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Covid is beginning to spike in parts of Europe again — and sewage data indicates rising cases in the US are imminent. Online and on television, talking heads and tweeters are asking, “Where’s Dr. Fauci?”
They’re posing this question to rile up the masses and show that Anthony Fauci’s omnipresence on cable news over the last few months was largely political, and happened in concert with the Biden administration, with whom he appears to be in lockstep agreement on everything from masks to mandates.
It’s a salient point not without merit, but I would take it a step further and ask: who cares where Anthony Fauci is?
Surely it’s a bit hypocritical, especially on the right, to demand that Fauci be fired or at the very least allowed to retire quietly to a life on Dancing with the Stars…and then suddenly start wondering where the good doctor is and why his media appearances have been more limited lately.
Fauci’s legacy will be fused to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the noble lies he told about it and the irreparable damage he helped wreak on public health.
And Biden’s handling of the pandemic, which has not “shut down” the virus, will no doubt be tied to his party’s forthcoming electoral wipeout in the midterms.
The White House must have realized the connection between Fauci as the face of the pandemic and the Democratic Party’s dwindling fortunes. Fauci’s disappearance from the mainstream networks is likely no accident — but the point remains: good riddance, and who cares?
The right got what it wanted — for Anthony Fauci to take his politicized science hemming-and-hawing act and hit the road. The longer we go without hearing from him, the better. The country moved on from Covid-19 long before the White House and the CDC found it to be politically expedient to do so. Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci didn’t so much shut down the virus as start ignoring it in time for the State of the Union.
Should Covid rear its head in the US again, the White House would do itself a favor by keeping Fauci sidelined. He hasn’t done much to help the country react rationally to the possibility of a rising case rate — and he has remained defensively stubborn on the possible origins concerning the virus in China (he still claims the likely origin is zoonotic, despite a lack of evidence to support that thesis).
Most likely, the next time we will hear from Fauci will be when Congress convenes a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic, which was suggested earlier this week. He will get his talking points in about speaking for “the Science,” combative senators like Rand Paul will get their soundbites, the media will have a field day with the food fight. None of it will get us any closer to answers about how the pandemic happened, or why the CDC and Fauci changed their message in the name of science, sometimes almost overnight.
Anthony Fauci has quietly returned to the shady world of gain-of-function and dual-use-of-concern viral research, at least until the next pandemic. Don’t complain about him being gone.
