Rethinking St. Anthony of Fauci for Blue MAGA

A coronavirus long read from David Wallace-Wells notes the complexity of COVID case and death rates around the globe. It notes that some of this means that, short of the East Asian stance of acting quickly and asking questions later, advanced nations of the West might always have wound up with some problems. (These issues are discussed on my weekly coronavirus roundup piece.) 

But, later in the piece, he looks at some of the specific American problems.

And, no, he does NOT target Donald Trump. Nor Greg Abbott.

The St. Anthony of Fauci, to Blue MAGA/Blue Anon, looks worse and worse with hindsight:

On February 11 (2020), a month before Ryan’s press conference, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Messonnier, and Ron Klain had taken the stage at an Aspen Institute panel on the novel coronavirus led by the superstar infectious-disease journalist Helen Branswell. Several times, Fauci repeated that he believed the virus was low-risk — later clarifying that it was important to communicate to the public that it was low-risk, in part to protect his own credibility and the credibility of the public-health Establishment. “To this day I do not understand why,” Branswell recently wrote. A few days after the panel, Fauci described the risk of the coronavirus to Americans as “minuscule.”

We need to hear this, and Blue MAGA needs to abandon yet more of its anti-Trump tribalism. On my other blog, from a philosophy perspective, I've talked about Fauci's "Platonic noble lie" on masks.

But wait! There's more!

(A)t every opportunity, Fauci was counseling the opposite — calm in the face of the storm. On February 15, he told an interviewer that the flu was a bigger threat to Americans. For another month, he was still advising against masks. It wasn’t just Fauci (whom the upstart leftist magazine The Drift recently mocked as “Dr. Do-Little” in what likely won’t be the last reconsideration of the sainted physician).

I've already started my retake!