Most criticism of Fauci that I see comes from right wingers who think that he is injecting microchips into their body. What is the left take on him?
Most criticism of Fauci that I see comes from right wingers who think that he is injecting microchips into their body. What is the left take on him?
What really gets me on this is that if he'd just clearly and unequivocally stated that he was wrong, nothing much would have changed and he would have seemed much more credible. The "no need to mask" recommendation was pretty early in the pandemic, and there was a lot of conflicting information about how COVID spread, whether asymptomatic spread was common, and so on. If he'd said "we made a recommendation based on early data, and it turned out to be disastrously wrong," I'd be a lot more sympathetic, and so would many other people, I think. The world is messy and science is hard, and COVID was a very rapidly evolving situation. There's a fair argument to be made that he should have known better given SARS and whatnot, but owning the bad call openly would have still made a difference to his credibility.
Instead, he and the CDC have tried to rewrite history by screeching that he was "taken out of context" and never really said that, which is clearly false. People--even qualified professionals--make mistakes, but running the "don't trust your own eyes" disinformation campaign is just a bizarre way to deal with that, and makes people think that there's something nefarious going on beyond just mere incompetence.
He absolutely should have known better. He legitimized all sorts of completely made up claims about the reasons masks don't work, none of which had any sort of evidence backing them up, and all of them were immediately discarded when he changed course. What evidence ever existed that would make one think that say, wearing a mask would increase risk by making people touch their face more? Where is the study? Where is the study that disproved that study? None of that BS was ever based on anything, there was never any doubt that masks work. The idea that he changed his position because of new evidence is total bull.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that it's nonsense. But even from just a PR perspective, the way they handled it is bizarre. They would have been more successful if they'd just said "sorry, we made a mistake" than "no, what you remember wasn't actually what happened."