COVID Goes Away, Trump Comes Back, Part Deux

The biggest story yesterday without a doubt was Dr Fauci's announcement of his resignations from his interlocking positions within the deep state, although he stressed this wasn't "retirement".

Fauci is currently the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.

“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci revealed in a statement.

Fauci’s decision significantly moves up the timeline of his retirement, as he said in July he would resign at the end of Biden’s first term.

Just two Saturdays ago, I noted that Dr Fauci had been booed while throwing out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Did this have anything to do with his decision? I wouldn't rule it out, but too much else has been happening. For instance, his former sidekick Dr Birx is starting to adopt the time-tested Albert Speer strategy for rehabilitating her public image, essentially to say she really wasn't 100% on board with the genocidal thugs who were running the show:

Former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should prioritize transparency in reforming the agency after the pandemic.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Dr. Birx said that the CDC should focus on sharing its data with the American people in a way they can understand and work with the private sector to better collect information.

. . . “[I]n March of 2020, all of our data that I used to warn Americans of who was at risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death came from our European colleagues,” she said. “That in itself should be an indictment of our system.”

Wait a moment. The way I remember things, in February of 2020, Fauci was telling us not to wear masks and to go on a cruise. By March, it had changed to the scary expanding red circles on the evening news based on the Imperial College London models, which were models, not data. And Dr Birx at the time was endorsing every scary red circle. "Transparancy" is hardly the cure, the cure is not telling lies to incite panic, but then, she'd have to accept responsibility with Fauci. She goes on,

“Secondly, reporting was coming in extraordinarily slow from hospitals through a system that CDC had created. And I know this created controversy, but for three months, I asked the CDC to fix its system and develop a partnership with clinics and hospitals, and laboratories, and they wouldn’t. And so that’s why I asked all the hospitals to start reporting, and they did. And so I think sometimes we hold ourselves back.”

Translation: "We weren't using data at all, we were just passing on the scary ICL red circles, which led to the predictions of mass graves in public parks and sending hospital ships to New York and LA, which had to sail away unused a couple months later. This destroyed our credibility from the start, but I sorta thought we shouldn't do this." Oh, right. Except she herself had to retire in a hurry once she blew her own credibility by having a family Thanksgiving when she'd told the public not to.

UPDATE: On Fox last night, Dr Fauci first denied he ever locked anything down, but if he did, it was with Dr Birx's agreement. Apparently he's trying to hitchhike on her attempts to rehabilitate herself.

In the wake of his announcement, Dr Fauci isn't even showing Dr Birx's level of insight:

Outgoing National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” that people on the right who were distorting reality to believe that the January 6 Capitol riot didn’t happen were also creating an environment where proper public health responses to pandemics are being impeded.

Well, it wasn't that Dr Birx and I blew our credibility, it was just that the public wouldn't believe us. OK, but whatever the reason, the guy is out, more than two years earlier than he'd promised. That's what I call science. But it looks like even Dr Fauci couldn't ignore a growing informed consensus that the public health establishment, led by Drs Fauci and Birx, couldn't have had things more wrong over a two-year period:

Critics argue that the CDC, the feds broadly and the U.S. public health establishment have erred repeatedly in their assertions related to COVID, ignoring global research clarifying the risk profile of the virus, the tradeoffs of masking, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and the economic, social and educational toll of strict mitigation measures.

. . . The agency issued its ultimate walk-back in revised COVID guidance this month, removing distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups — the only credible legal basis for vaccine mandates — and recognizing that natural immunity by itself confers protection, as White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci's own scientists have documented.

It's hard to avoid thinking there's been a long con going on for more than two years, and whatever the truth or falsity of theories the 2020 election was stolen, the version that Trump was some sort of bumpkin who ignored the sage counsel of Drs Birx and Fauci is dead, dead, dead. Contra Dr Fauci, this goes some way to rehabilitate Trump as a leader with fortitude and foresight, and it shores up the metaphorical meaning of a stolen election and January 6, if not necessarily the factual truth. But it's the metaphor that tells the story, not the footnotes.

So yet again, I don't think it's a coincidence that COVID is going away as Trump returns to the public sphere. By the way, you may not have noticed, but he's seized control of the Republican Party in the process, something he didn't have while in office:

Former President Donald Trump blasted Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as a “broken down hack” just days after the Senate Minority Leader questioned whether the GOP would be able to flip the chamber in November’s midterm elections.

“Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate,” Trump said on his Truth Social media site late Saturday.

. . . McConnell did not name particular candidates, but a group of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates are struggling in the polls.

Whatever disagreements Trump had with McConnell as president, he kept them relatively quiet. Now McConnell is a broken-down hack, on a par with Crooked Hillary and Low Energy Jeb. Trump is on familiar terrritory, while McConnell, like Hillary and Jeb before him, is not. Out of office, he got rid of Liz Cheney. McConnell is fully aware of this.