Monday, March 07, 2022


Fauci’s New Actions Revealed After Seemingly Disappearing as COVID Narrative Disintegrates

The left’s favorite COVID scold, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been conspicuously absent from the national media for the last few weeks, and the outlets he has been relegated to seem to underscore the Democrats’ new strategy on COVID.

Deservedly or not, Fauci has been the face of the Democrat response to the coronavirus, scolding Americans to give away their freedoms for “safety” from the “pandemic,” demanding that we all must be masked — with two masks, even — advocating for our jobs to be shut down and citizens to be locked in their homes and screeching for our schools to be closed. But since early in February, Fauci has gone from appearing on multiple news outlets per day to being nearly invisible to the news-viewing public.

His sudden disappearance, though, seems to coincide with the emerging realization among Democrats that their constant stream of fear porn over the coronavirus is hurting them politically, and their newly inculcated fear that their laser-like focus on draconian COVID mitigation is going to cost them during the 2022 midterm elections.

Radio host Chris Stigall, for instance, recently noted that election consultants are advising the Democrats to “declare victory over COVID and move on,” and quickly usher in a return to normalcy — and conveniently just before the 2022 elections, too.

Democrats are suddenly warning each other in private to drop further COVID restrictions, to open schools and to end mask mandates.

In light of that bubbling undercurrent in Democrat electoral plotting, Anthony Fauci has suddenly been removed from the powerhouse news outlets and has been relegated to lesser-known blogs, publications and the odd Youtube channel.

Indeed, as The Post Millennial noted, Fauci’s news section of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases website shows only one appearance in March (by March 5), and a scant 14 appearances in all of February. That is a heavy contrast to previous months. In January, for instance, the NIAID news tracker shows that Fauci made 17 appearances and he clocked a whopping 41 in December!

It certainly appears that the Democrat powers that be have decided that the celebrated doc is now a has-been that they don’t want seen by the American people.

Meanwhile, mask mandates are being dropped even by deep blue states. At the end of February, California, Oregon and Washington state all announced pullbacks on masking to various degrees, according to the Wall Street Journal. And by the beginning of February, even Biden’s homes state of Delaware told citizens that masks were no longer necessary.

The Centers for Disease Control also made an about-face and said that most people can doff the masks and added that masks in schools are not necessary.

The CDC’s new guidelines even prompted a group of researchers to urge schools to dump mask mandates for kids altogether.

The end of masking is also amusing. After all, mask zealots claim without evidence that masks “prevent” people from getting COVID, but now these same people are saying that the numbers are down, so we can throw away our masks. But if masks work, shouldn’t they want to stick with them until the numbers approach zero? Why the sudden decision to dump the masks? “Election Day” seems to be the answer to that question.

With all this just coincidentally occurring in time for the 2022 elections, the timing is suspicious, indeed.

Meanwhile, the vaunted Dr. Fauci’s star is dimming, as he appears on obscure YouTube-style channels in a desperate bid to stay relevant. One would think that appearing with an unknown left-winger on the obscure vlog called “WokeAF” is not the optimal exposure he has become used to.

In case you don’t get that title, “Woke” is clear enough, certainly, but the “AF” stands for “as f*ck.” So, now Fauci has been relegated to appearing on video channels with curse words in their title!

That is quite a fall from grace.

***********************************************

Time to put the Covid pandemic behind us

Comment from Australia

While we can safely rule out Vladimir Putin as a contender for this year’s Nobel peace prize, he may not yet be out of the running for the Nobel prize in medicine. After all, the invasion of Ukraine has put a stop to Covid-19, or at least the interminable conversations about a waning pandemic.

Omicron may be ripping through Australia and New Zealand somewhat faster than a fleet of Russian tanks but it presents less danger to human life and limb. Putin has presented the world with something far more frightening than a coronavirus mutation: a hostile invasion of a sovereign neighbour that may yet trigger a wider conflict.

