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How Much Does Dr. Fauci Really Care?
Dennis Prager spoke the hard truth Monday morning: Dr. Fauci is a lifelong government employee with a salary and benefits package perfectly insulated from the economic consequences of his words. He has absolutely no skin in the game. If Dr. Fauci truly believes it is necessary to put hourly workers, waiters, bartenders, and small businesses out of work, destroying them economically, then let him and the head of the CDC ante up.
Dr. Fauci’s easiest path is completely shutdown of our economy, doing maximum damage to people who were just starting to see real success and a brighter future. He can claim noble motives, even as he seeks to avoid blame for early failures. Words of concern and supposed sympathy tripping off a career bureaucrat’s lips ring hollow and are bitter to those he ruins.
So, President Trump needs to put this to the coronavirus crew immediately, giving them the chance to volunteer giving up their salaries until the federal guidelines no longer limit American jobs. Then, if they push back, he needs to drop it on them in front of the cameras. Let’s all see their real faces and real positions when they are made to live with the real consequences of their words.
We have already seen Dr. Fauci tripped up on his own words today. He pushed for schools to be closed, but then stumbled over himself as a real reporter asked why daycare centers would be open, since the reason for shutting schools applies to daycare. He finally acknowledged the obvious and left the microphone with “we’ll look at that again.”
President Trump can do this in the context of virtuous examples from professional sports, where team owners are promising to keep paying people who work their home venues, to protect them from the consequences of stopping games. This is the way Americans respond to hard times. Rudy Gobert has already pledged over $500,000 to his home arena workers and others. He is the NBA player who was the unlucky first to be found infected. Here in Arizona, one of the two major utility companies just announced they will not shut off anyone’s power or charge interest until this government made economic catastrophe ends. Time for Fauci to put his paycheck where his mouth is.
If Dr. Fauci and the rest of the crew face real economic pain right now, and suddenly have to worry about paying bills in the months ahead, then they will be motivated to truly act in the real public interest. This may not change their recommendations, but it will certainly go a long way towards buying them credibility with a public they lecture and chide about being serious. This is of a piece with governors ordering restaurants and bars closed, while keeping their party’s primary election on schedule for this week. Everyone can see the obvious contradictions. Those governors should lead by example.* Their salaries, along with Dr. Fauci’s should all go to direct economic relief for the smallest businesses and most economically vulnerable workers.
* President Trump was too sharp to fall for a White House press-member asking him to call on governors to postpone elections. This would immediately turn into claims of dictatorship and plans to cancel the November election, when the latest coronavirus might be back.
Published in General
There are no solutions, just trade-offs as Thomas Sowell has observed. I don’t think that Dr. Fauci is a bad guy but the system he works for is biased towards central planning and tends to ignore the economic problems caused by their policy. Maybe Dr. Fauci is getting everything right but we need to recognize that governments are biased.
Bollocks. This is the time when a leader makes the hard choices and accepts responsibility for the outcome.
Well we came back from smallpox.
I certainly hope there is more of this, and it was my first thought on hearing about restaurant restrictions.
I’d like not to be told I don’t care. Far too much, I guess.
But hey, caring for the most mentally ill clearly is not worth praising if it is done by someone without skin the game.
This is an impossible situation for Trump and co.. By all means let’s bash anything they do. With 2020 hindsight they will have been wrong no matter what.
Exactly. If this ends and there is no disaster, then we’ll know that it worked. We already know how bad it could be by noting other nations that flubbed it.
I’m sympathetic to Cliff’s arguments, and I am certainly not in a position to be taking any of the cuts I’m about to experience, but we have a plan and we’re going to execute it. I prefer a plan to chaos.
The important point is that we avoid making anything permanent. What I am always fearful of is not the short term, but very painful hardships but the long term political abuse. The Patriot Act was the regurgitation of a power grab that was successfully resisted many times over several years. When 9/11 came along the establishment power grabbers renamed their monstrosity and we’re still suffering from it. What further degradation of our rights will this experience bring on?
I’m not a pathologist or doctor or whatever expert studies such diseases. I have to trust them because I don’t know any better. I’ll grant them trust, but only so far. I know it could possibly ruin me financially. I don’t know what else to recommend, though. I don’t want to trust them, but I don’t have much choice because I just don’t know what else to do.
I work in public administration as well. I also think the original post badly over-simplifies what Fauci is tasked with to an insulting degree. I guess the opposite argument would be to say that anyone who argues against these measures are animals who put their bank accounts above the lives being saved. Neither argument shows much understanding of public health, public administration, economics as well as many other disciplines.
It should come as no surprise that the gradual break in trust in our institutions has us all questioning the wisdom of the “expert” class, regardless of which administration is in charge. This breach will not be healed easily.
Agreed. Let’s turn down the heat. Rational people can argue for different trade-offs without being evil. If you’ve got a case for doing A instead of B, make it. But yelling insults at people who choose B is unlikely to change any minds.
