Fauci lied about the effectiveness of masks to preserve supply and turned half the US into anti-maskers, even though there's now a shitton of masks (with N-95s still being expensive instead of free like they should be).

I think it is worse than that, in some ways. It is why I don’t really blame people for being anti-mask, or even mask ambivalent, even though a lot of them are just petit bourgeois and selfishly looking for their personal failings to be somehow vindicating. Fauci said that he was lying, and that it was to preserve masks for healthcare workers. But it is really unclear to me that he wasn’t just very completely wrong and saying that he lied in order to maintain a level of credibility. So, either way he is untrustworthy. People were right to be skeptical of his advice, but liberals ignored this and insisted on him being infallible. Questioning Fauci became its own political statement, and liberals identified it as reactionary.

But, the reality is that Fauci was highly inept and political and identifying his advice with “science” removed the capacity for the CDC to ever influence public behavior short of physical violence. If 50% of the country now looks at the CDC in an oppositional way, it is a collapse of credibility that renders the institution itself meaningless. It is the absolute worst outcome from a public health perspective, but another 50% of people still act as though he is good. They aren’t even bothered to see the damage it did and instead blame mostly working class people for being reactionary (when in reality, reactionaries were simply using selfish petit bourgeois impulses and mask-skepticism in an opportunistic way)

When Biden “rewarded” people who were vaccinated by ending mask mandates for them, but only working on an honor system, Fauci was parroting that shit even though there was no evidence it was a good idea, and socially it had the actual effect of ending the only pandemic measure they were willing to insist upon. It happened and then immediately we stepped into the delta wave. Liberals still became hostile when I pointed out it was Biden and Fauci making an objectively political decision that killed hundreds of thousands. That was when I realized that the Pandemic was “over” and that it had essentially become an unsolvable problem under our political-economy. Its why I basically just count my blessings that I survived and that there is little I could do.

Our social system failed, it is continuing to fail us all. Working people are mostly just responding to the material reality of that, and sometimes it is ugly. I think it just ticks off another box as to why the need to build a communist movement is an existential crisis in itself. I have given up on the pandemic in some ways, but I have become obsessed with organizing instead, because that is something that could resolve these contradictions, eventually. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I hate Fauci. I don’t get mad when people don’t wear masks. Most of the working class has been forced to contract it already by our social system, so it has caused most working class people to give up. Whether they understand it or not, they behave as if they have no control, probably because they unconsciously know they are subjects now. It is a manifestation of the callousness of capitalism and the dictatorship of bourgeois “democracy”.