USA: Early last year, Anthony Fauci seemed like the calm, informed voice of reason regarding COVID. Soon, though, intelligent people noticed he had to walk back everything he’d said earlier (and he flouted his own mask rules). Fauci seemed to be all ego, no substance. But since he positioned himself against Trump, the drive-by media love affair has continued unabated. Now that we’ve learned Fauci knew that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab and that his illegal use of taxpayer money helped fund it, Fauci’s getting nasty. Leftists love that he’s nasty; conservatives love that Sen. Rand Paul is coolly and calmly using facts to have Fauci treated as the corrupt man he really is.
If I read only mainstream news, 18 months after China’s COVID assault on the world, I would accept that Fauci is the genius who saved us from both COVID and Trump. I would ignore his flip-flops on masks, his many and varied lies about herd immunity, and his connivance with the Democrats to deprive Americans of early intervention with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, both of which might have substantially reduced the mass die-off of American’s elderly. (By the way, that die-off has saved quite a lot of Social Security money, as well as state funds used on the elderly in Democrat-run states.)
Additionally, if I consumed only the drive-by media, I would believe that Fauci squashed Paul like a bug for daring to attack Fauci’s credibility regarding gain-of-function research. The Hill’s coverage is representative (emphasis mine):
During a Senate Health Committee hearing about the federal COVID-19 response, Paul said the NIH funded illegal gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which created a highly dangerous and transmissible virus able to infect humans. Gain-of-function is a controversial method where researchers make a pathogen more infectious, often to develop more effective treatments and vaccines.
It’s an unsubstantiated accusation Paul has made before, and one Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has denied.