The rains saturating the east coast have provided further distraction from the Covid dark opera. And when even The New York Times runs the headline, “Get Out of Your Pyjamas, the Pandemic is Over”, it should be time to call it quits.

International data should give us the confidence to declare that Covid-19 is in its death throes, having accomplished its mission of infecting every community on Earth, even NZ, where daily case numbers per 100,000 people last week were higher than the peaks in either Britain or the US. Thankfully, however, just like everywhere else, almost nobody is dying. The number of active cases across the world has been steadily declining since its Omicron peak in late January. The stockmarket saw it coming. Shares in Moderna and BioNTech are a quarter of the price they were in August and Pfizer has lost around 20 per cent of its value since December.

Last week, the US Senate narrowly passed a resolution to end the state of emergency. Republican senator Ron Marshall from Kansas, who introduced the measure, described it as “a symbolic victory to our citizens that normalcy is around the corner”. Mopping up the executive overreach, however, may be easier said than done.

Few in positions of authority have mustered the courage to declare the pandemic over. The deadly Wuhan virus, which prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a pandemic, is extinct. Omicron is far less deadly. Yet there appears little appetite to review the pandemic status, suggesting there are those who prefer to keep it in place. The people resisting a return to normality are generally in positions of power and influence. They have profited from the pandemic either financially or through a rise in the sense of their importance.

They include many in the mainstream media who, with some honourable exceptions, have kept their fingers on the panic button, even as the risk to public health has declined.

Two weeks ago, former deputy chief health officer Nick Coatsworth told Chris Kenny on Sky News that the Omicron variant was “clearly not” as dangerous to healthy adults and children as influenza. “If you had to give me a choice between which one I would vaccinate (my children) against, every time I would be choosing influenza over a Covid-19 vaccine,” he said. “That’s how I feel about the difference in severity between the two.”

Coatsworth’s advice was based on clinical experience and data. Yet, as Kenny reflected in The Weekend Australian the following Saturday, most of the rest of the media ignored the story. Taking away our liberties came much easier to the elite than handing them back.

Countless rules, regulations and protocols that were put in place when the risk was perceived to be rising remain in place with no prospect of any immediate review. Worse still, many of the measures were put in place without an expiry date, even though the pandemic was bound to pass.

We should have known after 9/11 that rushed measures to deal with a perceived emergency are hard to remove.

The security guards who were put in place to patrol the walkway on the Sydney Harbour Bridge have been strolling pointlessly up and down 24 hours a day for more than 20 years. No one can remember why they were put there, let alone who has the authority to stand them down, but perhaps someone should find out.

Hopefully, the mask “protocol” (not a rule or regulation) in airports and on domestic flights will be scrapped some time before 2040, but you wouldn’t put your money on it. The measure was agreed by national cabinet in January 2021 and updated in October. Transmission of the virus aboard an aircraft is far rarer than most would imagine, thanks to high-back, forward-facing seats and constant fresh air pumped through highly efficient filters. There is no conclusive scientific evidence that a scrappy mask, carelessly worn, is any more capable of stopping the Omicron variant than a hapless security guard could stop a low-flying 737. Yet the rule remains in place, serving as yet another barrier to civilised human interaction and a burden on those required to enforce it.

The absence of open debate is perhaps the most troubling restriction of all. Coatsworth is not the only person to harbour doubts about booster shots for children or whether universal booster shots, not just for the elderly or others at high risk, is a sensible or proportionate policy.

Questioning whether we really need to ostracise the unvaccinated remains a taboo even as state authorities are considering when dismissed workers could be invited back into their jobs to fill the vacancies for skilled staff in health and education.

Last week, the NZ High Court recognised the new reality by upholding an appeal by unvaccinated police and members of the NZ defence force, declaring their dismissal to be unlawful.

The court found their dismissal was not “a reasonable limit on the applicants’ rights that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. The expert advice before the court did not show that the dismissal of unvaccinated workers made “a material difference” to health outcomes in the era of Omicron.

In other words, the only justifiable redundancies are the dispensing of superfluous rules.

***********************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*************************************

No comments: