Julie Kelly
amgreatness.com
Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried-And Failed-To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project.
It appears that Anthony Fauci’s 15 months of fame are just about up.
The ubiquitous infectious disease “expert” who became a household name and the most powerful man in the country—or is it the world?—last spring, finally wore out his welcome, even by the friendliest of hosts. For the first time in recent memory, the doctor did not make his morning rounds on the Sunday talk shows. Last week’s weekly press briefing by Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, featuring Fauci, only earned 19,021 views, a 50 percent drop in viewership since April.
The American public, for the most part, is suffering from Fauci Fatigue; his favorability rating has dropped from 68 per cent one year ago to 54 per cent now. Forty per cent of U.S. voters say they’ve lost confidence in Fauci over the past year. His latest tap dance about the origins of the virus while defending the trustworthiness of Chinese researchers does little to restore confidence in his integrity or self-proclaimed expertise.
House Republicans introduced a symbolic but futile bill to oust Fauci from his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Some even imagine Fauci and his fellow COVID-19 propagandists and profiteers will face charges for the incalculable damage they have inflicted on the country under the guise of virus mitigation.
But I have bad news for anyone hoping Fauci will pay a price for his incompetence, misdirection, and in many instances, straight-up malfeasance: he won’t.
Just like any number of official doomsayers, especially those who feed off the public trough, Fauci will never be held accountable for what he’s done. Last March, I compared Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx to Michael Mann, the famous climate scientist and author of the infamous “hockey stick” model that showed a massive spike in global temperatures purportedly caused by human activity. The Penn State University professor is considered a rock star for his nonstop climate fear-mongering which has influenced public policies around the world, all in service of chasing the global warming bogeyman that has yet to decimate all the coastal cities, kill off all the polar bears, or melt all the glaciers—just to name a few environmental catastrophes we were promised.
Further, Mann has been exposed as a scam artist; his graphs, like so many climate and coronavirus models, were fraudulent tools designed to scare the public into compliance for political purposes. It was the same approach instituted at the start of the pandemic hysteria; alleged experts relying on flimsy data quickly concocted “models” predicting death and destruction on a massive scale. Those models, presented to Donald Trump in late March 2020 by Fauci and Birx, led to an extended “flatten the curve” shutdown—an extreme measure that was totally ineffective if not counterproductive, resulting in irreversible human costs we won’t fully grasp for years or perhaps decades.
But like Mann, Fauci will face no comeuppance. “[P]rophets of nonexistent doom are often cheered as heroes no matter how many times they’ve been wrong,” I warned in a March 2020 column. “It all has an eerie ring to those of us who’ve covered the climate movement.”
Fauci, like Mann, will remain an icon on the Left; he’ll eventually exchange his federal sinecure for a cushy position at a prestigious university or comfy, taxpayer-paid retirement. Fauci will win awards and likely land a lucrative book deal. Perhaps he will help write a screenplay where he plays the savior to Donald Trump’s villain. Maybe an Oscar or Nobel Peace Prize is in his future.
But not only will Fauci escape formal punishment, but he also will never express an ounce of regret for what he’s done. He will never apologize to America’s youth, whose futures he has hobbled. He won’t account for the lost scholarships, stolen rites of passage, and academic delays, let alone the depression, loneliness, and hopelessness suffered by millions of children and teens.
He’ll never apologize to the bankrupted business owners or the families of helpless nursing home residents who died of “failure to thrive” after lockdowns kept them away from loved ones for months on end. He’ll never say he’s sorry to someone like Dr. Scott Atlas, whom Fauci repeatedly maligned even though Atlas was right about everything from the uselessness of face masks to the benefits of herd immunity. (Atlas, unlike Fauci, gets choked up talking about the human toll of lockdowns.)
Fauci, of course, isn’t the only one who will whistle past the graveyard, literal and figurative, of one of the greatest man-made catastrophes in modern history. Governors of both parties won’t face a fair reckoning, either. Sure, some might lose reelection bids or recall challenges, but they’ll never take the stand in a court of law to defend their criminal conduct. Ditto for the news media, the most poisonous factor of American life, which once again acted as the Democratic Party’s propaganda organ rather than a much-needed sceptic.
ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl over the weekend admitted the media dismissed the idea the virus originated in a Wuhan lab because Trump and his administration suggested it was true. “Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them because Trump was saying so much else that was just out of control,” Karl said on the network’s Sunday show. Exactly what Trump said that was “out of control,” Karl didn’t elaborate.
Others to blame who will escape culpability include Big Tech censors, the credentialed public health class, college administrators, public teachers’ unions, and every petty neighbourhood tyrant who made life unnecessarily miserable for nearly 18 months. These folks, not anti-maskers, are the real Neanderthals, the 21st century’s version of the Flat Earth Society—ignoramuses or frauds, take your pick—who laughably thought humans could socially distance themselves from a mostly harmless respiratory virus while at the same time discrediting every workable cure from hydroxychloroquine to sunshine and exercise.
The only upside, if there is any, will be the realization that the offspring of COVID’s misery merchants can never be trusted again. Never again can we allow the likes of power-hungry, mendacious megalomaniacs like Fauci or Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer or Dr. Leana Wen tell us what to do. Their legacies should be ones of shame. They should be cited as cautionary tales, not success stories.
Unfortunately for our children and our grandparents, that is the only price they will ever pay.
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