Dr. Fauci should absolutely get credit for his long public service. And. He must also own the apparent abject failure to actually prepare for this eventuality, to have in the national emergency stockpile sufficient respirators and pop-up modular tent hospital wards to isolate active cases needing medical support. We learned from Secretary Azar that we have “thousands” of respirators, as we should if we are prepared for a chemical or biological attack that would inflict mass respiratory casualties. How many? Oh, that is classified, “national security.”
How’s about our civil servants just say straight out how much they can raise the line at which our medical system is actually maxed out? How about telling the American people we need to hold down the number of cases needed medical support to X, and for that reason, based on a worst or most likely case scenario, we need everyone to really sacrifice?
And how is it that Dr. Fauci was blinded to day care centers presenting the same risk as schools? He clearly was, from his reaction in front of the camera. Based on his reasoning on restaurants and bars, how is the press allowed into the White House? How is the White House staffed, if cleared, why not locked into the building until the crisis lifts? Why are grocery stores OK, but not restaurants?
Not really. My decision would be to obliterate wherever the terrorists live so that they can’t attack us. When I say obliterate, I mean turn them and their entire nation into glass. I have no problem doing that whatsoever. I’d do it in a heart beat before making one single American suffer. So, no, not obvious.
No. The opposite.
Fauci didn’t make up this threat. The numbers are incontrovertible. At the current rate of growth of the number of infected people we will see millions infected and dying in this country before the beginning of summer. Independent experts estimate a 50 to 70% infection rate in the US. That’s 5o to 70% of 327 million infected and 3 to 4 million dead or higher.
Fauci is trying to get ahead of it to avoid the nightmare scenario of a shortage of medical critical care. His recommendations are perfectly logical whether or not he’s a career bureaucrat. He has no choice but to assume the worst.
And it wouldn’t have made any difference. In a few weeks those business would all shut themselves down if the outbreak proceeded as the experts fear.
We can be glad we live in a country where we can hurl hot-tempered insults at each other. It’s better than the alternative.
It’s not a binary choice between screaming insults or throwing punches.
There is a big difference between the government shutting businesses down and businesses shutting themselves down, even if the same number of businesses get shut down either way.
True. A 3rd choice is that only official positions can be expressed. A 4th is that unpopular opinions are squelched by the majority. And there are others, as well.
My number one prayer is that an immunity test is developed to check for antibodies so that we can identify those who can safely help others.
Then we could mobilize volunteers. That would at this point work faster and be more productive than a vaccine. We could replace vulnerable health care workers with immune health care workers.
The retirement community is divided into “early retirees” and “older retirees.” Not all retirees in their early sixties are useless. Some early retirees like me could help enormously in our local hospitals and nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.
In fact, when World War II broke out, the military sent the younger doctors overseas with the troops, and the older doctors came out of retirement to take care of the home front.
This is what we need right now. We need caregivers and helpers within our neighborhoods and then in our hospitals and clinics. And in our hospitals and labs, we could replace a lot of the vulnerable clerical workers with immune volunteers.
I keep wondering if China has already developed this test. I was fascinated a couple of weeks ago when I read they were sending 45,000 doctors and nurses and others into the Wuhan area to relieve the exhausted hospitals. In the picture, the relief workers were wearing masks, so probably they are not sure that they immune.
Valid point, and I should’ve been clearer. It’s my call to make the primary recommendation from DHS, which will be entitled to significant weight.
Then the President (and by extension, his close advisors) are bowing to “politics” more than I’ve seen to date.
Sorry, this response makes no sense. It sounds like an empty platitude. What, exactly, do you expect Trump to do?
Here’s what I’m thinking ( hoping?).
He’s going along with all – this behind it 100% – and then, once the people get restless and fed-up with these draconian measures and there’s a desire to end this, he accedes to their wishes and opens things back up, carefully. Declaring that the measures taken effectively slowed things down and bought us time – as was the original intent, and we have to get back to our daily lives. And people won’t be in a strong position to argue.
How bout them bollocks?
We could even (now don’t laugh) discuss things quietly using facts and logic rather than verbal abuse.
The bigger difference might be government shutting down business with live workers who are still alive and remain that way, versus businesses shutting themselves down because workers are sick and/or dying.
This seems wildly overblown.
Two cheers for Ohio Governor DeWine, who has, at the 11th hour, recognized that he must actually practice consistency to maintain credibility. Now he has shut down the presidential primary, scheduled for tomorrow. This properly aligns with his earlier announcement that he was shutting down all bars and restaurants. Consistency matters here.
Maybe I’m giving the guy too much credit, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the president knew he was screwed politically no mater what he did, and decided to do what he thought was the right thing, re-election be damned.
If so, then faster please.
I saw that too and just rolled my eyes. These are the kind of insane projections that are causing people to think the World is ending. To put things in perspective, the entire country of China does not have millions infected or millions dying. They don’t even have 100,000 people infected. They have a little over 3,000 deaths and the disease already started leveling off a week ago. 3 to 4 million dead in the U.S. would be approximately 4,000 times higher than the Chinese death rate(!)
We have to get real about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than 500 people died in the U.S. from Covid 19 by the end of flu season.
But, but, but… It says the estimate was from “independent experts”! So it must be right! They are even smarter than just standard-issue experts, right?