason to keep putting him in front of the camera.
Fauci was wrong that South Dakota would see massive hospitalizations. Fauci was wrong when he praised New York last July, as anyone who was paying attention could already see at the time. If the numbers don’t lie, as Fauci said in response to Noem’s criticism, then what is his justification for saying the state with the second-highest death rate per capita “did it correctly” while Gov. Andrew Cuomo was covering up nursing home deaths that his own order had caused?
When Fauci isn’t playing partisan politics, criticizing Republicans while propping up obviously failing Democrats, he’s spending his time undermining the vaccination drive. While President Biden promises that there will be enough vaccines available for everyone by late July, Fauci says that “normalcy” will not return until at least Christmas or maybe sometime in 2022.
What is the normalcy Fauci envisions? You will still be wearing masks, even if you have already been vaccinated. Restaurants and movie theaters will still be capacity-limited. And, of course, the new strains of the virus are “maybe even more dangerous” than the ones that led Fauci to urge perpetual lockdowns.
New daily cases are now lower than they have been in about three months. Nearly 80 million vaccine doses have been administered, with 8% of the population being fully inoculated against the virus. That number will keep rising unless people decide there is no point in getting the vaccine if their governors are just going to listen to Fauci and keep everything shut down into 2022.
Vaccinations will end the pandemic. There will be a return to actual normalcy, not to the warped view of normalcy Fauci has talked about. Fauci should return to being another faceless bureaucrat well before 2022, and the sooner it happens, the better it is for the country.
