Saturday, December 26, 2020

One Thing I've Noticed About Dr Fauci

He has a history of misspeaking, but every time he's caught at it, he does what narcissists do -- he tries to convince you that he didn't tell a lie, he was actually doing you a favor, but you just didn't see it.

Just before Christmas, he explanied that his latest whapper was because we aren't ready for the truth.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has long cited 60% to 70% as the level of COVID infection/vaccination the country would need to achieve herd immunity — for the disease to fade and life to return to normal, writes the New York Times' Donald G. McNeil Jr.

"I n a telephone interview," McNeil continues, "Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goalposts."

"He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks." Fauci's confession:

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

This is consistent with his remarks in July, when he said he'd earlier told us we didn't need to wear a mask, but it was for our own good:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, says he doesn't regret advising Americans against wearing masks early on in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell published in InStyle, Fauci defended his credibility and decision-making in response to recent attempts from the White House to undermine him.

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs," he said.

Fauci's main problem seems to be that, at the bitter end of his career, he's stumbled into 15 minutes of fame, and it's going to his head. The reporters fawn over him, he blurts without having anything to say, and cetainly without any reflectioni on how his renmarks may be understood. So, when he needs to, he just finds a reason to justify whatever ill-advised statements he'd blithered before.

The problem is that what he's doing now is consistent with what Newsom and other authorities are doing, which is, faced with lockdown measures that have been completely ineffective, he's throwing out entirely new sets of bogus numbers to justify sticking even more strictly with what's not working. .

And he'll have Biden's ear.