“There should be more mandates, there really should be.” So said Dr. Anthony Fauci in July 2021 while speaking to CNN host Jake Tapper. It wouldn’t be the last time, either, Joe Biden’s Covid point man would advise that Americans be compelled to take the then-new and largely untested coronavirus “vaccines.”
This had an effect, too: More than two million Americans lost their jobs after balking at the experimental shots. Many multiples of that number submitted to the coercion, and some would later suffer serious side effects — including, in certain cases, death.
But now Fauci, (in)famous for flipping more than a gymnast, has changed his tune on mandates. In fact, points out the Washington Examiner’s Jon Miltimore, the ex-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and current Georgetown University professor is now a big proponent of “choice.”
Oh, it’s not that Covid has receded as a reality (only as a boogeyman). Why, “New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show COVID-19 cases are again rising in some parts of the country,” relates Miltimore.
“The CDC’s map indicates that several states are experiencing a ‘substantial increase’ in cases (more than 20%), including Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Nebraska, which saw a 57.3% spike from the previous week,” he continues.
Moreover, the statistics indicate that during September and October, Covid accounted for an average of more than 100 dead Americans a day. (This, however, is a surely inflated number. Note here that a source at a major medical examiner’s office told me a few months ago that only one to two percent of the “Covid” deaths evaluated at the office were actually caused by Covid.) Yet this doesn’t explain Fauci’s and authorities’ change in attitude; after all, the numbers have been exaggerated all along, as even government officials and The New York Times finally admitted. Yet the reality is that now there simply is no talk of reinstituting draconian measures.
Just consider the vacillating doctor’s latest prescriptions. As Miltimore writes:
While speaking to ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week earlier this fall, Fauci was asked who should be taking the new COVID booster.
“I believe we should give the choice to people that are not in the high-risk groups, to have the vaccine available for them,” Fauci replied.
Choice is the key word here. It’s a stark contrast to Fauci’s previous support of the White House’s vaccine mandate that required private companies to demand vaccination as a condition of employment.
“We know that mandates work,” Fauci told Wolf Blitzer in October 2021. “So, although you’d like people to do it on their own accord, sometimes mandates actually can help in that regard.”
Fauci’s new position isn’t just that low-risk people should get to choose, however, as his statement might imply. Fauci would subsequently imply that even high-risk people should be given a choice.
“Make [the vaccine] available to everyone, but certainly recommend it to high-risk people,” Fauci told Karl.
Do realize that Fauci’s devotion to Covid vax mandates was so extreme that he even said in August 2021 that he believes “mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea.” This is despite the fact the coronavirus posed virtually no threat to children. Consider, for example, that a study out of Germany — a Montana-size country with 83 million people — found that during 15 months of the pandemic, not even one healthy child died of Covid.
In contrast, a researcher predicted in 2021 that for every child “saved” by the Covid shots, 117 would be killed by them. What’s more, nine researchers from establishment institutions (e.g., Harvard) estimated last year that for college students, the shots were up to 98 times as dangerous as the disease itself. In other words, Fauci’s vax-mandate insistence was malpractice.
It’s also now history. And why? Trying to be fair, Miltimore concedes that we do know far more about Covid now than we did in 2021. But back then we knew enough. We knew the early data out of Italy showed that the average age of coronavirus mortality victims was 79.5, and 99-plus percent had comorbidities. We knew that the CDC had released age-specific Covid data in September 2020 already showing that for people 0 to 19 and 20 to 49 years old infected with the coronavirus, their survival rates were, respectively, 99.997 percent and 99.98 percent (complete data below).
We also knew what reason informed: If the Covid shots actually were effective, then why should anyone worry about the “unvaccinated”?
But none of this mattered to Fauci. And Dr. Scott Atlas, who spent time at coronavirus meetings with Fauci and other Covid-response-team members, revealed why in late 2021.
Fauci and his colleagues lacked knowledge, didn’t know the data, didn’t care to, and exhibited a total lack of critical-thinking skills, Atlas informed.
This helps explain why the authorities were consistently wrong in their China virus pronouncements, a fact Miltimore helps illustrate with the following tweets.
The bottom line is that the Covid response was always largely driven by politics and, Miltimore avers, so is Fauci’s recent vax-mandate flip-flop.
The public’s fear has abated and their faith in health authorities has cratered, Miltimore points out, and their tolerance for mandates has thus been expended. I’ll add that the establishment also no longer needs to use Covid to drive a hated rival (Trump) from office.
Miltimore concludes saying that the issue isn’t what is best, but is, to quote Thomas Sowell, “who shall decide what is best?” It’s just a shame, he then states, that it took Fauci so long to realize he’s not the one to decide.
This, however, gives the doctor undeserved credit. As I illustrated in 2020’s “The Many Masks of Anthony Fauci,” the man changes his tune continually — and not just with the wind, but with the slightest breeze. So if tyranny again became politically feasible and Fauci had power, how long would it be before he resurrected his iron fist inside a surgeon’s glove?