Rochelle Walensky

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.

Another week in the spring of 2023, another round of claims that the 2024 Republican primary is over before it has even begun. As regular readers will know, this newsletter’s firmest 2024 conviction is that it’s far too soon for such definitive declarations. Trump may not be like other presidential contenders, but anyone ready to hand out prizes should remind themselves who was leading the pack at this stage in previous cycles. Driving the sense that it’s all but over is a growing consensus that Ron DeSantis doesn’t have what it takes: he lacks charisma, he doesn’t know what ideological lane to occupy, he has made the fatal mistake of trying to beat Trump at his own game.

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.

Don't call it a comeback. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, there were signs that if Republicans had success, Covid would be roaring back with all its former aspects of fearmongering from the Democratic media complex, requiring more spending, more regulation and the return of rules Americans previously found anathema. This would serve the purpose of said complex in numerous ways: helping them push back against Republican efforts to end those supposedly "emergency" authorities and bureaucratic programs that now must find ways to sustain themselves. Everything from proxy voting to government vaccine requirements to the handwaving justification for the student loan bailout would be at risk, if the fiction that we are in the midst of constant emergency could not be maintained.

For a brief moment, America was the cheering mission control room in every action movie. You know the one: the flight controllers stand there nervously, waiting to hear from the wayward rocket. Then, suddenly, the radio crackles: “Houston,” says a voice, “this is Gemini One...we did it. A federal judge in Florida just struck down the mask mandate.” And everyone goes wild. From out of claustrophobic plane cabins and sterile airports this week came unlikely scenes of jubilation as passengers tore off their masks and breathed freely once again.

At the start of this year, I took a flight from London to DC. For its duration, I wore a cloth mask that I had been given for free at a bookstore — the kind of mask that Most Experts now say does not meaningfully prevent viral spread. At one point, shortly after I’d finished eating, a tall male flight attendant asked me to pull my mask up — I, of course, did as asked. A few hours later, while the lights were dimmed and I was drifting off for a nap, my mask slipped to just below my nose, the same flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pamphlet from the airline.

Face masks are forever. If you blinked, or weren’t paying attention, you might have missed it. If you weren’t tuning into CDC director Rochelle Walensky, then you didn’t hear it at all. Several media outlets picked up on something Walensky subtly added to a statement about mask efficacy. You probably weren’t paying attention to them either, which is what they are counting on. The CDC director endorsed the idea of permanent masking, during seasonal communicable diseases, including the seasonal flu or common cold. In an HHS statement on YouTube, Walensky sneakily slips “protection from the flu, or coronavirus” into her statement. “Whether it’s an infection from the flu, coronavirus, or even just the common cold.

For four years the mainstream media kept a tally of every lie President Trump ever told. Fact-checkers like the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and CNN’s Daniel Dale centered their lives around Well Ackchyually-ing Trump at every opportunity. How times have changed! President Biden’s lies are constantly written off as either harmless gaffes or exaggerations. Even the most blatant falsehoods from Joe receive little or no criticism from the press. Instead, journalists speculate on what they think the 78-year-old probably meant to say. During the Trump administration, fact-checking hubs like Snopes and Reuters had no problem issuing black and white verdicts on the president’s statements. Suddenly there are 46 shades of gray.