Years from now, long after I’m gone, someone will write a really good, balanced account of the Trump Administration and hopefully will end up saying what I’m going to say right now, which is this: If you want to keep a majority of the public on your side, the one thing you don’t do is make an enemy out of Anthony Fauci. You just don’t.
First of all, you don’t make an enemy out of Fauci because Americans like their doctors. Remember the old joke, ‘what do you call 500 lawyers under the sea?’ We don’t have a joke like that about doctors.
Second, Fauci’s work on AIDS made him the single, most influential scientist in the medical community, in particular when it came to understanding how viral diseases attack and overwhelm the body’s immune system. Covid-19 happens to be a viral disease. Duhhh….
Has Fauci ever made mistakes in his work? Of course he has. But that’s because figuring out any kind of scientific process is always an iterative process – you go from what you know to what you don’t know and eventually you get it right.
I can understand why Trump’s initial reaction to the virus was to downplay the threat. Because even though the reports coming out of China were dire, maybe we would luck out the way we lucked out with Ebola and the problem would just fade away.
It didn’t. It got much worse, and we had a real Pandemic on our hands.
What was Trump’s response to the problem? He got up at a political rally in February and announced that the virus would “be gone” by April as soon as the weather warmed up.
What Trump should have done as soon as he learned that the virus had entered the United States, was to sit down with Fauci and come up with a plan agreeable to both of them. But such a move would have required Trump to let someone other than himself provide the guidance for the government’s pandemic response. And if we have learned one thing about Trump’s Presidential tenure, it’s that he would never, ever let anyone else take charge of any issue, whether he knew the first thing about the problem or not.
From the moment that Fauci publicly disagreed with Trump about the severity and risks of Covid-19, the President and the country’s chief expert on viral disease were at odds. This situation can only be seen as the worst and most dangerous mistake of Trump’s Presidential years.
Unfortunately, the mistake has now been compounded by various Trump political wannabees who are beginning to line up for the Great Race in 2024. Chief among them is Rand Paul (R-KY) who has been publicly vilifying Fauci as a misinformed, left-wing zealot or worse. Rand and other Republicans have been using Fauci as a stalking horse for fundraising, going after him, in particular, over the issue of mask mandates, which the GOP continues to oppose because such restrictions rob Americans of their ‘freedoms’ and their ‘rights.’
In that regard, I would like one of the idiots who claims we should be able to decide for ourselves what to do to protect ourselves from harm to explain how come we have speed limits on all our roads. Shouldn’t I be able to decide for myself about how fast I can drive? Isn’t that an issue of personal freedom no different than whether or not I must wear a mask?
Know what? Enough is enough. None of those antediluvian, anti-science jack-offs pandering to the lowest intellectual denominator in the human species deserves one second of our time to make their so-called thoughts known.
What does deserve all our attention, all our support and all our promotion is an open letter written and published by Ezekiel Emanuel and signed by nearly 300 medical and public health professionals, including Nobel laureates and other distinguished scientists in the medical field. The final paragraph reads: “We deplore the personal attacks on Dr. Fauci. The criticism is inaccurate, unscientific, ill-founded in the facts and, increasingly, motivated by partisan politics. It is a distraction from what should be the national focus – working together to finally overcome a pandemic that is killing about 500,000 people a year. We are grateful for Dr. Fauci’s dedication and tireless efforts to help the country through this pandemic and other health crises.”
I think everyone should copy this letter, send it to as many friends and associates as possible, and then send it with all the signatories to their elected, national representatives who need to get up and support Anthony Fauci in the strongest, possible terms.
We can always find a scientific answer to disease but finding a scientific response to stupidity is not so easily done.