Fauci, Birx, etc don't get to make any of the decisions you're complaining about. They can't make the US buy masks or get them to healthcare workers or force any particular financial response - that's not in their job purview. They have to deal with the reality of what the situation is and control what they control - which is, given that we didn't have unlimited masks, try to make sure as many as possible were available for healthcare systems to acquire.
Do these MAGA conspiracy nuts not realize that had Fauci and Co not protected against a surge in panic buying masks, the hospital system could have completely failed with a medical supply failure? Imagine doctors in Covid units with no masks available during the first surge. Yeah Fauci is going to look like he can’t be trusted but anyone else in his position would have said the same thing to protect the health care workers. What Fauci also said was to social distance and shortly after a stay at home order until the supply chain could ramp up production of ppe. It’s not like he was maliciously trying to get people killed by encouraging them to inject themselves with bleach or something.
Quite a few around my area still say the pandemic was made up just to hurt their dear leader trump. Yep the WHOLE freakin world was in cahoots with BLM Antifa and the Dems. Wait until they realize last Christmas was the last Christmas everrrrrrrrr. Keep this on the down-low but we forgot about Easter, so we'll do away with it next year. Shhhh
I think a lot of people forget what the early days of the pandemic was like. People have forgotten there was panic buying of toilet papers and also there was a severe shortage of PPE for medical professionals. March 2020 the nurses union here in MN had a drive publicly asking for donations of N95 and respirators from the public because they were facing shortages. I got connections in Asia to send me surgical masks that I gave to local EMS and to friends. There were calls and instructions on social media for people to sew masks to donate. The shortage of PPE including masks was a real concern for the medical community and other frontline workers.
Fauci's role has been magnified by both his supporters and his detractors. While he does have a very important role he is ultimately just an advisor to the Presidency. He doesn't make or implement policy especially at the state level. People blaming him for shut downs or mask mandates, or not mask mandates, are missing that he wasn't the one who put those policies in. He has a very large role in recommending those policies but ultimately it's up to one's state and local leadership who put those policies in.
Only in our anti-truth hellscape could Anthony Fauci become a supervillain an op-ed by Margaret Sullivan of WaPo In November, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon was banned from Twitter after he called for Fauci’s beheading. But the campaign against Fauci has dramatically intensified recently — especially since BuzzFeed and The Washington Post released his email trove last week. And in a twisted way, it makes sense. After all, today’s right-wing politics and media require a villain. With solid approval ratings and an apparently indelible reputation as a moderate, President Biden isn’t turning out to be much of one. Vice President Harris? A little more promising given how much some trolls enjoy race-baiting, but still a less-than-ideal target. But Fauci is a different story. He established himself as an annoyance to Trump early in the pandemic, when he was forced to publicly correct the president’s many dangerous assertions about the disease. In a right-wing culture so often opposed to verifiable reality, who better to target than a person who stands for science and facts? “During the Trump administration, many on the right unfortunately learned the lesson that they could make up almost anything and people would believe it,” said Laura Helmuth, editor in chief of Scientific American (and a former colleague of mine at The Post).
