It’s official: A mere 889 days since we were told we had 15 days to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci told America he’ll only be around for between another 101 to 131 days.
So soon? Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, announced Monday that he’ll only be the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the history of the United States for four more months at most, saying he’ll be stepping down in December. Whatever will we do without him telling us we have permission to do it?
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to have led the NIAID, an extraordinary institution, for so many years and through so many scientific and public health challenges,” Fauci said in a statement posted on the NIAID website. “I am very proud of our many accomplishments.”
Fauci, who is 81, said he isn’t retiring, but instead leaving to “pursue the next chapter” in his career. Unfortunately for him, that “next chapter” may involve answering a lot of questions about his handling of COVID-19, particularly if the Republicans control Congress after November’s midterms.
As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson noted on his Monday night show, that’s not a chapter of his career Fauci will likely embrace.
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“Is it possible the thoroughly nonpartisan man of medicine has thought about what might happen in November when the Republican Congress takes over? Does he believe that could be bad news for him?” Carlson asked.
“Well, yes, it is possible he believes that because, on some level, even Tony Fauci knows that Tony Fauci is, in fact, a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes,” Carlson said. “So, it’s possible that Tony Fauci might want to resign before he has to explain all of that to a new Congress.
“He might want to get out of town now and move to, say, Cambridge, find a safe place to hide before the reckoning. Just a thought, because, honestly, there’s a lot to answer for.”
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Despite the fact Fauci was “the one religious leader [the left] still revered, their own, even tinier, version of the Dalai Lama,” Carlson said, Fauci — to put it mildly — isn’t viewed as sacrosanct by Americans on the right. Far from it, especially given the startling record of mendacity that Carlson highlighted.
Among his greatest hits? First off, Carlson said, Fauci “admitted to The New York Times that he lied about herd immunity in order to sell more vaccines.”
While this wasn’t his first lie chronologically, it certainly was one of the most telling fibs from Fauci:
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” he told the Times in December of 2020. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
But, as we now know, the goal posts were always moving.
Lie number two? Masks.
First, Fauci said they were useless. Then, he said they were indispensable and that he’d lied to make sure everyday Americans didn’t buy them all up at the beginning of a pandemic.
Except that was a lie, too, according to what he wrote privately: “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [a] virus,” he told Sylvia Burwell, a former Obama-era director of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a February 2020 email, according to Newsweek.
Lie number three might be the most critical, however — because it’s not just the lie that might have covered up the origins of this pandemic, but might also have helped conceal where the next one will come from.
“As your kids were suffocating during gym wearing a mask, Tony Fauci knew they didn’t work — and then there’s this, maybe his most notable crime,” Carlson said. “He didn’t simply downplay and obfuscate the origins of the pandemic — apparently in conjunction with the Chinese government. No. Tony Fauci covered up evidence that he, Tony Fauci, helped create that virus in the first place.”
That’s because he insisted, under oath before Congress and under questioning from GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, that the NIH had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?” Paul asked during a Fauci appearance on Capitol Hill in July 2021.
“Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement,” Fauci said. “This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function. What was — let me finish.”
“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans,” Paul shot back. “You’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?”
“Yeah, that is correct — and Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci replied.
As Carlson noted, Sen. Paul is also “an actual doctor who’s not a B.S. artist, who asks simple questions and demands straightforward answers.”
Fauci, meanwhile, “was lying in that clip. He knew he was lying,” Carlson said.
But don’t take Carlson’s word for it. Take numerous reports by the left-of-center investigative journalism outlet The Intercept — which said, among other things, that “[s]cientists working under a 2014 NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses combined the genetic material from a parent coronavirus known as WIV1 with other viruses.”
The outlet reported that it spoke to 11 other virologists and noted that “[s]even said that the work appears to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research.”
As Carlson noted, gain-of-function research is “not allowed in this country, so they were offshoring it in their various labs, including one owned by the Chinese government.” And all the while, Dr. Fauci was lying to our face about it.
When the new Congress is sworn into office on Jan. 3 of next year, Fauci will be gone — regardless of which party is in control. So, roughly 1,000 days after the phrase “15 days to slow the spread” took its place in American history on March 16, 2020, we won’t have the career government bureaucrat around to tell us what we ought to be doing.
Republicans need to make sure that “gone” doesn’t mean “forgotten,” however.
You may not be convinced, as Carlson is, that Fauci “has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.”
What we do know is that, for the better part of two years, Fauci stood at the head of a pandemic bureaucracy that dictated how Americans could live their lives, with control over how federal resources would be allocated in a way not seen since the end of World War II.
And, as Fauci stood at the head of this mammoth COVID-enabled bureaucracy, he lied about the nature and the potential origins of the virus, as well as the efficacy of the health measures used to fight it. Not only that, he lied about it repeatedly — and then lied about the lying.
If that kind of power isn’t held to account, it will be wielded again — and abused in exactly the same ways.
America can’t afford to let that happen.
