The fading Sunday morning talk shows have been a favored forum for Dr. Anthony Fauci to steer national behavior on masks and travel, and families getting together. The usual prescriptions from him that have grown pretty tired to many of us.
Sure enough, there he was again Sunday on “Face the Nation,” urging continued mask vigilance and ongoing travel cautions because, you never know, there could be more health devastation ahead. Fauci has been elevated to chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, who does need medical advice.
He warned about the dangers of new virus variants and families’ Spring Break vacations, after more than a year of insulation and isolation and the threat of some states like Texas easing health restrictions.
Fauci said:
“I’ve said many times that when you’re coming down from a big peak and you reach a point and start to plateau, once you stay at that plateau, you’re really in danger of a surge coming up. And unfortunately, that’s what we’re starting to see. We got stuck at around 50,000 new cases per day, went up to 60,000 the other day. And that’s really a risk.”
He called it “almost a race between getting people vaccinated” and the possibilities of new outbreak surges. Joe Biden was more blunt than Fauci, calling easing of covid restrictions “Neanderthal thinking.”
Fauci said it was “conceivable” — if the vaccination pace of around three million per day continues — that parents could send their children to camps this summer. “We don’t know that for sure,” he added, “but I think that’s an aspirational goal we should go for.”
Fauci said he found acceptable that vaccinated parents not wear masks at home. But when they send children outside to mingle with other kids and families, they do need to don masks.
Fauci, who is an avid Washington Nationals baseball fan, predicted an easing of stadium crowd restrictions as the season wears on, though with continued mask wearing required. As our RedState colleague T.LaDuke wrote here, Michigan loosened its restrictions slightly to allow 8,000 spectators at the Opening Day game.
He dodged comment on the upcoming WHO report on the virus’ Chinese origins, which reportedly was largely controlled, even possibly written, by China. “You’re getting a lot of conjecture around about what they did and what the (investigators) were allowed to do or not,” Fauci said.
And then there’s the whitewashed, hemming-and-hawing rewrite of history by CNN, documented here by RedState Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar, covering up the former CDC director’s candid assessment. But the argument that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab goes against the accepted mainstream media narrative. So, move along, folks, nothing to see here.