Editors at the Washington Examiner have nothing nice to say about the nation’s leading COVID scold as he retires from government work.
“I represent science” was the arrogant response of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, after senators had the temerity to do their oversight jobs and question his decision to spend tax dollars on gain of function research at the same Wuhan lab where COVID-19 likely originated.
Believing himself to be the living embodiment of science, Fauci has claimed ultimate authority to set policy, apparently for as long as anyone anywhere has a single case of COVID-19. “This is a public health matter, not a judicial matter,” Fauci whined when a federal judge overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s travel mask mandate this spring.
Never mind that Democrats in Congress had voted to end their COVID-19 emergency declaration a month earlier so they could attend President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union speech unmasked. Fauci never criticized that blatantly political decision. It was always abundantly clear that politics, not science, lay behind his pronouncements.
It wasn’t science that led Fauci to downplay the efficacy of masks when the virus began to spread, saying, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” only to reverse himself weeks later and eventually call for double-masking.
It wasn’t science that led Fauci to move the goal posts on herd immunity from a 60% to an 80% vaccination rate.
Nor was it science that led Fauci to pooh-pooh suggestions that a lab in Wuhan, China, the region where COVID-19 first broke out and where researchers were studying COVID strains, might have been responsible for allowing the virus to leak and escape into the rest of the world. …
… Science is not Fauci. Indeed, it’s fair to say Fauci is more of a career bureaucrat than a scientist.
