I watched it back and forth with Wolf Blitzer yesterday and was amazed at how different his tone was from his interview with MSNBC last weekend, which went viral after Fauci again discouraged people who had been fully vaccinated from eating indoors. For some of us, it was the last straw in his program of caution. Trump populists have been moaning about him on social media for centuries, but yesterday not only MAGA types complain. I remember thinking it felt like the moment that ‘Fauci fatigue’ finally went down well under the legitimate comments.
As if that’s the proof, the best-known magazine of American conservatism today has an editorial on Fauci that has finally defended its welcome.
Fauci does not write or determine the quarantine policies enforced by cities and states; he can only advise other people inside and outside the government. But his voice carries a lot of weight, and, more or less willingly, he has become the face of America’s quarantine policy. It seems frustrating that his perspective is always that the right time is still six weeks from now, no matter how low the consequences or how much the national vaccination program accelerates …
Vaccines are protected against COVID-19 from serious health problems and we have known for a month that vaccinated people shed dramatically fewer viruses, perhaps 75 to 90 percent. If results like this do not go safely to a restaurant or movie theater, what will it do? What’s the point if you can not be vaccinated to be vaccinated?
We can overlook the photo shoot of the pool in Hollywood, or its unmasking, while watching a baseball game. But Fauci has changed into the ever-pessimistic, over-cautious, position-changing, administratively agreeable face of the pandemic recovery. At this point, he would be doing himself a favor by putting out the next opportunity to appear in a TV show or podcast and concentrate on his day job.
This is worse than what National Review suggests. Fauci’s benchmark for full reopening has now been 10,000 cases a day for months, or ideally, much less. We have not reached the point once since the pandemic escalated in March last year, and it may not affect even after all willing recipients have been vaccinated this year, as there will still be millions refusing to be vaccinated. become and remain susceptible to COVID. His perspective is not that six weeks from now is the right time to reopen. Functionally, it will never really be the “right” time to reopen.
But watch him yesterday on CNN. Not a single disapproving word is uttered when Wolf asks him to eat inside. On the contrary, Fauci emphasizes that the risk of a vaccinated person being infected is ‘extremely low’ and, of course, was much lower than it was before the vaccines arrived. He poses the question in terms of personal risk tolerance, which is appropriate. And he goes so far as to say that he will be comfortable as someone who has been vaccinated for a baseball game. He never explicitly condenses to eat out, but by emphasizing how low the risk is for someone who has been vaccinated and approaching the subject because of each individual’s convenience, the takeaway is: ‘It’s fine with you, but if the the idea of going to a restaurant makes you nervous and do not go. ‘
What’s a pretty significant shift from his standard hypercare, no? Look, then read on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BQ9xqGWX2g
I can not compare his attitude in that track to his attitude in the MSNBC interview a few days before. All I can think of is that he was recently made aware at some point that his relentless pessimism about the pandemic and his chronic underselling of the vaccine could affect people’s willingness to be immunized. He does have a very of heat yesterday for his comments about not eating out, mostly from the usual suspects (Rand Paul calls him a “Little tyrant” in a tweet) but not exclusively. I have defended Fauci many times in the past, but as far back as a month ago I said that his extreme caution resulted in a decrease in his media appearance. A month later, he still made frowning faces about vaccinated people going to restaurants.
At some point, “you should not change, even after you have been vaccinated”, it is just a skepticism about vaccines.
I wonder if the White House communications team or its own deputies at NIAID followed the setback of the MSNBC interview and decided to pull him aside to discuss a tone change. Some red states already seem to be approaching the “vaccine wall”, where they are starting to run out of eager recipients and have to start convincing the reluctant but open-minded. Fauci’s endless caution about eating may have accidentally convinced some people that the benefits of vaccination are not so great. The CNN interview feels like an attempt to undo it. We’ll see if his tone stays sunnier going forward or if it was just a one-time thing.
Instead of an exit question, look at dr. Marty Makary, a chronic critic of Fauci’s pessimism, addressing his MSNBC commentary on Fox this morning. Makary gives a good point about the looming prospect of a ‘casedemic’ in which most older Americans are vaccinated and most younger ones do not, and the virus continues to spread among the latter, while some serious cases arise that require hospitalization. If we still involve an average of 30,000 cases a day next month, but almost no one goes to the ER, because the infected are all twenty who can fight the virus naturally, it’s a public health emergency that puts restrictions on businesses or a no citizen required? We know what Fauci will say.