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Fauci’s Quagmire: Snopes to the Rescue
Reprising the disastrous assumptions of Field Marshall Haig that the enemy could not sustain a war of attrition, General Westmoreland’s strategy in the Vietnam War put us on a path in which our primary goal quickly mutated into a desire to achieve the appearance of not losing while desperately looking for an exit.
Trying to appear not to lose is now the sole basis for our COVID-19 policy. “Losing” does not mean the disease spreading until herd immunity reduces it to endemic status (which was always going to happen anyway). Losing would be a forced admission that the suppression strategies failed and all the evolving, temporizing nonsense deployed to protect the illusion of effective leadership was not based on science but on vanity, a love of the spotlight, and possession of the levers of policymaking power.
We cannot even enjoy the demonstrable success of the vaccines against the severity of subsequent infection because, in the same vein as the “light at the end of the tunnel” gaffe, we were promised the vaccines would end the spread. Fauci & co. worked hard to make us fear the spread (“cases”) per se. Worse, most Americans can no longer trust the FDA or CDC for straight answers about vaccine side effects risks, effective treatments, or much else dealing with COVID-19. As with the Vietnam War, the loss of trust in government has deeply hurt the nation. The breach this time may be worse because the medical science and health guys should be the ultimate honest brokers of information.
Americans are mostly nice people (do not include me with you “mostly nice” types) who were probably prepared to forgive and forget the horrific social, political, and economic destruction of all the utterly futile mandates if the crisis could be finally brought to an end. We were encouraged to form the near-universal hope that vaccinating most people would quickly establish some kind of herd immunity and let us resume normal life. But now that it is clear that vaccines do not stop the spread, that there is no exit, no light at the end of the tunnel, and that we are resuming mandates that we now know with statistical certainty don’t work along with the prospect of endless boosters. And we must still remain in a conditioned state of fear of the number of “cases” like the Eloi hearing the Morlocks alarm sirens.
So the prospect of forgiveness and praise is receding rapidly. We are not at the point where Dr. Fauci will be scrambling onto the last chopper off the roof of NIH campus HQ. But the facade of competence and honesty is crumbling. The government-adjacent entities of social media and the MSM are working hard to forestall the reckoning.
Now that the data doesn’t really let us convincingly blame red state governors or the unmasked, the new Maginot Line of spin is that (a) the unvaxxed are clogging the hospitals and (b) we can’t let up on the mandates because those damned unvaxxed trogs won’t let us end the pandemic and the proof is: see (a). Not really steel-trap logic regarding infection numbers but it will have to do.
A paradigmatic example is how Snopes reacted to this Tweet from the estimable @ianmsc:
This trend is true almost everywhere—vaccination rates approach 90% and up and yet the number of “cases” still rises to new heights. This is. of course, not what we were promised. So, Snopes rides to the rescue of this newest variant of The Narrative and stamps this tweet “Misleading”
The funniest part of Snopes’ extensive criticism is the claim that the increase should have been shown as a mere 6,200% percent rather than 16,700% in another part of the thread, a point which is not exactly a devasting riposte but nevertheless delivered in a “so there” tone.
Snopes says screw the data–the experts still Believe, and the wrong sort of people like the tweet so it must be wrong:
The Twitter account’s many tweets about COVID-19 appeared to largely receive engagements from people who leaned toward anti-science, anti-vaccine, and anti-mask rhetoric. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vaccines and masks are both effective in the fight against the deadly disease.
The data in the graph remains unrefuted. The point stands. Nevertheless, the “experts” believe and the anti-science MAGA hats don’t so those facts no longer matter. And, of course, here is the obligatory new official twist using hospital & death data:
The final part of the tweet read: “Hard to imagine a less scientifically justifiable policy than vaccine passports to keep others ‘safe.’” However, this missed the mark. Since the time that COVID-19 vaccines became available, the vast majority of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have been in unvaccinated patients, according to data made available by the CDC.
Never mind that this misses the point about infection spread. It is those damned unvaxxed who are keeping it going. But the Narrative can’t handle that truth and also stupidly maneuvered itself out of eligibility for credit for what the vaccines actually do accomplish because we must fear the number of “cases” even if we are in an age and health demographic at minuscule risk.
Lost in the shuffle is the fact that despite various mandates and enormous vaccination rates, COVID still finds and kills its intended victims at the same rate everywhere. Vaxxed or unvaxxed, shouldn’t the overall death toll be a lot smaller by now if any of this had worked? Will the new spin twist hold as the percentage of deaths and hospitalizations among the vaxxed rises (as it must) or will it be about how those damned un-boostered types are keeping it going? Will people continue to tolerate this farce?
Maybe if the Great Barrington guys had set policy, there might have been some reduction in deaths as a result of a more intensively targeted protection strategy but nothing much appears to stop COVID, so who knows. In any case, The Great Barrington approach would not have required constant lies to justify hideously costly failures to achieve unattainable goals as has the Fauci quagmire.
Published in General
I’m sorry but Fauci outright lied on several occasions. He at first told us that the general populace should not be wearing masks. It was later revealed that the change in policy was not due to any new medical information, but because they simply didn’t want hospitals running out of masks. But they couldn’t tell us this up front. Instead they had to lie that it was medically unnecessary to wear masks.
Fauci even admitted lying about herd immunity. He told the public low-ball predictions which he knew to be incorrect. He later said that he kept changing his assessments just to test the waters to see how the public would respond. Then he lied to Congress under questioning by Rand Paul, claiming vociferously that the U.S. government did not fund gain of function research in China.
These are not simply speculations gone astray because of changing circumstances. These are purposeful and knowing outright lies.
First, it is undeniable that the expectation being promoted was that the vaccines would end transmission. Experts can be forgiven for being initially wrong but not for a refusal to admit it when the results are in nor for refusing to adapt to the facts, nor for failure adjusting policy recommendations accordingly. We have known for well over a year with dozens of studies that confirm with absolute certainty that closures do not flatten the curve and yet there is no push from top experts to stop doing that despite the costs. We are being pushed into vaccine mandates despite the fact that vaccination does not protect others from infection. We continue with silly mask mandates and continue to create havoc for our school kids precisely because our ruling experts DO NOT respond to actual data. And people like you want to make sure the policy is whatever is most comfortable for the credentialed sorts irrespective of performance, outcomes or science. You find excuses for deference presumably because the prospect of ignorant hordes making policy is terrifying. Is that it? Shouldn’t we instead maintain a high bar of accountability to protect public trust?
Your go-along, get-along, the-experts-must-know-what-they’re-doing outlook is largely immune to what has actually happened. They have not responded to new information except to double down on assumptions and approaches that are wrong and have not worked.
And your take on the Vermont data is a stretch. The “restrictions” for which you continue to have near-religious affection, have had no effect. Instead of the mere assumption that by golly it could have been worse but for these policies, please produce a single jurisdiction on the planet where the implementation of such “restrictions” created a detectable departure from the regional seasonality curve.
And in that same vein and with respect to you affection for “restrictions” how is it remotely possible that COVID finds and kills it preferred victims at exactly that same rate at the same times in mandate-free, maskless Sweden as in N95-mandated Germany?