In 2020, at least some conservatives defended coronavirus czar Dr. Anthony Fauci when he refused to speak negatively about former President Donald Trump. His job, they insisted, was not that of a partisan. But he has since abandoned this guise of political neutrality and with it any credibility he might have had left.
During an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation this weekend, Fauci responded to Republicans who have called for his prosecution, and Sen. Ted Cruz in particular, saying they should be prosecuted instead for their supposed role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“I have to laugh at that,” said Fauci. “I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”
First off, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has nothing at all to do with the topic Fauci was avoiding talking about — his failure to address the coronavirus pandemic honestly or effectively. Fauci’s only goal in bringing up Jan. 6 was to divert from that with a baseless allegation. Fauci strutted right out of the world of health and medicine and science and into the world of politics.
It’s fair to argue Fauci has always been a politician — that he has merely stopped hiding it. Now, however, he doesn’t seem to care at all who knows his views on Cruz, Trump, Jan. 6, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and a whole range of other issues well outside his area of expertise. He might claim to be the representative of Science Itself, but he’s really just another pundit looking forward to the CNN contract that awaits him as soon as he retires — or, hopefully, is fired.
Predictably, Fauci spent the rest of the interview blaming everyone else for the politicization of the pandemic.
“I am somebody who only cares about science and health, and it is — you’re right, it’s painful and disturbing to see when you’re trying to focus all of your attention on doing what you can do, the way we did to create the vaccines, to develop the drugs, to save millions of lives,” he said. “And then you have this completely outlandish politicization of it. Politicization of everything. Politicization of the public health, politicization of the origins, politicization of all of it is really — I think when we look back at this, we’re going to say what were we thinking, what was going on back then?”
The answer is simple, really: In a few years, we’re going to look back at public health officials such as Fauci and agree that they were the problem. They were the ones who politicized the pandemic by kowtowing to China and slamming Trump’s initial travel restrictions as xenophobic. They downplayed the lab leak theory of the virus’s origin and covered up the federal role in funding gain-of-function research. They shifted the COVID goal posts repeatedly, dismissing any and every concern about the government’s unscientific approach and the damage it was doing to the public and to the reputation of public health officials themselves.
Fauci’s Jan. 6 snipe at Cruz is just the latest in a long string of political offenses. Fauci is a political animal, and he shouldn’t be at all surprised when people like Cruz get political right back at him.
