Miranda Devine: Anthony Fauci has got it wrong on Covid-19 yet again

The halo is starting to slip and Americans are beginning to see just how wrong the lionised Dr Anthony Fauci has been getting things during the pandemic, writes Miranda Devine.

On the weekend, Dr Anthony Fauci and First Lady, Dr (not really) Jill Biden, went to Harlem to promote Covid vaccinations.

You should have seen the reception! Instead of bouquets from Harlem they got a Bronx cheer.*

“F-ck you Fauci”, “F-ck your Covid” passports, “F-ck the CCP”, shouted a mixed-race group of protesters waiting outside the vaccination clinic at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem as the motorcade arrived.

“Fire Fauci. Fire Fauci”, they chanted. “Masks don’t work! Why are you humiliating our youth?”

US First Lady Jill Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci on a joint visit to promote vaccinations. Picture: Getty Images

You might say the honeymoon is over for Fauci, a Washington bureaucrat who fell in love with his own press.

Now the rest of the media has admitted that the most plausible explanation for the pandemic is a virus leak from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting Frankenstein research on bat coronaviruses, funded in part by Fauci’s agency, the shine has come off – especially since he assured us it wasn’t a lab leak.

Coupled with a trove of Fauci’s emails released under freedom of information laws last week and the penny had dropped with the public that he never was worthy of the sainthood bestowed on him by the media.

The emails show Fauci knew from the start that reputable virologists suspected the virus was engineered in a lab, privately believed that masks don’t work, and spent a lot of time cuddling up to anti-Trump journalists.

At worst he may be partly culpable for the Wuhan outbreak, due to his championing of the risky “gain of function” research which makes viruses more lethal and more infective to humans and was offshored to China to avoid a moratorium under the Obama administration.

Anti Covid-19 vaccination activists shout slogans and hold placards as First Lady Dr Jill Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci visit a vaccination clinic in Harlem, New York. Picture: AFP

Then there is the fact more and more Americans are fed up with mask mandates and school closures and pandemic restrictions loved by Fauci but which appear to have had little effect on death rates and the trajectory of infections if you compare states which locked down hard, like in California, with those that didn’t, like Florida.

Fauci was lionised by the media for the same reason as his good friend Gov. Andrew Cuomo – they were the anti-Trump figures chosen to be a daily reproach and contrast to the president.

The halos have fallen off, first Cuomo’s and then Fauci’s, with a thud, but it doesn’t matter now because they served their purpose.

He might get heckled in Harlem but Fauci still gets the adulation he craves on MSNBC and CNN.

He is a Washington bureaucrat, who flips and flops and muddles the message. Worst of all he lies, even admitting proudly on two occasions to lying about masks and herd immunity.

He is not embarrassed about untruths he thinks were for the public good, because we dumb savages can’t be trusted with the truth. His friends in the media agree because they, too, have a poor opinion of most of their countrymen and an inflated opinion of themselves.

Fauci also had poor judgement. His advice on everything from masks and lockdowns to therapeutics and vaccines, to Tinder and the origins of the coronavirus was wrong or contradictory or self-serving.

He was a close family friend of Cuomo, as Cuomo’s little CNN brother Chris revealed last week, and guided him through one of the most disastrous responses of any state, where the elderly were not protected and, in fact, were actively endangered by Cuomo’s policy of forcing nursing homes to accept Covid-infected patients.

In the populous state that handled Covid the best, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis figured out early that Fauci didn’t have a clue, and using overseas data worked out that the priority must be to protect the elderly and the infirm, and let businesses and schools remain open.

As a result, the unemployment rate in Florida of 4.8 per cent is not much more than half of New York’s 8.2 per cent.

New York City residents also are about to pay the highest taxes in the country, with the top rate set to rise to 14.8 per cent in state and local taxes, on top of a 37 per cent top federal income tax which Biden is considering lifting to 39 per cent for people, or couples, earning over $400,000.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis figured out early that DR Fauci was clueless. Picture: Getty Images

Florida, on the other hand, has no state income tax. No wonder New Yorkers are fleeing south.

You can’t pin all of New York’s woes on Fauci, of course, but you can judge him for heaping praise on Democratic New York last year as the “model” for Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, while criticising DeSantis’ “very concerning” decision to fully reopen bars and restaurants in Republican Florida.

Yet the results indicate Fauci may have been wrong again.

New York has suffered the second most deaths per capita (272 per 100,000) in the nation.

Florida ranked 27 with 172 deaths per 100,000. In case you think it’s just about Florida’s warmer weather, look at sunny California, which imposed draconian lockdowns and mask mandates and is relatively youthful, with one of the smallest populations of over-65s, versus Florida which has the nation’s second largest proportion of elderly.

You would expect Florida to have a much higher death rate, since the elderly are most vulnerable to the virus, but California beats it by only four places, with a death rate of 161. People are starting to wonder what all the pain was for.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo presided over the most Covid deaths per capita in the US. Picture: AFP

Ridiculously, Fauci and Dr Jill (who has an EdD – a doctorate in education) wore masks to Harlem on Sunday, despite both being fully vaccinated for months.

It kind of undercuts their message. But this is the sort of kabuki theatre that Democrats and health experts have been revelling in since the start of the pandemic.

Weaponising the virus in an election year successfully ousted Trump. It normalised absentee voting, the method most vulnerable to fraud in the US, and it replaced a booming economy with big government welfare.

As Jane Fonda said a month before November’s election, the pandemic was “God’s gift to the left”.

They’re loathe to let it go, but the public increasingly has other ideas.

*A Bronx cheer is “a sound of derision or contempt made by blowing through closed lips with the tongue between them; a raspberry, according to the Oxford Dictionary.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph