Covid

Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator. Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality. Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off. https://twitter.

The Biden administration officially ends the Covid-19 public health emergency today. Some of the last national-level Covid policies, such as vaccine requirements for federal workers and contractors as well as for foreign air travelers to the US, are on their way out. It's a belated recognition that most Americans have learned to live with Covid. Yet some of the figures associated with the most heavy-handed Covid policies have already tried rewriting history. Anthony Fauci recently abjured responsibility for Covid lockdowns, claiming merely to be downstream of the CDC. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” he said. “Never. I never did.

According to the calculations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 92.2 percent of American adults have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But a new report published this month found that as many as one in four Americans have never received a shot. The finding casts doubt on the role that vaccines played in getting the pandemic under control, and further incriminates the CDC’s pandemic response, undermining its trustworthiness. The report was prepared by the Covid States Project, a joint initiative of Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University. They surveyed almost 25,000 people across all fifty states and DC with state-level representative quotas for sex, age, and race.

Over Presidents Day weekend, Donald J. Trump, our most beloved former president — according to him anyway — posted the following to his Truth Social account: “Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, closed up Florida & its beaches, loves RINOS Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove (disasters ALL!), is backed by Globalist’s Club for NO Growth, Lincoln Pervert Project, & 'Uninspired' Koch — And it only gets worse from there. He is a RINO in disguise!, whose Poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck Ron!” This is as good a point as any for the launch of Thunderdome 2024, a Republican presidential primary that has all the signs of being even bloodier and more acrimonious than the 2016 contest.

Why would a candidate for the presidency purposefully undermine his greatest achievement in government — one that required the movement of heaven and earth, one that his opponents deemed impossible, but one that he ultimately delivered to the broad benefit of the American people? It seems ridiculous. Yet that is what Donald Trump seems to be doing, in his typically scattershot way. You have to ask: why? Trump, via his TruthSocial account, has been posting at record pace criticizing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — whom he maintains he voted for — as a "globalist," knocking DeSantis for favoring lockdowns (which he didn't) and for pushing people to get vaccinated (which he did).

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.