Who Is Responsible for America's COVID Disaster?

Who Is Responsible for America's COVID Disaster?
By Buck Sexton

Hitting 500,000 COVID-19 worldwide deaths is a grim milestone...

We are now one year into this pandemic, and it's difficult to look at hospitalizations and deaths month after month without feeling like there had to have been a better way to deal with this.

If this is what it looks like when lockdowns and mask mandates are "working," one has to wonder what a more focused protection approach would have yielded.

Earlier this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's favorite lab-coat authoritarian, inscribed his epitaph for our fight against COVID-19 by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos, "I believe that if you look back historically, we've done worse than most any other country, and we're a highly developed, rich country."

Fauci added, "It's so tough to just try to go back and do a metaphorical autopsy on how things went. It was just bad."

As anyone who has been a close observer of this man for the past year knows, this statement is classic Fauci... sanctimonious and deceptive.

Let's start with the most irritating part of his claim: "We've done worse than most any other country." According to John Hopkins University of Medicine's mortality analysis, America has a COVID-19 mortality rate of around 152 per 100,000 of population.

That's high, no doubt... But so are the numbers from the United Kingdom (181), Italy (158), and Belgium (191). Spain is right behind the U.S. at 144, despite enormously costly and intrusive lockdowns, Mexico is at 143, and France is at 126.

So it's simply not fair to say, "according to the data" (which Fauci seems to rely on more as a crutch phrase than anything else) that the U.S. had a markedly worse response to this than any advanced western country of similar size. We are right in line with major European countries, several of which had extreme lockdowns in effect for months.

But who was in charge of all of this? Who was leading America's response to the pandemic? One of the biggest continuing falsehoods of the COVID-19 narrative in America is that Trump refused to "listen to the experts." That's a politicized rewriting of history...

In the crucial beginning of the virus spread, former-President Trump overwhelmingly handed over control of our COVID-19 response to "the experts," and that was Dr. Fauci more than any other person in the country.

As written in the Washington Post last year, when Trump told the American people in late February 2020 that the virus was well under control in the U.S., "he was not lying or playing down more dire information he was being told privately. He was repeating exactly what experts such as Fauci, [Robert] Redfield, and [Nancy] Messonnier were telling him."

Never forget that it was Dr. Fauci who, on March 8, 2020 on CBS News, told the American people at the very beginning of the pandemic explosion:

There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences - people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

Fast-forward a year later, and now Dr. Fauci is telling everyone how much more effective two masks are than one. And you might be wondering, what control group in what scientific study brought about such a revelation? They strapped masks on mannequins in a lab and made some calculations. Here's the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention link to some of the recent studies on this if you want to read it for yourself.

Why is it that Dr. Fauci manages to escape all blame? Throughout history and up to the present, if a general in a theater of war presides over a catastrophe, it's understood that he will be held accountable for that, either through firing or resignation. This is the way accountability with any large bureaucracy has to work, even though everyone is fully aware that no one man is responsible for everything that happens in a war.

Dr. Anthony Fauci defies this norm... His predictions throughout the pandemic have been appallingly wrong. His guidance constantly shifts based on the needs not of health, but politics. His pathetic effort to dance to the teachers unions' required tune on school re-openings is a case in point.

The data is overwhelming, and has been since last summer, that children are at very low risk from COVID-19 and also much less likely than adults to spread it. Nobody disputes this. On top of that, many private and parochial schools across the country have been open, and they're doing just fine.

And millions of "essential workers," like grocery store clerks, mail carriers, and truckers, have been doing their jobs from day one of the pandemic. Why are teachers so special?

It's obvious what's going on here... Fauci won't come out clearly in favor of schools opening right now because the Democrats (and yes, Fauci is one) cannot cross the teachers unions. They need their political muscle and their donations. That children are suffering terribly from school lockdowns doesn't matter enough to the Biden administration to do anything about it.

None of what we've seen from Fauci is surprising... He's the ultimate bureaucrat. But given the amount of power he's been handed over the entire country, maybe we should also demand he be held responsible for the policies that have been, by his own admission, a disaster.

Accountability means Fauci must be fired... But the chances of Biden ousting the Left's favorite totalitarian grandpa are zero.