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Sunday, May 23, 2021

Fauci Is Squirming

Polling is showing that Fauci is struggling with his credibility. The fact that, even on left wing shows where he's most likely to appear and be treated like royalty or a saint, he's being asked about the issues that Rand Paul has raised. The left media has likely been emboldened to question Fauci by exposés in New York magazine and most recently by liberal science journalist Nicholas Wade, as well as by liberal icons like pollster Nate Silver who has stated that Fauci has "gaslighted" the public.

Now I see Fauci slipping and letting the cat out of the bag to Politifact--as quoted by TGP:


Politifact: Sen. Rand Paul, who you have tangled with in the past, suggested that you and the NIH funded risky research that eventually down the line was connected to COVID-19? I don’t want to dwell on this for too long but I do want to give you that chance to react to his comments today.

Fauci: That’s actually preposterous. To bring something up is really not helpful. He was saying that we funded a kind of research in China that could lead to dangerous research. That’s not the case. So what he was saying was absolutely not true. It is really unfortunate that he brought that up. It really does nothing but cloud the issue of what we are trying to do. So it was just unfortunate that he said that.

Politifact: That has been the subject for a lot of our fact-checking on the coronavirus for the past year. There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still. So I wanted to ask are you still confident that COVID developed naturally?

Fauci: No actually, that’s the point that I said. And I think that the real unfortunate aspect of what Senator Paul did was he was conflating research in a collaborative way with Chinese scientists which was — you’d almost have to say that if we did not do that then we’d be almost irresponsible because SARS-COVI-1 clearly originated in China… So we really had to learn a whole lot about the viruses that were there, about whether or not people were getting infected with bad viruses. So in a very minor collaboration as part of a sub-contract as part of a grant, we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists. And what he conflated that was that we were involved in creating the virus. Which is the most ridiculous majestic leap I’ve ever heard of.

Politifact's questioning is fair, but very accurate and persistent. They had Fauci on the hook from the start by specifying that Rand Paul "suggested" that "the NIH funded risky research that eventually down the line was connected to COVID-19?" Fauci desperately wants to distance himself from that--he interjects "dangerous" for "risky" and then says it's "absolutely not true" that NIH funded research was "dangerous." But he doesn't want to touch that business about research that "eventually down the line was connected to COVID-19?" Read and parsed carefully, his reply does NOT deny that NIH funded research was "connected to COVID-19" "eventually down the line."

The giveaway is that Fauci is mentally squirming is that he feels the need to return to that idea in the second Q&A exchange. To their credit, Politifact doesn't just accept Fauci's blanket and disingenuous denial. They appear to have been prepared for Fauci's tactic but, instead of getting tangled up in a dispute about what Rand Paul said or implied or suggested, and what Fauci's denials really denied and on and on, Politifact comes back with a slightly different line of questioning that has Fauci scrambling and implicitly admitting what he attempted to deny in the first answer.

Politifact--without mentioning Rand Paul by name--asks if Fauci is still confident that COVID developed "naturally". Fauci has to admit that he's not. The problem is that that looks like he's admitting what he first attempted to deny. As a result he feels obliged to give a somewhat long, convoluted, and typically disingenuous explanation of his admission. Once you start trying to explain what you just said, you're treading on thin ice. What Fauci's explanation amounts to is setting up a straw man and knocking it down. Thus: "No, we [presumably NIH] were not involved in creating the virus." But Rand Paul never said that NIH helped create the virus--simply that NIH funded research that ended up being connected to the lab origins of COVID-19. And Fauci doesn't dare deny that. 

Reading between the lines, Fauci has now basically admitted all of that. The one fig leaf that he's trying to maintain is that the research they funded was necessary and not dangerous. The problem he faces is that he is now being forced to admit that Covid is a lab creation, that it was developed from SARS Classic, and that NIH was funding research into SARS Classic. But was that a "risky" strategy? I think that's a distinction without a difference, and I also think more and more people are coming to see that. Fauci, with each appearance, is creating a record of disingenuous non-denials that future questioners can use to challenge him.

Fauci's utility to the Left is winding down. The Left's problem is how to dump him while somehow distancing themselves from complicity in the casedemic that Fauci created.

ADDENDUM: Notably, Politifact has quietly withdrawn its year old "pants on fire" claim that the Wuhan Lab origins of Covid was a "debunked conspiracy theory." So obviously there's movement on the Left. They see the casedemic hoax starting to crumble and they're starting to look for a scapegoat. It's starting to look like Fauci could wind up being "it". 


14 comments:

  1. "Fauci's utility to the Left is winding down. The Left's problem is how to dump him while somehow distancing themselves from complicity in the casedemic that Fauci created."

    Exactly.

    Facts are stubborn things. They tend to hang around and not go away.

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    1. A bit of a quibble here: this is not so much about persistence if the facts as about how the narrative is being shaped to ease the public into normalcy without letting on that it was another in a series of hoaxes.

      The folly of people like Faucci is that they think they're in on the game, that they're important and valued. Faucci was never more than a tool. Whether they let him off easy or hard is purely a function of the needs of the narrative.

