Personally, I have no problem with folks admitting they were wrong. Admirable in fact! I do have a problem with the way Fauci has dismissed and dishonestly attacked legions of qualified scientists who have disagreed with him for the past 12+ months. Scientists who have turned out to be correct.
There is a significant share of the US population who has a deep distrust of the Gov. public health system. Fauci has not helped. Had our public health officials done a better job of messaging, a bunch of the nut cases who won't get vaccinated may have acted otherwise?
Now He Tells Us
Dr. Anthony Fauci discovers that life involves trade-offs.
By James Freeman
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Jan. 3, 2022 2:21 pm ET
Scientific achievements can be fleeting as the pace of innovation surges ever forward. But for a brief moment Dr. Anthony Fauci appears to have discovered that there is a precious economy operating beneath his world of political epidemiology.
Dr. Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, told CNN last week why he supported reducing the government’s recommended isolation period for asymptomatic individuals who test positive for Covid to five days from 10. Said Dr. Fauci:
The reason is that with the sheer volume of new cases that we are having and that we expect to continue with omicron, one of the things we want to be careful of is that we don’t have so many people out... if you are asymptomatic and you are infected we want to get people back to the jobs — particularly those with essential jobs to keep our society running smoothly.
So I think that was a very prudent and good choice on the part of the CDC which we spent a considerable amount of time discussing, namely, getting people back in half the time that they would have been out so they can get back to the workplace doing things that are important to keep society running smoothly.
For the government disease doctor who once dismissed the economic and societal impact of pandemic lockdowns as merely “inconvenient,” last week’s self-discovery represented a stunning breakthrough. Alas, it appears that the good doctor has since lost some confidence in the validity of his finding, following the discovery of a new strain of public criticism.
As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week...
“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested,” Fauci said. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.”
Science is so exciting, with one innovation in Washington consensus-building following another at breakneck speed. Wherever America’s favorite government disease doctor ends up positioning himself in the isolation debate, let’s hope that he is finally beginning to understand that the U.S. economy is the most powerful man-made force in the world for sustaining life.
Dr. Fauci, who has focused for much of the pandemic on one public-health threat to the exclusion of all others, also recently revealed that, believe it or not, sometimes Covid risks to children are even smaller than they appear. Last week Dr. Fauci told MSNBC:
...if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with Covid, as opposed to because of Covid. And what we mean by that—if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for Covid and they get counted as a Covid-hospitalized individual, when in fact they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with Covid as opposed to because of Covid.
This too is progress for the celebrated doctor, who has generally failed to recognize the importance of non-Covid threats to human health. This recent discovery seems to place Dr. Fauci in good company, because it is echoed even by some doctors who focus on medicine rather than politics. Joe Murphy and Daniel Arkin reported last week for NBC News on the recent rise in pediatric hospitalizations:
Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC’s “TODAY” show on Tuesday that the increase was probably inevitable because of the arrival of winter and the transmissibility of the omicron variant...
However, he said, his hospital has seen a lot of kids test positive for Covid without necessarily showing symptoms or getting sick.
“We test anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have Covid, and we’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for Covid or in the intensive care unit for Covid,” Offit said.
Dr. Fauci’s growing understanding of non-Covid threats to human health is encouraging. At a May 2020 Senate hearing Dr. Fauci warned against ending economy-crushing lockdowns even while acknowledging:
I don’t give advice about economic things.
That was just $4 trillion of pandemic-fueled federal debt ago. At the same 2020 hearing, Dr. Fauci did not even pretend that he had estimated the consequences for children of closing schools.
Expensive as Dr. Fauci’s journey of personal education may be, U.S. citizens can only hope that his new understanding of the world outside of Covid policy will withstand future innovations in government public relations.
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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
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