Here we go again.
First, Anthony Fauci pokes his head up to claim, against all evidence, that masks do stop COVID-19 after all.
Then, right on cue, the White House announces that Fauci’s No. 1 fan, President Biden, will be “masking indoors” after the double-vaccinated, twice-boosted first lady contracted the virus for the third time in 13 months.
Then Whoopi Goldberg, who once declared she was “boosted within an inch of your life,” goes missing from “The View” with her third bout of COVID.
“As you can see, Whoopi is not here,” co-host Joy Behar said Tuesday.
“She has COVID. It’s back! It’s back!”
Co-host Ana Navarro exclaimed to the live audience: “Clap if you had your third booster!”
The ladies were fairly giddy with excitement over the imminent return of the “plague.”
Hasn’t learned a thing
For all their moaning, there’s a certain type of sanctimonious hypochondriac who enjoyed the pandemic more than they will admit and secretly can’t wait to slap on a mask to show their selfless concern for others.
To them, Anthony Fauci was a saint, whose every word was their command, and just when we thought we’d seen the back of him, he’s back on our TV screens to gaslight us all again.
At the height of the pandemic, Joe Biden was so enamored of Fauci’s infallible advice that he would “jokingly direct” him to sit in the vice president’s chair, according to a new book by Franklin Foer.
More fool him, but Fauci should know better, being an expert and all.
Sadly, the diminutive health bureaucrat’s CNN interview over the weekend shows he hasn’t learned a thing after almost three years of flawed advice, which included exhorting people to double-mask.
It was a textbook case of sneaky Fauci beclowning himself again.
“There’s no doubt that masks work,” said Fauci.
“I am concerned that people will not abide by recommendations” of the CDC on masking, he said.
CNN host Michael Smerconish politely pointed out that masks actually don’t work, citing an authoritative Cochrane review, published in January, of 78 high-quality scientific studies, with more than 610,000 participants, that concluded masks were useless in stopping transmission of the virus.
“There is just no evidence masks make any difference. Full stop,” the lead author, Oxford University epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, said at the time.
So, after reading Fauci some of the “unambiguous” Cochrane conclusions, Smerconish asked: “How do we get beyond that finding of that particular review?”
You would think the eminent Fauci might have heard of the Cochrane review, since he’s such a devotee of “the science.”
He was caught by surprise and vomited out an answer, of sorts: “Yeah, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level, for individual, when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong, but when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves, or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage.”
Nope.
Sorry.
Makes zero sense.
‘Doesn’t make sense’
That’s not just me saying that. It’s what Jefferson himself said when he weighed in this week on Fauci’s CNN disinformation dump.
“So, Fauci is saying that masks work for individuals but not at a population level? That simply doesn’t make sense,” Jefferson told independent journalist Maryanne Demasi.
“He says there are ‘other studies’ … but what studies?”
Jefferson suggested the former White House adviser might be “relying on trash studies … many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional and some actually use modeling. That is not strong evidence.”
He said Fauci doesn’t understand “that cloth and surgical masks cannot stop viruses because viruses are too small and they still get through.”
“What I do know is that Fauci was in a position to run a trial, he could have randomized two regions to wear masks or not. But he didn’t and that’s unforgivable,” he said.
Yes, it was unforgivable.
It’s the lack of humility that really rankles with Fauci.
No contrition, no acknowledgment of the disaster he rained down on America and the world.
Just the cocksure arrogance of a small man who had a big job for way too long and came to believe the flattery of scientists who depended on him for grant money.
And, as the evidence increasingly shows, he knew a lot more about the novel coronavirus coming out of China than he let on.
As former Trump official Peter Navarro has written, Fauci never disclosed to President Trump or anyone on the coronavirus task force that he was being told in January 2020 that the virus was likely engineered.
Nor did he mention that he had helped fund the risky “gain of function” research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab that was the most likely source of the outbreak, despite his attempts to divert blame onto a nearby wet market.
“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” he famously boasted in 2021 when people started catching on that he was a fraud.
Yet he ignores scientific data when it suits him.
Masks don’t work. Full stop. And Fauci should stop talking.
Shokin’s eye on the sky
Fired former Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin, 70, fears for his life and believes rocket wreckage that fell in his backyard this week is a warning sent by allies of President Biden to stop him from talking.
He says he already has been the victim of two assassination attempts, including mercury poisoning in 2019 that almost killed him.
Now he is concerned that a rocket could target his house outside Kyiv, disguised as an accident of war.
“There is information that Joe Biden wants to use the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies to deal with me so that I do not have the opportunity to give truthful testimony against him,” Shokin told The Post Wednesday.
“In the conditions of a full-scale war in Ukraine and the approaching elections of the president of the United States to discredit or destroy Shokin, Biden can use the capabilities of Russia or Ukrainian law enforcement agencies.”
Shokin reported the debris scattered through his courtyard to the Ukrainian National Police on Wednesday.