I came to this thread late. This might have already been posted. The alleged Fauci ‘smoking gun’ emails - The Washington Post On Tuesday, The Washington Post and then BuzzFeed News published previously unreleased emails from the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci. The emails were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows journalists to request internal government emails. The disclosures gave conservatives who have long questioned Fauci’s stewardship of the coronavirus response something to latch on to beyond shifts in his public comments. They argue that these private emails show Fauci wasn’t forthcoming or curious enough when he cast doubt upon the “Wuhan lab leak” theory and argued for a more cautious covid response than President Donald Trump. The emails have been cited all over conservative media, with commentators often labeling them “smoking guns” and GOP lawmakers including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) re-upping their calls for Fauci to be relieved of his duties. But what’s actually in the emails? And how does it square with everything else we know? Let’s run through a few of the big supposed smoking guns. The lab leak theory Of late, the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China — rather than naturally — has caught on, with previous skeptics like Fauci acknowledging the real possibility that the theory is worth further exploration. This has not been a proud moment for the scientific community or much of the news media. But conservative news coverage of Fauci’s emails has often stretched beyond the idea that this was undersold to the assertion that Fauci was provided real evidence of a lab leak and completely disregarded it (or worse). In a Feb. 1, 2020 email — very early in the virus’s life in the United States — immunologist Kristian G. Andersen wrote to Fauci stating that the virus had limited “unusual features” that might suggest manipulation in a lab. “On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir,” Andersen wrote. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” It is this point that conservatives hang their argument on, but there is more to the story. Andersen offered that his team look into the issue. And they did, but they concluded several weeks later that the lab leak theory was indeed implausible. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the study said, while adding that “it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.” Apart from that, some have highlighted Fauci’s sharing information that pointed to the virus occurring naturally as some kind of proof that he was overly invested in that theory. There is much in the emails that is redacted (which is an issue we’ll get to). But if this is the best evidence we have that Fauci unduly disregarded the lab theory, it’s not the most compelling. Even the email above regarded this possibility as unproven and that there was very little evidence — though evidence worth studying — of potential engineering. Fauci certainly cast doubt on the lab leak theory. But he generally couched it as there being no real evidence of it, rather the conclusive evidence to disprove it, and he was doing so at a time in which most other scientists were doing the same thing. There is quite simply no evidence that Fauci was delivered anything amounting to solid evidence of a lab leak. It adds very little to what we already knew about the doubt he cast on this. Those redactions, though, are worth questioning. In mid-April 2020, for instance, National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins sent Fauci a link to a Fox News report playing up the possibility of a lab leak with the subject line, “conspiracy gains momentum.” But both the rest of Collins’s email and Fauci’s response are entirely redacted under the “deliberative process” justification. Doubting the efficacy of masks Another popular line of attack on Fauci involves his initial comments downplaying the need for the general public to wear masks. And, again, there is plenty of grist for that mill, given that guidance was later reversed. Fauci even acknowledged publicly a year ago that part of the reason for his initial guidance against masking involved the possibility that because people would buy up masks and deprive the medical professionals who truly needed them of enough masks. The emails show that Fauci was delivering this initial anti-masking guidance early on even to a prominent former health official. In a Feb. 5, 2020, email, Fauci told former Obama administration Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell that she needn’t mask up. “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material,” Fauci said. “I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location.” Again, this was a very early email, shortly after the virus made its way onto American shores. And again, it doesn’t really show Fauci saying anything privately that he wasn’t saying publicly. It would probably be more concerning if he had been telling health officials like Burwell something different from what he told the general public. But he didn’t. As with the lab leak theory, you can lay blame with Fauci’s initial commentary being overly declarative. But the email suggests this was indeed something that (at least very early on) was the consistent guidance based upon how he and other scientists understood things at the time. The Zuckerberg email Another popular claim is the idea that Fauci was somehow colluding with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg — an argument that dovetails nicely with the current conservative effort to decry big tech. Zuckerberg, in a March 17, 2020, email to Fauci, offered his platform to help in disseminating information about the virus and mitigation measures. At issue here is another redaction of something a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases aide labeled as Zuckerberg’s “even bigger offer.” Fauci responded to the email saying he was “interested” in Zuckerberg’s ideas. Critics noted that the redaction was deemed necessary not for the more-standard reason of “deliberative process,” but because of “trade secrets” — i.e. information related to a private business that is privileged or confidential. “What’s the offer Zuckerberg made to Fauci?” Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked. “The redaction references ‘trade secrets.’ Must be challenged.” The suggestion — which Ingraham didn’t state but that others have — is that perhaps Facebook was going to do something to tamp down on coronavirus misinformation (or, to put it less charitably, censor it). It would indeed be great to know exactly why we can’t see what’s behind that redaction. But again, even if that interpretation is correct, would it really tell us anything new? We knew Facebook had taken certain steps intended to combat covid misinformation; it announced that later the same month. Those steps can arguably go too far, but they should probably be judged on their merits rather than on various government officials’ potential interest in the effort. ....
