Why Is Dr Fauci Unhappy?

Dr Fauci had an extended interview yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he displayed irritattion at his critics in a pattern that emerged last week when he said of Tucker Carlson and others, "I'm trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people." Yesterday, he expanded on this:

BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect–

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

BRENNAN: –From President Trump?

FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean–

FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying.

BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that’s- that’s unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people’s lives. Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.

This is all about. . . President Trump? The elephant in the room now is that over roughly a year since Biden has been in office, with vaccines available over that entire period, there will have been about the same number of COVID deaths by January 20 as occurred under Trump. And the visible face of the COVID crisis since it began, under both presidents, has been Tony Fauci. who's been doing his job and just trying to save lives, except that his record shows he hasn't been especially good at precisely that.

But his version is that he's a scapegoat to deflect from Trump's failures, except that Biden's have been precisely the same. But criticizing Tony Fauci in any of this is criticizing science.

The problem is that hypothetical 2024 matchup polls show Trump beating Biden handily. Fauci sees sentiment against him as a surrogate for pro-Trump sentiment. He's got that right. I've seen surmise from a few poll watchers that the Delta COVID variant fed dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the crisis.

But this means that hyping the new Omicron variant now will simply compound the problem. And scolding the plebs for not wearing masks or being unvaxxed, or worse, imposing new lockdowns, will only increase resentment and won't fix the problem.

At some point, even Biden will have to recognize that one good way to stop his slide will be to fire Fauci. He's long overstayed his 15 minutes. Even if nothing improves, it will buy Biden some time.