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  2. I was thumbing down radio dial this morning, and heard someone from New York magazine or somewhere criticizing Chris Cuomo's ethics and failure to meet journalistic standards. I was pretty shocked...whoever was interviewing this guy (from NPR?) was trying to make excuses and stick up for Chris Cuomo, but the other guy stood firm and said that even if Chris Cuomo was an opinion guy instead of a news guy, he still had a bad conflict of interest and didn't meet journalistic standards.

    Tie in to this article- is it possible there are some 'journalists' here and there who are starting to react against the Pravda mentality that's prevailed among the media for so long? Politifact has long been anything but the facts and a left-wing tool to 'fake fact check' themselves. So is it the left wants to flush Fauci, or somebody there actually has a few brain cells firing properly?

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  3. When you add Fauci's funding of Frankenstein research at U Pitt., (placing fetal scalps on mice) you have the Left's perfect excuse. Fauci is obviously a sociopath with Mengelean flavoring; it's not the look the Left needs.

    Of course, the U. Pitt. stuff did not bother the Left up to this point in time....

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  4. This is one of the mess ups by Trump. Fauci was suspect due to his AIDS leadership.

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    1. This is true. It's holding Trump to a standard that few could live up to, but if he had framed the issue in those terms--he screwed up AIDS and we need someone younger and better now--he might have nipped this in the bud.

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    2. @TD
      @Mark
      "It's holding Trump to a standard that few could live up to..."

      Of course Trump was also preoccupied with Faux Impeachment 1.0 when covid erupted. As well as who knows how many other Deep State obstructions.

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    3. Yes, of course all this is retrospective. Plus, with any leader you take the good with the not as good. For example, as a germophobe, Trump was probably primed to be gamed by the pandemic narrative--more than many others--and to be predisposed to vaccines as a cure all. We all know he did a lot else that was very good and was unfairly targeted by the Establishment. He wasn't Superman. But with 20/20 hindsight ...

      20/20 hindsight is legit within stated limits.

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    4. I would like to know who covered his AIDS failures up and didn't reveal them fully to Trump. Fauci funded AIDS research far, far out of proportion at the cost of research into heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other diseases that affect far more people than AIDS. Fauci had a LOT of blood on his hands long before this.

      -Chuck

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    5. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/donald_trump_should_not_be_the_2024_republican_candidate.html

      Some Trump pros and cons to think about...

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    6. I will vote for Trump again because his pros outweigh his cons.

      Sorry, done with slick talking politicians.

      Results is the grade.

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    7. @ cass

      I read that piece last week and not impressed. Yes, Trump's staffing choices turned out to be largely wrong and even disastrous in a few cases, but somehow he managed to get a heckuva lot done. As TexasDude said, results count and he got em despite all odds and treasonous opposition. I can't think of a single politician who would have stood up against half that abuse and gotten half as much done.

      That said, i seriously struggle with Trump winning the election in a landslide and deciding to walk away without a fight. My wife reminds me that we don't know what intel he had on just how far the deep state was willing to go to resist any attempt by Trump to force through a real audit or revote, so he stepped away to spare us from alot of bloodshed. Ok. My response is, what about Lincoln? At some point the President cannot avoid bloodshed if the republic is at stake. I don't agree with the argument that it's better somehow to let Chairman Zhou and the thugs show Americans how bad it can get rather than fight to honor the votes of 80 million plus citizens. Trump was commander in chief and he wouldn't give the order to respond to the shelling of Fort Sumter. Worse, it's as if Lee abducted all the Republicans in Congress and replaced them with confederates.

      I just don't like the whiff of Neville Chamberlain declaring peace in our time as a free country is swallowed up by evil people.

      If not Trump, who? No one comes to mind.

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    8. anon, I'm not so sure Trump has "walked away without a fight." I think you significantly underestimate the Uniparty opposition he was/is facing. I think any resort to electoral politics at this point must start with a realignment of the political parties and I think that is what Trump realized (long ago) and what he has been fighting to achieve. I'm not sure how the so-called Republicans in charge of elections in the swing states that were stolen would have reacted to any legal or political pressure Trump might have thrown at them before the election but look at the BS he got from Georgia when he tried to "fight" the electoral treachery going on there. The Republican and Democrat Parties need to be shaken up and every populist non-elitist (call us what you like) needs to sort themselves from the elitists/Globablists/progressives/oligarchs (call them what you like) in each Party before ANYTHING can be changed politically. I'm not sure how fast or how certain that sorting will be but it has begun and Trump is calling for a MAGA remake of the Republican party. We either get on board or come up with our own plan of action but in any event we can refrain from throwing stones at the man, IMHO. Mark A

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  5. I’m amazed at how much the establishment GOP has fought tooth and nail any question of election fraud. Rep Cheney is a great example of this, with McConnell not far behind at a federal level. Not to mention what happened at a state level in Ga.

    > look at the BS he got from Georgia when he tried to
    >"fight" the electoral treachery going on there.

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